Think "Matt Drudge vs. Newsweek." Who won?

[Gipper]

Here is something positive to think about on your Saturday.

I hope the author (the Great Gary North) is right. Essentially he states the welfare state and socialism is dying (I wish it would die quickly and forever) and liberty is raising.

The world is going through withdrawal. This began in late 1978 in China, when Deng freed up agriculture. That began the withdrawal from Marxist Communism. The USSR followed suit in December of 1991. The withdrawal from Fabian socialism began in earnest in India in the mid-1990s. These events have re-shaped the world. The aftermath has only just begun.
In China and India, the pain has been minimal. That is because the economic effects of the earlier systems created such devastation. Think of the phrase, "I've been down so long, it looks like up to me." Think of China today and China in 1973 under Mao. The positive change has been greater than any seen in recorded history, and on a scale that was inconceivable in 1980. Every month, urban living space sufficient to house the population of Philadelphia gets built: 1.5 million people.
From 1945 until today, the American Right has decried Communism and Fabian socialism. Both are dead ideologies today. They have almost no defenders. Inside the elite, they have no defenders outside of English departments. Yet the reality of this overwhelming institutional and ideological victory has failed to register inside the Right.
One of the things which I do not understand is the appalling pessimism within the American Right. I realize that a lot of promoters are cashing in on this pessimism. They get rich by preaching that everything is going to hell in a handbasket. Everything is not going to hell in a handbasket. Communism and Fabian socialism went to hell in a handbasket. Keynesianism is going to hell in a handbasket. Liberty isn't.
What we are seeing is the greatest triumph of free-market ideas in the history of man.
I really do not have a lot of patience for people who say this country is going to hell in a handbasket. It is going to go through the wringer at the government level, meaning the welfare state level. Why is that a bad thing? An analogy: a man can get break his heroin addiction, but he has to go through withdrawal. If he is then forced by economic circumstances to quit using heroin, he is going to get better. Why is this a reason for lamenting on the sidelines of life, wringing our hands that some addicts will go through withdrawal pain? The same applies to the world economy.
Americans are like heroin addicts. They are so addicted to the welfare state mentality, and the flow of funds out of Washington, that they think they cannot survive the transition. Well, we are going to survive it, and we are going to get far richer on the far side of it. A heroin addict dreads the horrors of withdrawal, but the serious addict looks at the life he will enjoy on the far side of detoxification. He decides that it is worth paying the price, because of the better life that awaits him on the far side. This is how we should look at the welfare state today.
THE TRANSITION TO LIBERTY
We live in an era in which free-market ideas are spreading as never before. They are spreading not just because of better intellectual cases defending it, but because of the extraordinary productivity that is available to societies that abandoned socialism. This is becoming visible to the whole world. People seek out intellectual defenses of the free market, but mainly because they have already switched their opinion, and that opinion is steadfastly against bureaucratic interference in their lives.
The Internet is making available defenses of the free market, but more important, the Internet is making available ways of making money and gaining access to new information that are completely outside the control of the bureaucrats. This is where we are winning, and we are winning all over the world. Why should we think that this will not bring enormous productivity all over the world? Why do we see the glass as half-full?
I can see why a socialist who has spent his life defending government interference and the bureaucratization of society would see everything is going to hell in a handbasket -- the "hell" of liberty. But why should conservatives see this process as a threat?
http://www.garynorth.com/public/10615.cfm

 

[dogtowner]

It has to die as its unsustainable. the only question is the velocity that its moving at when it crashes and burns