Thursday, March 17, 2011

The monumental entitlement mentality of socialists



Egad, as Mr. Howell would say. The poor fellow has to cook noodles to spec in order to keep his job. Can the Triangle Shirt Factory fire be far behind? These people carry on as if they had anything, anything at all, to do with the Egyptian revolution. They think they are bold rebels against society, (i.e. the rest of us), when in fact they are its wards. And here's a splendid takedown of this mindset.

This is what happens when a god has no power. He gets grumpy because he is the self-adjudicating arbiter of right and wrong. And having been wronged, he seeks ‘social justice’ to rectify the wrong. But the effective material expression of his morality is thwarted because he has no power.

The god then seeks other powerless gods who share the same fellowship of perceived injustice, from which to draw enough collective power to alter the social reality.

They fully recognize their powerlessness, since they adopt a mantra amongst themselves whereby they must “speak truth to power”. The mantra becomes a feverish pitch as the gods en masse try to convince the others, the non-gods, that what you earn is really not yours to keep, that you owe them a debt because of their existence, that the producers of wealth are not entitled to any of it, and more….

Alas, reality can only be altered for a short duration. Truth has a way of correcting artificiality. Progressivism is all about altering reality to fit the demands made by the gods.

The moral of the story is that there are reasons why you should never give collective bargaining rights to the gods.

Which brings to mind Richard John Neuhaus' observation: "Socialism is the religion people get when they lose their religion." And Paul Johnson's:

The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.