Political Philosophy

Money and Power, Continued

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There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money

–Samuel Johnson

I was reminded of this quote by something Irving Kristol wrote:

In New York the ruling passion is the pursuit of money, whereas in Washington it is the pursuit of power. Now, the pursuit of power is a zerosum game: you acquire power only by taking it away from someone else. The pursuit of money, however, is not a zero-sum game, which is why it is a much more innocent human activity. It is possible to make a lot of money without inflicting economic injury on anyone. Making money may be more sordid than appropriating power—at least it has traditionally been thought to be so—but, as Adam Smith and others pointed out, it is also a far more civil activity.

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How Anti-Nuclear-Power Hysterics Kill

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Two stories, one about the dangers of contaminated spinach and another on the NY Times’s ignoring of irradiation as a preventative for food borne illness, show us how the moral posturing and emotional hysteria of the anti-nuclear-power left have not only vastly contributed to global warming, mercury poisoning, strip mining, general air pollution, etc. but have also been responsible for the deaths and maiming of virtually everyone who suffered from food-borne microbial illness in the last 40 years.

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Irving Kristol, 1920-2009

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Irving Kristol

Irving Kristol was a CCNY Boy, not a Chicago Boy.

Kristol was a Neoconservative when the “neo” part meant something. It started out as an insult, by former liberal friends, who derided Kristol and others for going where the evidence took them, and turning against their former views and former colleagues. The Neoconservatives were the people associated with The Public Interest magazine in the 1960s, mostly Jews from New York. The leading figures were Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Nathan Glazer and their circle. These guys followed a half-century course from Left to Right. They started out as Trotskyists at City College in New York in the ’30s and ’40s. Kristol describes that period here. They were anti-communist Social Democrats associated with Irving Howe and Sidney Hook in the 1950s. As the Democrat party undertook to build the Great Society in the 1960s, they became social planners. As that program failed, and Vietnam failed, and the McGovernite New Left began to take over the party, they became Scoop Jackson liberal hawks who were increasingly dubious about government social programs as well as staying hawkish on defense issues. As Jimmy Carter attempted to go beyond detente to something like appeasement, some switched parties and became Republicans. They were hawkish on defense and unideological and undogmatic critics of social programs that did not work. Kristol was the main figure in this intellectual odyssey. He and his colleagues added a critical infusion of intelligence and policy expertise to the conservative coalition that elected Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Perhaps Kristol’s most important contribution was his editorship of The Public Interest, which he described here. Recently, the complete archives of the Public Interest became available online.

Rest in peace.

UPDATE: Helen weighs in, with many good links.

I Want to Be Like Norm

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This panel below is from a the web comic “Escape From Terra”.  It’s a pretty good hard science fiction story which examines how a libertarian/anarchist society might function in space. The centeral conflict revolves around those in space trying to keep their freedoms in the face of ever-present encroachment from the statist world-government of Earth (it’s modelled on the EU).

In the story, two pilots deliver a chunk of a comet to a self-made billionaire who is hiding out on his own little artificial habitat. The billionaire has to hide because he keeps creating disruptive technologies that empower ordinary people to live their lives independently of the state, and the government doesn’t like that — to the point it wants to see him dead.

In this panel, the billionaire explains his motivations:

[Click for full size]

disppage2

[Source]

Every geek in the world should strive to emulate the late Norman Borlaug. Geeks and business people have done more good for the world than all the politicians and wannabe-politicians combined.

In 1969, the people who changed the world for the better weren’t left-wing, pro-communist-victory “activists” but the engineers and scientists who landed men on the moon and fired up the first two nodes of the Internet. People who view “progress” in terms of politics first and foremost have done far more harm than good. Yet, as the comic points out, we know their names while the names of those who made our lives so much better are erased from common history .

People in the developed world (and increasingly the rest of the world as well) have lives of physical comfort, social equality and political freedom mostly because of the efforts of geeks like Borlaug who use knowledge and hard work to turn dirt and water into happiness.

When artists whip out posters of people like Borloug instead of the glorious leader du jour, we will know we have become a truly wise civilization.

The following may be related. Or not.

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It’s your call.

1. But the democratic legislature will long hesitate to relinquish the decisions on really vital issues, and so long as it does so it makes it impossible for anyone else to provide the comprehensive plan. Yet agreement that planning is necessary, together with the inability of democratic assemblies to produce a plan, will evoke stronger and stronger demands that the government or some single individual should be given powers to act on their own responsibility. The belief is becoming more and more widespread that, if things are to get done, the responsible authorities must be freed from the fetters of democratic procedure. F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom.

2. List of President Obama’s “czars” from Politico (I count 32, but I might be wrong because my eyes started glazing over after the “Great Lakes Czar”…….).

UPDATE: Okay, I know many of these ‘czars’ are simply governmental department heads, and the like, but I still think the above is instructive as a point of discussion.