Brain Fertilizer

Kim du Toit is a polarizing figure. The things he says receive outrage, admiration, outright dismissal, disparagement, applause...depending on your personal political and social view. He's been around the block enough to have a good idea of what he has found to be true, and won't soften his words if he thinks your opinion lacks validity. It's not that he's close-minded, I think, as much as he's already thought things through and seen how things work clearly enough that it would be extremely difficult to get him to budge in his opinions.

I will probably be exactly the same in another 10 years.

In any case, he's got a nice summary of the problems with the ideological left over at his site today. The comments are good, as well, so don't forget to click on those, too.

Excerpts:

...what the Left seems to fail to grasp is the fact that most Left philosophy seems to start off with a premise that sounds like: "Oh, wow! Wouldn't it be cool if...", quite oblivious to the fact that all they have to do is study history to find out that a.) that "cool thing" has been tried before and b.) it failed, with horrible consequences.

Dead on. And unstated, but I think should be understood, is that I agree that it would be cool if [insert ideological left goal] came about. Obviously, it would be cool if no one ever had to worry about going hungry, or suffer discrimination, or die from not being able to afford health care, or have to kill to defend themselves or their freedom...but as Kim pointed out, we've already tried the things they propose, and they didn't work before because of the essential selfishness/short-sightedness of the vast majority of humans.

Sure, If you got the right people, socialism could work. Heck, find the right like-minded people, and even libertarianism could work, or anarchy, or bigamy. Unfortunately, the right people really don't exist, because things always fall apart on misunderstandings of intent or disagreements on how to proceed. A system that depends on people making the right decisions is only as good as the people making the decisions, and that's a poor system indeed.

I've said it before, and I'll repeat now for emphasis: the beauty of the United States Constitution is it took into account that most people act in self-interest, and the framers made sure that the pursuit of self-interest was channeled into and aligned with the common good.

A bonus excerpt:

In the absense of fact, all that's left [sic] are slogans -- government by bumper-sticker -- and reliance on "expert" opinion (again, not fact) to buttress their philosophy.

...which sort of explains Michael Moore and Paul Krugman, no?