The implications of this are pretty God-damned deep.

by w3woody

The Conservatism of Progressives

Most “progressives” (meaning those on the left to far left who prefer that term) would freak if they were called conservative, but what I mean by conservative in this context is not donate-to-Jesse-Helms capital-C Conservative but fearful of change and uncomfortable with uncertainty conservative.

OK, most of you are looking at this askance – aren’t progressives always trying to overthrow the government or something? Aren’t they out starting riots at G7 talks? The answer is yes, sure, but what motivates many of them, at least where it comes to capitalism, is a deep-seated conservatism.

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However, when we move to fields such as commerce, progressives stop trusting individual decision-making. Progressives who support the right to a person making unfettered choices in sexual partners don’t trust people to make their own choice on seat belt use. Progressives who support the right of fifteen year old girls to make decisions about abortion without parental notification do not trust these same girls later in life to make their own investment choices with their Social Security funds. …

Beyond just the concept of individual decision-making, progressives are hugely uncomfortable with capitalism. Ironically, though progressives want to posture as being “dynamic”, the fact is that capitalism is in fact too dynamic for them. Industries rise and fall, jobs are won and lost, recessions give way to booms. Progressives want comfort and certainty. They want to lock things down the way they are. They want to know that such and such job will be there tomorrow and next decade, and will always pay at least X amount. That is why, in the end, progressives are all statists, because, to paraphrase Hayek, only a government with totalitarian powers can bring the order and certainty and control of individual decision-making that they crave.

As they say, read the whole thing. And by the way, here is the two item choice to determine if you’re an anti-capitalist progressive. Which would you pick?

  1. A capitalist society where the overall levels of wealth and technology continue to increase, though in a pattern that is dynamic, chaotic, generally unpredictable, and whose rewards are unevenly distributed, or…
  2. A “progressive” society where everyone is poorer, but income is generally more evenly distributed. In this society, jobs and pay and industries change only very slowly, and people have good assurances that they will continue to have what they have today, with little downside but also with very little upside.

However, I do want to add one thing, from an unrelated location:

Why Double Entry Bookkeeping Was Not Crucial, Nor Other Proffered Necessary Conditions

What made us rich, I argue at no doubt tedious and unreadable length in the Bourgeois Era trilogy, is imagination, ingenuity, radical ideas released.

That is, learning, ingenuity and new ideas, driven by the imagination of people inventing new processes, new devices or new business methods, is what has driven the growth of wealth.

And it is classical liberal capitalism, not “diligence” or “hard work”, which led to the explosion of wealth over the past 150 years which makes today’s world completely unfamiliar to an agrarian settler living a sustenance existence in the United States in the late 1800’s. Human creativity was “released from ancient trammels” by “liberalism, Smith’s ‘liberal plan of [social] equality, [economic] liberty, and legal [justice].'”

So when a progressive argues that the world would be measurably better if we were poorer (i.e., living a “more meaningful life” closer to nature, stripped of the unnecessary contrivances and plethora of choices that Bernie Sanders once railed against), but a more “evenly distributed” society (similar to the idealistic Ba’ku people in Star Trek: Insurrection)–what they really are speaking about is living in ignorance.

Because the moment a people are trapped in well established trammels for their own good by the Statists who believe they know better than us, all in the name of “progress”–that’s the moment the world is set for a major disruption if someone happens to come across a better method or a more efficient way.

So Progressivism, really, is a call to ignorance and stupidity. It is a rejection of the dynamic forces that happen when people sit down and figure out a better way. It is a call to an ancient ignorance that promises a “simpler” life–a swan song, a siren call pulling us to the rocky shoals and onward to our death.