Quote of the Day: April 9, 2024

Fractad (View Post):

In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious and dull. That is one of the lessons of the twentieth century.

That's every century, Roger. Sometimes one needs to look around a bit, but it's throughout history every where and every when.

Fractad (View Post):

Set aside the dollar amount and its effect on the economy – does no one in his administration consider the moral hazard this creates?

This administration consider? No. They do not think at all. They do what feels good or what they see will give them a temporary advantage.

Fractad (View Post):

Set aside the dollar amount and its effect on the economy – does no one in his administration consider the moral hazard this creates?

For them it's a feature, not a bug. They wouldn't do it if there was no corruption of the citizenry to be gained from it.

Arahant (View Comment):

Fractad (View Post):

In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious and dull. That is one of the lessons of the twentieth century.

That’s every century, Roger. Sometimes one needs to look around a bit, but it’s throughout history every where and every when.

Perhaps so.

But a historian educated in modern economic science (the antidote to the later mainstream pseudo-scientific economics that now infects our minds) could make a strong argument that

1. the 19th century was for Britain and the US a time of slow, laborious, and dull creation especially of the good things that come to us as collective assets: collective material wealth, and those that Scruton names (“peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain it.”) This creation encompassed both Bastiat’s That Which is Seen (absolute creation) and That Which is Unseen (differential creation)

2. The 20th was a century of rapid net differential destruction of those assets, absent net creation. Our intellectual incapacity to identify real economic phenomena that are of the category That Which is Unseen has permitted us to become a society that lustily participates in its own enslavement and impoverishment. Highly intelligent citizens defending the existence of the FDA, or the need for something like it, for example.

Marx was a Nineteenth Century writer supported by the wealth of Engels and his factory. And not everywhere was as peaceful as the US and Britain. Look at South America and Mexico. Also, what about that unpleasantness in 1861-1865 in the US? Or the Napoleonic Wars for the first 15% of the Nineteenth Century? Oh, and the War of 1812? The Nineteenth Century saw a lot of growth and progress, but that does not mean it was not destructive.

The Twentieth Century certainly had what we now call WWi and WWII, but it also had scientific advances and growth unlike any other century. Yes, we made mistakes in the 20th C., but it was the best century until this one.