Enjoying the view from Limbo
Q. What would Donald Trump have to do to change your mind about him? A. He would have to replace his rational faculty with that of Thomas Jefferson, his temperament with that of Ronald Reagan, and his principles with those of George Washington. Unfortunately, his life, past and present, shows him to be on the very opposite end of the spectrum on all...
Liberty's Labors Lost / What is The Establishment? / World Politics
by Daren Jonescu · Published October 10, 2022
Elon Musk, who soiled himself for all time by defecating on the people of Ukraine last week, has decided to raise his profile in the pantheon of profiteering punks to yet another level of shame. This time, rather than waiting for a tyrannical government to actually invade a smaller, sovereign neighbor, destroy much of that neighbor’s infrastructure, and kidnap thousands of its children...
That cynical men will exploit a human problem for their own petty advantage, without concern for ultimate outcomes beyond their own immediate gain, is obvious. This cynicism explains most of what is called “foreign policy,” most of what is called “medicine,” most of what is called “education,” most of what is called “entertainment,” and most of what is called “lawmaking.” But none of...
Hatred of “elitism,” with its inherent suspicion of anything that seems to imply a standard of human superiority, follows inevitably from long immersion in political and moral egalitarianism. Democracy, the political product of the principle of equality run amok, is the fertile soil of egalitarianism’s most spiritually invasive weeds, gradually fostering a general, almost instinctive anti-elitism. In practice, this anti-elitism constitutes a most...
Ideas and Reflections / Liberty's Labors Lost
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 20, 2021 · Last modified July 31, 2021
Today’s mass entertainment is obsessed above all with two themes: superheroes and zombies. This is self-revealing, as we are indeed trapped in the age of the undead, whose only mode of living is to suck the life out of others, and whose only hope of being saved from their emptiness is to lose themselves in the last realm of imagination left for hollow,...
Socialism mistakes productivity for greed. Capitalism concedes the point, and proceeds to mistake greed for virtue. Socialism believes there can be no freedom as long as there is private property ownership. Capitalism believes the legal right to hold material goods in one’s own name is a sufficient condition of freedom. Socialism asserts that it is wrong to judge men as better or worse...
Ideas and Reflections / Socialized Medicine
by Daren Jonescu · Published January 4, 2021 · Last modified April 15, 2024
The profit motive is not inherently evil. Nor is it inherently moral. Everything depends on what a man is seeking to profit from, how he hopes to gain that profit, whether the need he is claiming to meet is a legitimate need in natural human terms, or a harmful and illegitimate one, and what interests are being furthered by the efforts and gains the profit-seeker is pursuing.
I have no time for people who tell me the profit motive is freedom, or that greed is a virtue. The profit motive is merely one of a thousand reasons to act in the state of freedom — certainly a practically useful reason, but hardly definitive of the state of freedom, anymore than what Aristotle calls useful friends (co-workers, regular customers) are definitive...
Donald Trump signs a two trillion dollar stimulus package, passed in bipartisan fashion at lightning speed, before anyone stops to (a) read the law, or (b) find out whether any of this “stimulus” is even needed. And that, of course, is completely leaving aside the more fundamental question — but who worries about those anymore? — of whether the government of an ostensibly...
Yet again, socialists are out to prove beyond any doubt that their ideology is entirely rooted in, and fueled by, one overriding passion: envy. There is no subject more revealing of the Marxist mind than “the rich.” The moment a Marxist (or socialist or progressive) is asked to explain why it is problematic that some people are enormously wealthy, while others are not,...
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