[Vision2020] Savior state.

[Andreas Schou]

Doug --

There is a certain moral purity to forms of government that have never
been tried. In the 1890s, communism was a well-respected economic
theory, largely because it had never been practically applied. By
1975, communism had lost its luster, largely because it did not work
and was idiotic besides. I could forgive a communist in 1890, 1910, or
even 1925, because it was unclear to everyone involved that they were
following a bankrupt ideology. Theirs was a sin, ultimately, of hope.

No such moral purity exists for communists in 2006. They're
Stalinists, or, at best, dupes. Their information on the political
ideology is regurgitated propaganda from the official policy organs of
corrupt states that failed even in successfully enacting stupid ideas.

Why do half-rabid free-marketeers, then, get a pass? They either
regurgitate half-digested Gilded Age claptrap or make unsupported
contentions about the power and purity of the free market, when no
evidence whatsoever supports them. The free-market-driven development
of the steam engine co-existed with the worst period of corporate
excess in history. Company stores enslaved whole towns; corporations
operated lawless private police forces; the media was controlled and
manipulated by a few very powerful men; incredible excess existed
alongside appalling poverty. This is not a coincidence: this is the
direct result of a free market unmuzzled and unbent to the service of
a better society.

To radical libertarians, the free market is a system that,
definitionally, cannot fail: it can only /be/ failed. This is
nonsense: the failures of entirely unrestrained capitalism are
obvious, well-recorded, and utterly unquestionable. The time during
which faith in an unbound free market was a sin of hope is long, long,
long passed.

-- ACS