Why ideologies usually need big government

By -
The essential character of an ideology is that it is a revolt against reality. For instance, in reality, people wish to have control over the things they create with their labor, and thus private property is a natural part of human existence. But the communist is upset by this and wishes reality were different than it is. He declares that private property it is actually unnatural and a form of theft.

But it is hard to get people to turn against nature. Simply asking everyone to give up their private property won't work: what is needed is the availability of force, and lots of it, to punish those who will not buy into the ideologue's distortion of reality.

The reader might provide more examples for his/her self.

Comments

  1. Prateek12:38 PM

    Have you also noticed that ever since classical liberalism and free markets were conceived as an idea, governments have kept growing bigger and bigger?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah2:01 AM

      Good point, Prateek. And the are good arguments as to why liberalism and big government go hand in hand.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more