A firm friend of government interference passes on.
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John Kenneth Galbraith, 1908-2006April 30th, 2006 |
 7 comments to John Kenneth Galbraith, 1908-2006 |
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Was it Galbraith who proclaimed in 1988 that the Soviet Union would economically surpass the USA?
Anybody who said that in ’88 beggars belief.
I’m pretty sure it was him. Don’t forget that many people within the CIA had absolutely no idea about the appalling state of the Soviet economy in its twilight years.
Please notice his date of birth and do the math—he came of age just when the most virulent statist and collectivist doctrines were being trumpeted as the “wave of the future”, both on the left and the right.
It is no accident that he was a leading, and very powerful, advocate of the entire range of collectivist thought and policy. He was literally indoctrinated with the stuff from his youth, and never had the intellectual courage to question one iota of it to the day he died.
But, and this should also be noted, his intellectual heirs are still promulgating all the same turn of the 20th century pap that he taught them, even though the social experiments modeled on those ideas lie in ruins all over the world. It is a powerful example of the delayed reaction which ideas bring about.
Although it is very clear that collectivist philosophy and economics are totally bankrupt, there is still a battle to be fought and won for the minds and souls of those now being polluted with this crap in the schools and universities.
Like the vampire whose means of sustenance it copies, collectivist ideology must be confronted at every opportunity, and the disastrous consequences of these ideas relentlessly exposed to the new generations which didn’t actually experience their pernicious effects.
The undead only survive in the shadows. Exposure to the light of day means their death. Throw back the curtains and let in the sun.
That the collectivist legacy lives on is evidenced by the fact that the hottest topic of political conversation just now is “runaway” oil company profits.
The evil, all powerful oil companies are the railroads of this generation. Previously it was the auto makers, the steel companies, General Electric, IBM, Microsoft, and, of course, (all together now) the greedy bankers.
It’s so much easier to have a scapegoat than to actually try to figure out and explain how things really work.
There was a great example in an interview quoted at another site. An idiot interviewer was grilling someone from the Administration with this question—“Now, oil demand is up, and supplies are down, so why have the prices increased?”
Idiocy this pure and unadulterated usually requires a senator from Massachusetts, or Charlie Rangel.
Good riddance!