Quote of the day

Against the backdrop of an unwarranted and unnecessary release of oil from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve and a troop draw-down in Afghanistan informed, in part, because of "waning domestic political support" , Victor Davis Hanson wonders just who are the socialists?:

All this raises some questions. The strangest things about the global statist crack-up are socialists’ unhappiness with their socialist utopia, and their subsequent efforts to avoid the consequences of the very redistributive state that they themselves once so gladly crafted.

This discussion is, of course, a belabored example of why and how socialists do not like socialism. Indeed, statism is not a desired outcome, but rather more a strategy for obtaining power or winning acclaim as one of the caring, by offering the narcotic of promising millions something free at the expense of others who must be seen as culpable and obligated to fund it — entitlements fueled by someone else’s money that enfeebled the state, but in the process extended power, influence, and money to a technocratic class of overseers who are exempt from the very system that they have advocated.

Who are socialists?

There are none. Only technocratic overseers who wish to give someone else’s money to others as a means of winning capitalist-style lifestyles and power for themselves — in a penultimate cycle of unsustainable spending. When this latest attempt at statism is over, Barack Obama will enjoy a sort of Clintonism, a globe-trotting post officium lifestyle of multimillion dollar honoraria to fund a lifestyle analogous to “two Americas” John Edwards, “earth in the balance” Al Gore, a tax-exempt yachting John Kerry, a revolving-door Citibank grandee like Peter Orszag, or a socialist Strauss-Kahn in $20,000 suits doling out billions to the “poor.”

That is just the way it has been and will always be.

So, Marx had it wrong. It has turned out that statist-inspired entitlements are the opiate of the masses.

Apparently, no one took away any lessons from the Cold War. That wasn't just the global brand of the Soviet Union that was defeated. One of the take-aways should've been the acknowledgement of the unsustainable nature of over-regultated, top-down, command and control economies that guarantee a "right" to work, housing, health care and pensions.

Some 20 years on, looks like we're playing some catch-up on the lesson plan.