File under Western Civilization, Decline of: Krugman wins Nobel

The market has been severely hamstrung for decades, and now that it is fainting from loss of blood, its vampire captors point to it and say, “see, markets need to be restrained or else they fail.”

I won’t actually comment on Krugman, other than to say that he is a socialist, and like many of his breed who do not actually implement collectivist scams (as opposed to Raines, Paulson, Mozillo, Congress, et al.) but provide intellectual support for them, he seems to have a soul, albeit a lost one.

Anyone who understands the principles of the market and defends them in public these days must feel the way I do: that we are simply narrating the decline. You can’t argue with history. You can just put it down as you see it, now in the hope of carrying a few embers of common sense through or out of the West as it enters some kind of dark age.

It is astounding that after recently observing Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, Peron, Castro, Chavez and a hundred other tin-pot dictators destroy or hobble their nations through various forms of collectivism, the entire West is now leaping headlong in that same direction, with hardly a second thought. No credit is given to the principles of individualism, private property and freedom of contract, nor the great market economy that created the prosperity these societies are so eager to squander. The market has been hamstrung for years, and now that it is fainting from loss of blood, its vampire captors point to it and say, “see, markets need to be restrained or else they fail.”

This episode will play out over generations, and it will end with tens of millions dead and the end of the very civilization that codified respect for the individual.

The end of the Enlightenment means the end of freedom and the end of freedom means the end of centuries of increasing living standards, from food and health care, to travel and communication, to privacy and personal security.

The West is simply finished. It’s best hope is balkanization, in case any regional pockets of common sense remain, though I can’t think of any that are physically and culturally strong enough to withstand the violence to come. Perhaps Switzerland, for a while.

2 thoughts on “File under Western Civilization, Decline of: Krugman wins Nobel

  1. I could not agree with you more.

    I felt the same disgust when I read that Krugman got the Nobel. I suppose because I have had a residual respect for the idea of a Nobel Prize, built up from hearing about it since childhood. But in recent years it’s become clear that the Scandinavians who award the prizes seem to be using it to a significant extent to make political statements – for example, giving it to Al Gore, for God’s sake, for the global warming scam which I can just about guarantee will be completely off the radar ten years from now, just as the global cooling scare of my teenage years in the 1970s is now forgotten.

    I get this real sad feeling when I see my smart, normally sensible friends applauding the various continuously growing intrusions into our freedoms. When my city outlawed smoking in restaurants and bars, my friends applauded because they didn’t smoke. They asked me what I thought, and I said I couldn’t believe that smart people were cheering the fact that another chunk of our freedom was taken away.

    And I am furious that this financial situation is being blamed on “unrestrained free markets”. What complete bull. The problem is not the free markets, it is the government guarantees that created the massive moral hazards that then were quite naturally and entirely predictably taken advantage of by people trying to make money, as all people everywhere always do.

    I agree about the balkanization. I think that’s where we’re headed. We’re heading for a Latin American kind of nation with all of the corruption that entails. (And part of the problem is the increasingly non-white character of the population. Nations of European people, especially Northern European people, have a much better track record of maintaining a civilization that I’d care to live in than Latin America and the rest of the Third World.)

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