Ghost of a flea: We the people

May 08, 2010

We the people

What Theodore Dalrymple says of Greece is true for the West and an inherent problem with representative government wherever the universal franchise is unaccompanied by widespread virtues such as honesty, self-control, providence, prudence, and self-respect.

When the crowd tried to storm the Greek parliament, shouting, “Thieves! Thieves!,” its anger was misdirected. It was a classic case of what Freudians call projection: the attribution to others of one’s own faults. It is true that the Greek politicians are much to blame for the current situation, and no doubt many of them are thieves; but their real crime was not stealing, but offering a substantial proportion of the Greek population a standard of living that was economically unjustified, maintained for a time by borrowing, and in the long run unsustainable, in return for votes. The crime of that substantial proportion of the Greek population was to accept the bribe that the politicians offered; they were only too prepared to live well at someone else’s expense. The thieves were not principally the politicians, but the demonstrators.

Of course, to the Frankfurt School minded this is not a bug but a feature. Destroy the education system and criminalize morality and in a generation or two it is the rule of the mob (and they plan to rule the mob).

God how I miss her: Karl paraphrases Margaret Thatcher, “the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

Would England yet had a conservative party worth the name.

Related: Margaret Thatcher on socialism (never gets old).

Posted by Ghost of a flea at May 8, 2010 09:27 AM