And the Wall Street Journal celebrates his contribution.
Damnant quod non intellegunt.
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/4713/dreher-condemns-capitalist-materialism/
Dreher Condemns Capitalist Materialism
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“…community-supported agriculture, small businesses, simple living…”
Hard to have those things without individual choice, but their self-contradiction doesn’t seem to bother them in the least.
From a libertarian perspective, we don’t care, but it’s interesting to note that many of the things he decries – mass production, destruction of local industry and agriculture, dissolution of families – are products of capitalism but not products of free markets. They’re the products of a heavily-subsidised capitalist class combined with social policies to placate those left out.
- Josh
Mr. Dreher apparently is just another variant of your run-of-the-mill statist, and as such he is inherently immoral. While I strongly support his right to live his own life as he chooses, Mr. Dreher apparently sees nothing wrong with imposing his views on others through government coercion. Unfortunately, Mr. Dreher sounds all too much like a modern version of what Rothbard and others have termed “millenialists”, and it is not surprising that the WSJ (and I would venture the rest of the mainstream media) at least partially support his viewpoints.
Contrast Mr. Dreher’s approach to that of the Amish, who renounce many of the same things as him, but who also renounce war and violence, even in self defense.
Remember the old days when WSJ then-editor Vermont Royster extolled Mises’s *Human Action* right there on the WSJ pages?
Nowadays those pages extoll communitarianism when not elevating the self-styled “social democrats” of neoconservatism. Silly me, hoping America’s top business periodical might have an interest in supporting free enterprise.
I fall on the side that Mr. Dreher is simply a statist. Liberal and Conservative terms are meaningless. There are those that promote the use of force on others and those who don’t. Mr. Dreher states that he is for the user of force to make people who would rather do something else do what he thinks they should.
As for the evil capitalist system that is destroying the planet? Reality shows just the opposite. Where a group of well intentioned or just plain mean folks determine the how other folks live normally has a record of environmental destruction that is much worse than a semi-capitalist country. For example, the US is much cleaner and has destroyed its environment significantly less than the old Soviet Union has done.
As a famous person once pointed out that it is a short walk from religion to socialism. I think he’s just another guy interested in telling me what he thinks is best for me, and then more than happy to force me to do it.
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