Quote of the day

Jonah Goldberg:

The problem with socialism is socialism, because there are no socialists. Socialism is a system based upon an assumption about human nature that simply isn't true.

The reason left-wing political thought will never deliver the utopian society it promises -- or even one preferable to a libertarian alternative -- is because its philosophy is so profoundly at odds with human nature. Indeed, the need to change the very nature of man in order for leftist philosophy to be viable is tacitly admitted by various communist regimes through their use of widespread propaganda to motivate its citizens and workers, re-education camps, and outright executions of intellectuals opposed to their ideas, who might infect the rest of the populace with their counter-revolutionary beliefs. A particularly extreme version of this attempt to change human nature was practiced by Pol Pot, whose path to an enlightened society was based on first turning the clock back to the year zero.

Capitalism succeeds because it recognizes man's self-interested nature and harnesses it to produce a better outcome for all. Socialism and all of its various strains, meanwhile, essentially seeks to play the role of God, seeking to re-fashion man in the image of its creators (assuming they are in fact the selfless beings they claim to be), which is why it inevitably fails.