About this episode
Brilliant and sophisticated young people come up with brilliant and sophisticated schemes for reforming the human race; unforeseen disasters ensue … That’s pretty much the story of Marxism, progressivism, etc. In response to disasters caused by leftist social engineering, the brilliant and sophisticated young people on the (so-called) dissident Right — folks like Walt Bismarck and Richard Hanania — have their own brilliant and sophisticated ideas for social engineering. Such schemes cannot possibly backfire, because these progressives on the dissident Right have better motives and smarter ideas, than those misguided progressives on the Left did, right? Wrong.The solution to leftist top-down progressivism is not right-wing top-down progressivism. It’s Distributism. It’s breaking up concentrations of power and promoting, as much as is practicable, ownership and decision-making at the lowest possible level of the social and economic hierarchy. A nation of owners and decision-makers is free; a nation of renters and employees and voters in huge elections (where all the candidates have bent the knee to AIPAC and to the central banksters) is bound to be enslaved. That’s the real lesson from “the American experiment.” If the Right intends to seize and to use the Left’s tools — i.e., the machinery of the Total State — it should do so only to destroy those tools as much as possible, so that no one can use those tools to abuse America’s citizens ever again.“Oh, but when we get control of the one ring to rule them all, we’ll use it benevolently,” the Richard Hanania’s and Walt Bismarck’s of the online Right assure us. I’m sure Hanania and Bismarck are smart — they’re certainly much smarter than me. And I’m sure they mean well — just like all the high-minded reformers who promoted things like federally-backed student loans and “restorative justice” and “no child left behind” and all kinds of other noble-sounding schemes. And I’m sure that Hanania and Bismarck have just as much skin in the game as those past reformers did, which is to say they have absolutely no skin in the game — meaning that they won’t be accountable for any of the unforeseen costs of their reforms. Nobody, not even Richard Hanania and Walt Bismarck, is smart or competent enough to successfully manage the human race from on high. There are too many variables, too much complexity, too much dynamism, for any one person or group to wargame everything out. The only w
