To update, with a quote:
Either capitalism, which is the road to hell, or socialism, for those who want to build the kingdom of God here on Earth.
- President Hugo Chavez
Nationalization and private property seizure has just begun.
The lefties who dream that we’ll all "go back to the land" want us to bury our good sense there.
Jared Diamond, a geographer and biologist recently featured in a National Geographic’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” presented an explanation from man’s past which applies to the leftish false precepts of nature which paints a silent backdrop of their world view. Diamond was trying to figure out why the social growth of the Papua-New Guineans had plateaued at a level below that of other societies developing in the same way and the same time.
He concluded that their poor food producing capacity not only did not let them develop specialized skills like metal tool making, if froze their prospects forever. More time spent and effort expended on the support of survival based on crops with limited nutritional value required them to set aside the developing of other skills that could improve their lot, and such as with the making of metals, the very tools which would give them a way to expend fewer calories to harvest the same caloric value needed to sustain basic nutrition.
This lesson is lost, or at least discounted by the new primitivists of the developed world. They sentimentally yearn for simplicity, but forgot that it came with great harshness. They look fondly on a nasty, short, and brutal life to satisfy a yearning for innocence that they have been unable to find in their relations with people or in other disappointments they find with themselves. They probably can’t entertain themselves or find a way to live with the world that they find themselves in, so they get easily bothered by a scare about something like overhead power lines, or wax on their apples.
Manual labor is inefficient and creates poverty. In the reasonable west it’s use is normally only reluctantly applied to limited circumstances which can’t be done in any other way.
Greenies and primitivists who aren’t very good at math romanticize about people and the land, and men going about their work in a traditional manner which has been long abandoned. They don’t consider human and animal manual labor to be much of an expenditure of energy. Looking to a less mechanized past reveals quickly that people were clearly poorer, and suffered from ailments from that sort of work and shorter, more painful lives from both sever and minor injuries.
Prior to the intensive mechanization of construction, it was accepted that the construction of large public and commercial buildings caused one death per floor.
Moreover, a manual laborer requires far more in the way of healthcare and food than an operator of machinery does. Food has to be produced, transported, prepared, and so forth. I’m sure that if we didn’t enjoy it so much, greenies would regulate it for the sake of energy efficiency. Fossil and primary fuels however are more embedded more densely with energy. For every unit of mass of it that you have to carry, far more productive output is extracted from it.
When a Chavez with a cadre of Chavs “Chavistas” calls for people who have never farmed to abandon the prospects of far more efficient industrial work and go to the undermechanized working of small-holdings or even mass-labor-based collective farms, he is dooming the whole society to mediocrity, in spite of whatever psychological sentimentalism it provides a social-political movement. It is a disservice to that very proletariat which in the end will realize that they were given the opiate of a bad idea to fill their cupboards instead of advancing their needs and quality of life.
The least one can do is ignore them. The best one can do is to continue to prove their world view otherwise by living well in a modern world, and occasionally asking them to impirically examine the basis of their reasoning, and why living examples of it only can be found in the least equitable and poorest societies on earth.
Remember: in a good society people help the disadvantaged on either the conservative or collectivist model. Either way, they are helped. If a social theory causes that society to help more of them, we aren’t just being stupid, we’re being cruel by bringing more people into mediocrity and misery. The more of them you have to serve, the harder it is on the remainder supporting them, and they too are victimized by a tyranny of bad ideas. Intended to pander to a comfortable sliver of the population that thinks compassion is about helping the greatest number of people, they should be more concerned with the conditions which require so many people to need any help at all.
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