Posted by aogFriday, 09 July 2004 at 09:49 TrackBack Ping URL

Hopless on the Left

Over at Harry’s Place there is a post about the evils of outsourcing, as stated by Senator John Kerry. While one wonders how his position is really different from that of the Luddites (whose jobs were outsourced to machines), it left me with the feeling that the defining characteristic of the Left is the lack of hope in human material progress despite the emphasis on material goods and their distribution.

While the historical record is clear that autarky and “job protection” trades off more future jobs for fewer present jobs (and frequently not even that), these are still the preferred solutions on the Left to any economic disruptions. There seems to be a strong preference for a good process that produces bad results than a bad process that produces good results. If you have no hope of future progress, then it might make sense to try and redistribute more equally what already exists. Still, it’s a bit odd that so called “progressives” don’t seem to have much faith in actual progress.

Of course, one of the key properties of the “good” process supported by the Left is that it delivers control over other people’s lives in to the hands of those running the process. The cynical among us might well wonder if that’s not the real goal and concern about “the people” is simply a cover story.