After Socialism

On this day:

1834
In New York City, four nights of rioting against abolitionists began.
1846
Mexican-American War: American troops occupy Monterey and Yerba Buena, thus beginning the U.S. acquisition of California.
1863
United States begins its first military draft; exemptions cost $300.
1865
American Civil War: four conspirators in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln are hanged.
1928
Sliced bread is sold for the first time by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri.
1930
Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser begins construction of the Boulder Dam (now known as Hoover Dam).
1946
Howard Hughes nearly dies when his XF-11 spy plane prototype crashes in a Beverly Hills neighborhood.
2002
A scandal breaks out in the United Kingdom when news reports accuse MI6 of sheltering Abu Qatada, the supposed European Al Qaeda leader.
2005
A series of four explosions occurs on London’s transport system killing 56 people, including four alleged suicide bombers, and injuring over 700 others.

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Failure is also information.

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Is there a reason why this particular allegation against Platner should be taken more seriously than the previous ones? Or have we defaulted to the volume of insight as a criterion for decisions?

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Headline: "A 21-year-old influencer, known as DreamDoll Brii, has died after being shot while in a lime green Lamborghini."
Neither her outfit nor its color was described.

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The men's soccer team was badly outclassed by Belgium last night. They went as far in the tournament as they could, and that should be the end of it--some more than expected success, with some frantic bad moments. But it won't be. The cloud of Trump's buffonish intervention because he disagreed with the game's rules will make America look again like rubes and cowboys. And bad sports.

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After Socialism

Alan Charles Kors's article, “Can There Be an ‘After Socialism’?”, written for the Atlas Society (An Objectivism/Rand group), is an old article but interesting because it is so accurate and heartfelt. It also highlights the absence of any reflective examination of socialism's obvious disasters:

"No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. The bodies are all around us. And here is the problem: No one talks about them. No one honors them. No one does penance for them. No one has committed suicide for having been an apologist for those who did this to them. No one pays for them. No one is hunted down to account for them.
….

The record is truly plain. Socialism, wherever it actually had the means to plan a society, to pursue efficaciously its vision of the abolition of private property, economic inequality, and the allocation of capital and goods by free markets, always culminated in the crushing of individual, economic, religious, associational, and political liberty. Its collectivization of agriculture alone led to untold suffering, scarcity, and contempt for property as the fruit of labor. It was, at its best, the ability, through horror and servitude, to build Gary, Indiana, once, without the good stuff, and without the ability even to maintain it.
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To be moral beings, we must acknowledge these awful things appropriately and bear witness to the responsibilities of these most murderous times. Until socialism—like Nazism or fascism confronted by the death camps and the slaughter of innocents—is confronted with its lived reality, the greatest atrocities of all recorded human life, we will not live “after socialism.”

It will not happen. The pathology of Western intellectuals has committed them to an adversarial relationship with the culture—free markets and individual rights—that has produced the greatest alleviation of suffering; the greatest liberation from want, ignorance, and superstition; and the greatest increase of bounty and opportunity in the history of all human life.

This pathology allows Western intellectuals to step around the Everest of bodies of the victims of Communism without a tear, a scruple, a regret, an act of contrition, or a reevaluation of self, soul, and mind.
…….

We know that voluntary exchange among individuals held morally responsible under the rule of law creates both prosperity and an unparalleled diversity of human choices. Such a model also has been a precondition of individuation and freedom. By contrast, regimes of central planning create poverty and occasion ineluctable developments toward totalitarianism and the worst abuses of power. Dynamic free-market societies, grounded in rights-based individualism, have altered the entire human conception of liberty and of dignity for formerly marginalized groups. The entire “socialist experiment,” by contrast, ended in stasis; ethnic hatreds; the absence of even the minimal preconditions of economic, social, and political renewal; and categorical contempt for both individuation and minority rights. Our children do not know this true comparison."

7/7/26