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The Left-Winger’s Big, Big Problem

It is the insurmountable flaw in all leftist philosophy, the insoluble contradiction, the problem that cannot be overcome: No matter what form that leftist philosophy takes — whether it be progressive, egalitarian, democratic-socialist, welfare-statist, communistic, or any other name those of this mindset wish to call it — in order to redistribute wealth, there must first be wealth to redistribute.

Somebody must produce, and the left-winger cannot exist without this person.

The welfare state cannot exist without the producers of welfare.

For exactly this reason, the left-winger is at the mercy of the very person he seeks to plunder. The left-winger relies on those he so often denigrates.

The state by definition cannot produce. It is (by definition) an agency of force. If you have any doubt about that, consider this:

The state cannot spend or redistribute a single cent unless it first either borrows, taxes, or prints.

As Janet Daley so felicitously phrased it in her recent London Telegraph article:

This was the heaven on earth for which liberal democracy had been striving: a system of wealth redistribution that was merciful but not Marxist, and a guarantee of lifelong economic and social security for everyone that did not involve totalitarian government. This was the ideal the European Union was designed to entrench. It was the dream of Blairism, which adopted it as a replacement for the state socialism of Old Labour. And it is the aspiration of President Obama and his liberal Democrats, who want the United States to become a European-style social democracy.

But the US has a very different historical experience from European countries, with their accretions of national remorse and class guilt: it has a far stronger and more resilient belief in the moral value of liberty and the dangers of state power. This is a political as much as an economic crisis, but not for the reasons that Mr Obama believes. The ruckus that nearly paralysed the US economy last week, and led to the loss of its AAA rating from Standard & Poor’s, arose from a confrontation over the most basic principles of American life.

Contrary to what the Obama Democrats claimed, the face-off in Congress did not mean that the nation’s politics were “dysfunctional”. The politics of the US were functioning precisely as the Founding Fathers intended: the legislature was acting as a check on the power of the executive.

The wealth that the left-winger wishes to “spread around,” as Barack Obama famously put it, must originate somewhere.

Where?

Only one place: production.

That in a nutshell is the awesome logic of Say’s Law.

Production, said Jean Baptiste Say, is everything.

He was correct.

Capitalism, as the very name implies, is the engine of capital production.

But what is capital?

Capital is the the amount of wealth owned by a person or a business. Capital is a form of property, and it can, if the owner of that capital chooses, be used to invest. I emphasize that word because investment is the backbone of production, which is the backbone of job creation.

Without wealth, humans are impoverished. Thus, for humans the production of wealth is survival.

Ultimately nothing more fundamental than labor is required for the production of wealth.

Production = life.

Money merely symbolizes wealth. Money is not wealth in and of itself but only a representative.

When money is debased, as it is when, for example, it’s printed without real wealth (i.e. production) backing it, it loses its value. In this way, government has the power to indirectly divest the value of the savings that people have spent their lives accumulating: by printing money that can’t be backed by real wealth, government thereby strips money of its worth. When too much money is printed, the money inflates, and a dollar is no longer worth a dollar.

The left-winger’s big, big problem, which the right-winger has to his detriment also accepted (albeit tacitly), is rooted in the misbegotten belief that if government doesn’t provide it, humans interacting freely will not get it done. That is the source of the insoluble flaw in all leftist thought, which in turn has a deeper source: the belief that human survival should be assured.


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The Five-A-Day Fruits And Vegetables Myth

My salad days, when I was green in judgment, cold in blood …

— William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (1606)

The following might be a little difficult for you to swallow, but I make no apologies: here at rayharvey.org we aim to pulverize all the myths, one slab of baloney at a time.

My good friend Dave (“The Cock”) Cochrane, from across the pond, was kind enough to send me this article, which recently appeared in the Daily Mail Online:

With great fanfare, it was reported last week that the current health advice about eating five portions of fruit and vegetables a day is outdated, and that scientists now believe that eight portions is more beneficial.

While many people grumbled about how on earth they would manage those extra portions, I ­allowed myself a wry smile.

For more than two years I’ve known that the ‘five-a-day’ mantra we’re all so familiar with is nothing but a fairytale.

Of course, they are tasty, colourful additions to any meal. But in terms of health and nutrition, fruit and veg have little to offer, and telling us to eat eight portions a day is compounding one of the worst health fallacies in recent history.

Surprised? Many people will be, and no doubt some dieticians and nutritionists will reject my arguments. But science backs me up.

The latest findings come from a European study into diet and health looking at 300,000 people in eight countries.

It found that people who ate eight or more portions of fresh food a day had a 22 per cent lower chance of dying from heart disease. Yet just 1,636 participants died during the study from heart disease, which is about half of one per cent.

Out of that very small proportion, fewer people died from the group that ate more fruit and veg.

However, the researchers cautioned that these people may have healthier lifestyles generally. They may be less likely to smoke; they may eat less processed food; they may be more active.

What we should not do is to make the usual bad science leap from association to causation and say ‘eating more fruit and veg lowers the risk of dying from heart disease’.

This survey comes not long after another large study, which examined half a million people over eight years, reported that fruit and veg offer no protection against breast, prostate, bowel, lung or any other kind of tumour. Those eating the most fruit and veg showed no difference in cancer risk compared with those ­eating the least.

So how have we been duped for so long?

You might assume our five-a-day ­fixation is based on firm evidence. But you’d be wrong.

It started as a marketing campaign dreamt up by around 20 fruit and veg ­companies and the U.S. National Cancer Institute at a meeting in California in 1991. And it’s been remarkably successful.

People in 25 countries, across three continents, have been urged to eat more greens, and have done so in their millions, believing it was good for them.

No doubt it was set up with the best intentions — to improve the health of the nation and reduce the incidence of cancer. But there was no evidence that it was doing us any good at all.

Read the full article here.

And remember: It’s an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers.