Thursday, October 6, 2011

George Will and Galbraith

George Will has written a piece today that describes in parallel terms what I have been writing about for the past three years. Namely he speaks of Elizabeth Warren and Galbraith and the current crop of left wing progressives.

Will states:

Warren is (as William F. Buckley described Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith) a pyromaniac in a field of straw men: She refutes propositions no one asserts. Everyone knows that all striving occurs in a social context, so all attainments are conditioned by their context. This does not, however, entail a collectivist political agenda.

Such an agenda’s premise is that individualism is a chimera, that any individual’s achievements should be considered entirely derivative from society, so the achievements need not be treated as belonging to the individual. Society is entitled to socialize — i.e., conscript — whatever portion it considers its share. It may, as an optional act of political grace, allow the individual the remainder of what is misleadingly called the individual’s possession. 

Warren is the apotheosis of anti-individualism and the very example of Harvard Law School and its Faculty. Progressivism denies individualism. Progressivism denies the individual, and as such it would be impossible for Warren to believe that any person could do it on their own. Yet since she has apparently never done anything the very thought that others have is so foreign she sees its very existence as a threat to human existence as she sees it. 

Further it is Galbraith to whom we all owe a debt, he more than Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, destroyed the very concept of the individual.

Thus Will in many ways is just echoing what I wrote in one of my earlier books, Progressivism and Individualsim. Yet Warren in her arrogant stance based in my opinion on total ignorance may very well get elected. After all it is Massachusetts, we shall see.