I am not a big fan of H.L. Mencken (see this), nor of Lee Jussim (see this). But I do follow Jussim’s blog, just to keep track of his intellectual outrages. In a recent, quotation-filled post, Jussim quotes Mencken:
The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.
Exactly. Thus we have
- economic destruction to “save the planet” in the name of a pseudo-science that can’t even depict the pre-1975 and post-1998 past accurately
- cries of “white privilege” and “racism” — accompanied by violence and suppression of speech, aimed at law-abiding persons who don’t think the “right” thoughts and say the “right” things (i.e., conservatives)
- “gender equality” and “marriage equality” as blanket justifications for the destruction of property rights and freedom of association
- “income inequality” as the rallying cry of redistributive schemes that penalize success and stifle the very economic growth that would materially enrich the poor
- shackled, inefficient markets because someone, somewhere made a mistake (from which he and others might have learned) or defrauded someone (for which ample publicity and a prison sentence somehow weren’t a sufficient remedy and caution)
- massive, costly, authoritarian bureaucracies dedicated to all of those causes, and many more.
It’s all very Orwellian.
Politics and Prosperity 