| | "In the absence of principle, men act without knowledge or vision. They act short-range and by feeling, their own or their gang's, struggling to trample on others before others trample on them, guessing case by case what policy will 'work' for the nonce."
"The mixed economy obviously rests on the philosophy of pragmatism, and thus on subjectivism. If subjectivism or intrinsicism is embraced as a matter of principle, it leads in politics to pure statism. But if subjectivism or intrinsicism, as happens regularly for perfectly logical reasons, causes men to disdain principles, it leads in politics to eclecticism. Eclecticism is the attempt to combine in one system essentials taken from contradictory approaches.
Since pragmatism dispenses with the idea of an external world and with objective rules of conceptualization, its exponents see no reason for context-keeping or for restraint. They feel free to assert any social demand or daydream that wells up from their subconscious or their subculture. These are the kind of people who specialize in manufacturing false rights."
"Our goals are noble, the daydreamers reply, and noble goals should not be sullied by grubby discussions of means."
"As the virtue of integrity tells us, compromise between good and evil leads to the triumph of evil. This applies to every field of human action, politics included."
"If the statist element is not rejected in principle and repealed in total, it eventually consumes the last remnants of the individualist element. (The economic mechanism ensuring this result is the principle that controls necessitate more controls.)
As the history of the West in the past century demonstrates, the mixed economy is not a "third way" between capitalism and socialism. It is merely a transition stage, a disintegrating anti-system, careening drunkenly but inexorably from freedom to dictatorship."
-author "unknown"
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