America’s
wealth is not an inventory of goods; it is an organic entity, a fragile
pulsing fabric of ideas, expectations, loyalties, moral commitments,
visions. To vivisect it for redistribution is to kill it. As President
Mitterrand’s French technocrats discovered in the 1980s, and President
Obama’s quixotic ecocrats are discovering today, government managers of
complex systems of wealth soon find they are administering an industrial
corpse, a socialized Solyndra.
All riches must finally fall into the gap between thoughts and
things. Governed by mind but caught in matter, assets must afford an
income stream that is expected to continue. The expectation may shift as
swiftly as thought, but things, alas, are all too solid and slow to
change. The kaleidoscope of shifting valuations, flashing gains and
losses as it is turned in the hands of time, in the grip of “news,”
distributes and redistributes the wealth of the world far more quickly
and surely than any scheme of the state.The belief that wealth consists not chiefly in ideas, attitudes, moral codes, and mental disciplines but in definable static things that can be seized and redistributed — that is the materialist superstition. It stultified the works of Marx and other prophets of violence and envy. It betrays every person who seeks to redistribute wealth by coercion. It balks every socialist revolutionary who imagines that by seizing the so-called means of production he can capture the crucial capital of an economy. It baffles nearly every conglomerateur who believes he can safely enter new industries by buying rather than by learning them. It confounds every bureaucrat of science who imagines he can buy or steal the fruits of research and development.
Read more: https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/312376/unleash-mind
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