Never surrender skillet lyrics

Never surrender skillet lyrics

Note: when sorting by date, descending order will show the newest results first. All times are GMT The time now is 06:16 AM. Copyright 2011 vBulletin Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. But as things are, the war of the sword and the war of the pens is perpetual Thomas Hobbes, De Cive There s no denying this is greatly entertaining stuff. But as with the first video, I find the pro-Hayek message rather irritating well I would, wouldn t I? To pick up on one specific thing, however, I m frustrated by the Hayek character appropriating some words of Adam Smith about human beings not being mere pieces on a chessboard. The original Smith quote, from his Theory of Moral Sentiments, runs thus: The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder. Smith s point is simple but extremely important. However ingenious and complex a plan or system may be, it can never match the complexity of the world upon which it is unleashed. Each action sets off incalculable further reactions. Each human agent affected by these actions and reactions will in turn be propelled by his or her own principle of motion in ways that cannot be predicted or controlled. No plan or system ever works out the way the men of system hope. As Smith, in his typically understated way implies, failing to see this can lead to social, political and economic disaster. Libertarians and classical liberals, Austrian economists and whoever else is on the wagon this week are fond of quoting this passage. Over at CafeHayek it is proffered as advice for would-be czars and other experts to remember. Yet libertarians et al rarely realise that Smith s reflections apply with devastating force to their own state-minimalist politics. Even in the world of minimal-state libertarian fantasy, there will inevitably be economic recessions. Eventually, at least one of these will be severe. In recessions people suffer; that s what unemployment and poverty entail, especially under never surrender skillet lyrics minimal state where there is presumably no welfare support. When people suffer, however, they do not sit around idly and wait for the market to fix itself whenever that might be. They take action to alleviate their sufferings as soon as possible. Under such circumstances, large-scale collective action will be taken by individuals seeking relief from suffering. Action of this sort is known as politics. In this politics, human beings mobilise so as to put the levers of power into the hands of those who will or at least promise to alleviate their sufferings. In modern societies this is done via the state apparatus. Hence even if magically we start out with libertarian state minimalism, we will not stay there. The power of the state will eventually be deployed so as to interfere with the market forces currently failing to alleviate the sufferings of ordinary people. Two things follow. First, and with especial irony, the libertarian minimal state can only be sustained by coercive state force. When ordinary citizens mobilize to demand state action to alleviate suffering, the politicians they select, and the movements that propel them to power, must be repressed in order to preserve the minimal state which refuses to never surrender skillet lyrics in the economy or to provide state support. Minimal state libertarianism either organically gives way to state interventionism, or resists this organic development by becoming an anti-democratic tyranny. At a conceptual level, this basically means minimal state libertarianism tears itself apart upon any contact with the constraints of reality. Secondly, with such considerations in place we can return to the real world and look at the alarming historical record. During the 20th century, when economic situations became sufficiently dire for sufficiently long, it was not mildly interventionist Keynesians who took power.