Some Transactions Are Zero Sum

“But only redistributive processes are zero-sum games; protective tariffs, mortgage subsidies, and armed robberies all transfer wealth forcibly from one person to another. Economic transactions are voluntary exchanges, which means that both parties perceive themselves as benefiting. A given economic transaction is zero-sum only if one party has miscalculated or been deceived” (Herbert Schlossberg, Idols …

And It Encounters a Lot of Realities

“Envy cannot be assuaged any more than cancer can be; they are both pathologies whose very being requires expansion to their neighbor’s territory. There is no fence that will ever be respected, no limitation that will be recognized as legitimate, no sense of proportion or humility sufficient to smother a sense of inferiority. By its …

Repentance Is Not Scooting Your Shelf Idol to Face Right for a While

“Those pathologies cannot simply be subsumed under such labels as liberal, conservative, or radical. The ideologies common to American politics all have a share in them; none has clean hands . . . . political rhetoric, the media, and the educational establishment have badly distorted the political and economic landscape, making it appear that the …

Reverse Dehumanization

“If we look at the villains instead of the victims — the police, politicians, social workers, businessmen — we find that the humanitarians have given them free will. They do not speak about the industrialist’s tyrannical father, the loan shark’s miserable childhood in an orphan home, the politician’s neurotic mother. Those people are responsible for …

And Eventually These Big Checks Will Bounce

“The culture of Western nations in which humanitarian thinking is dominant is a rentier living off the moral capital accumulated by its predecessors and giving no attention to replenishing it. When it runs out, the horrors begin in earnest . . . Humanism is a philosophy of death” (Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction, pp. 81-82).

A Floating Poverty Line

“Sentimentality, as we have seen, finds expression in autonomous, pragmatically based decisions on right and wrong, and in the refusal to declare absolute standards on all matters, including poverty. What sometimes seems to be an intellectual vacuity in humanitarian polemics is associated with this trait, which we may think of as the propensity to define …