I do understand that accusation would be a powerful weapon to use against anyone attempting to curb the abuses and excesses of predatory businessmen, but it is simply not true. Nor is it necessary to achieve that end. You see statists everywhere Tom, but there are none here.

I thought I made it perfectly clear in my post I was not opposed to capitalism. What I am opposed to is unregulated capitalism which inevitably leads to monopoly and exploitation, oligopoly and plutocracy. There is no divine right of capital any more than there is one for kings.

No business deliberately seeks out competition. It does everything it can to crush its competition. You and George Will would have me believe if capitalism was simply left alone it would tend to approach a benign equilbrium of fiercely competing industries, where merchants, workers, and customers would live in eternal profitable harmony and progress. I do not believe that. Historical evidence has indicated just the opposite. Go ahead, show me a counter-example.

Power gravitates to existing power, and political power inevitably accretes to economic power. You do not get a uniform continuum, you get accumulation and centralization accompanied by boom-and-bust oscillations and migration of wealth towards the top.

And why is our country so much better off than many others? We didn’t invent capitalism. What does make our country special, and those others based on a system comparable to ours, is that we have legal and constitutional means of preventing the abuses of capital, through the consent of the governed (not just the owners)while simultaneously protecting property rights. A system which you and Mr Will are trying desperately to dismantle.

And none of this has anything to do with the inspiring history of the evolution of creosote technology.

This is the history of railroad tie preservation.

Look at how it works. Trials. Errors. Things that screwed up and forced other solutions. Conflicts. Many different companies trying different things.

This is what works. This is why our country is better off than many others.

Nobody created a Government Tie Preservation Department where a bunch of people in a room, hand picked by politicians, would decide how all railroad ties would be preserved henceforth.

This is what’s used today. Many materials, many designs, many applications for countless individual cases and needs. The industry is regulated as far as safety is concerned, but nobody (yet) is telling the industry you must do things this particular way, safe or not.

Only government impose. Markets sell. The only way I can be forced to buy a product against my will is if the government has mandated it.

Freedom is chaotic. For living creatures or societies, stability is death. There, I used your words, and they work just fine.

as if there was something controversial or ideologically partisan about its fundamental premise. There’s nothing here for any “progressive” to object to, the concept that businesses should go broke if they fail to deliver, and that a healthy economy will find ways to recycle and salvage the “lost” wealth is certainly self-evident to me, and I suppose to every one. I suspect even Karl Marx was aware this was one of the fundamental strengths of capitalism, the ability to adjust and recover from setbacks. True, there may be situations when the disruption may be so big, so destructive, that perhaps we should intervene, if only partially. But let’s not pursue that, it’s always a judgement call.

This is George Will, after all, one of the more subtle intellectuals on the American Right, and it might prove instructive to deconstruct the text and find the sharp rocks buried deep inside this puffy little snowball. On closer inspection we sense the linguistic hooks hidden in the bait; note how its the progressives who crave “social stasis” while the conservatives “welcome…perpetual…dynamism”. Now, gee, why didn’t I think of that?

Is that a coincidence? Of course not. Will is good, really good. But his logic owes more to language than literalism. I’m lucky I’m bilingual, this kind of metaphorical word association is very awkward in Spanish and sticks out like a sore thumb, it simply screams “this is lawyer talk”. And even the words themselves are carefully chosen for effect. Why “stasis” instead of “stability”? Why not “chaos” in place of “dynamism”. George knows exactly what he’s doing.

Consider poor Teddy Roosevelt, another (boo!) progressive, who is incapable of predicting the blessings of creosote (no doubt because of his pastoral and unrealistic attitudes on conservation of resources). Of course, the trees that are cut down by the railroads to create agricultural land they can sell to help finance the railroads are never mentioned, or any of the other cascading and unpredictable social and ecological changes, both bad AND good, that resulted from the railroad bubble. This isn’t about railroad ties, its about land grabs and population displacements and financial skulduggery on a continental scale. Creosote is a distraction.

And of course, there is the long catalogue of historical examples carefully selected to support Mr Will’s thesis; that we should let the movers and shakers simply do what they want, they know best, the naysayers do not know what they are talking about. Look them up, the footnotes are all genuine, the facts are not made up. See, Mr Will is right, those who disagree with his thesis in any way must be mistaken, uninformed, perhaps even malicious. QED. I could go on, but I think you catch my drift.

Perhaps it is fortunate this essay wound up on Flame after all. And please note, I totally agree with every syllable of what George Will (and by extension, TB) are propagating here. I’m not saying this is wrong, that we should abandon every spontaneous adjustment a free market makes (creative destruction, don’t you just love it?). I agree with every word he’s saying. What I find disturbing is that letting the free market operate isn’t what this essay is about at all. It’s about the operators, the very real men who initiate these changes for their own private benefit, without consulting the rest of us, without even telling us what they are really up to and how its going to affect the rest of us, very often involving our public resources, and our money. And then, the tip of the spear… the warhead at the top of this little guided missile. The real message. Its those nasty government guys, they are the cause of ALL our troubles. If they would just go away and let us be free.

“Imagine all the things government planners cannot anticipate when, in their defining hubris, they try to impose their static dream of the “right kind” of future.”

True, I’ll be the first to admit government bureaucrats are often clueless. I used to be one. But does Daddy Warbucks know any better, does he care any more than those arrogant government planners? Is he hubris-free?Everyone agrees the free market can do a phenomenal job of meeting, and even anticipating, our needs. But is it always a free market that is really in charge, or is it just some friend of Mr Will’s. The real message here is not “let the market do its thing”, it’s “let the marketeers do whatever they please”. Yeah, it does belong on Flame.