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Republican voters, particularly in Indiana and California, can, by supporting Cruz, make the Republican convention a deliberative body rather than one that merely ratifies decisions made elsewhere, some of them six months earlier. A convention’s sovereign duty is to choose a plausible nominee who has a reasonable chance to win, not to passively affirm the will of a mere plurality of voters recorded episodically in a protracted process.

-George Will

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"If he (Trump) understands the separation of powers, then he understands that what he's been promising at rally after rally after rally, can't be done."

-George Will

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"The Republican party is going to have to rethink the business of having open primaries & caucuses. Seven of the, what? nineteen events so far have been closed, Trump has lost five of them."

-George Will

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Were the lungs the seat of wisdom, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly would be wise, but they are not and he is not.

-George Will

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Trump believes he should be president because of his business savvy. But he has, in effect, shrunk the large inheritance he received from his father. In 1982, Forbes reported Trump’s net worth at $200 million. Vox calculates that if he had put that in an index fund “at a 0.15 percent fee, he’d have $6.3 billion today after dividend taxes, almost certainly more than he actually does.” And an Associated Press analysis showed that if in 1988 he had put his money in an index fund he would have $13 billion.

-George Will

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"If narcissism was oil, this president would be Saudi Arabia."

-George Will

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"Ignoring reality is part of the job description of progressives."

-George Will

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"The problem with football is...football."

-George Will

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"In 1996, Bill Clinton ran for reelection promising to “build a bridge to the 21st century.” Today, here comes Hillary Clinton, trailing clouds of seediness and promising to build a bridge back to the 20th century..."

-George Will

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"Religions have been founded on less"

-George Will, on the coincidence of 7 key IRS employees' hard drives failing at the same time

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"When a politician, on the subject of science, says the debate is over, you may be sure of two things: The debate is ongoing and he's losing it."

-George Will

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"Well, it's hard to rejoice in the overthrow of democratic forms, although it's hard not to rejoice in the overthrow of a Muslim Islamist government that threatened to screw down an anti-modern tyranny that would be difficult to reverse. That said, when this began in Tahrir Square against Mubarak, there was much talk about all the young people with their smartphones accessing the social media, missing the fact that half of Egyptians live on less than $2 a day. Smartphones are not the symbol. . . . The choice today is between two flavors of tyranny. One is tyranny fueled by religious extremism, and the other is tyranny leavened by corruption, that would be the tyranny of the army. And that's what they'll get."

-George Will

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He (Obama) also promised to cut $800 billion from 10 years of war spending that will end in two years, which is like “cutting” $800 billion by deciding not to build a ski resort on Mars.

-George Will

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"...what people say when no one is listening, or so they think, gives you some insight into really Mr. Obama is. And this reinforces a narrative, which is he’s kind of slippery, very aloof and mildly disdainful of those people who inhibit his flexibility — aka, the American public.”
-George Will

George Will on Creative Destruction

Wikipedia

Cross-posted at the Left Coast Rebel

From Will's excellent Washington Post column today on creative destruction:

Creative destruction continues in the digital age. After 244 years — it began publication five years before the 1773 Boston Tea Party — the Encyclopaedia Britannica will henceforth be available only in digital form as it tries to catch up to reference Web sites such as Google and Wikipedia. Another digital casualty forgot it was selling the preservation of memories, a.k.a. “Kodak moments,” not film.

America now is divided between those who find this social churning unnerving and those who find it exhilarating. What Virginia Postrel postulated in 1998 in “The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress” — the best book for rescuing the country from a ruinous itch for tidiness — is even more true now. Today’s primary political and cultural conflict is, Postrel says, between people, mislabeled “progressives,” who crave social stasis, and those, paradoxically called conservatives, who welcome the perpetual churning of society by dynamism. tasists see Borders succumb to e-books (and Amazon) and lament the passing of familiar things. Dynamists say: Relax, reading is thriving. In 2001, the iPod appeared, and soon stores such as Tower Records disappeared. Who misses them?

Theodore Roosevelt, America’s first progressive president, thought it was government’s duty to “look ahead and plan out the right kind of civilization.” TR looked ahead and saw a “timber famine” caused by railroads’ ravenous appetites for crossties that rotted. He did not foresee creosote, which preserves crossties. 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.

Read The Rest.

Will is correct in that progressive tend to reject -- and even viscerally hate and/or loathe -- the dynamism of so-called creative destruction. But unfortunately that doesn't necessarily mean conservatives understand the true brilliance of laissez faire capitalism; they are just less hostile to its tenets...

But just what is creative destruction, you ask?

Investopedia:

Creative destruction occurs when something new kills something older. A great example of this is personal computers. The industry, led by Microsoft and Intel, destroyed many mainframe computer companies, but in doing so, entrepreneurs created one of the most important inventions of this century.

Schumpeter goes so far as to say that the "process of creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism."

Why is it unknown?

A-ha! That's why progressives hate the concept of creative destruction: for the dynamism of free markets (and the symbiosis of rationally self-interested individuals that fuel the brilliance of free markets to work,) something "newer" needs to "kill" something "older."

Like any other area where individual folks are left alone to pursue happiness, it is chaotic and in many cases not "fair" because someone eventually ends up with "more" than someone else!

This quote from Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, strikes a note on the creative destruction topic (hat-tip Adam Smith Institute):

A Bronze Age empire stagnated for much the same reason that a nationalized industry stagnates: monopoly rewards caution and discourages experiment, the income is gradually captured by the interests of the producers at the expense of the interests of the consumers, and so on. The list of innovations achieved by the pharaohs is as thin as the list of innovations achieved by British Rail or the US Postal Service.

FURTHER READING: At the Ayn Rand Institute, "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal":

Readers of Atlas Shrugged are struck by the moral fire of Ayn Rand’s defense of business and capitalism. She does not regard capitalism as an amoral or immoral means to some “common good”—as do most of its defenders—but as a profoundly moral social system. It is, she wrote, “the only system geared to the life of a rational being.”

In Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, which Ayn Rand called “a nonfiction footnote to Atlas Shrugged,” she and others explain the social system that she held has “never been properly understood and defended—and whose very existence has been denied.” That system is laissez-faire capitalism: a social system in which the government is exclusively devoted to the protection of individual rights, including property rights, and therefore in which there exists absolutely no government intervention in the economy.

Capitalism is not a treatise on the economics of capitalism, but a collection of essays on the philosophy of capitalism: the basic truths and principles that make capitalism the only moral and practical social system—the only system consistent with man’s nature and the requirements of his life—the only one that enables each individual to reach his full, glorious potential.

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"Progressivism’s battle cry is: “Mulligan!” It demands the ultimate entitlement — emancipation from the ruinous results of all prior claims of entitlement."

-George Will

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Consider nature. Not the placid nature that Constable painted, but nature as Tennyson saw it, "red in tooth and claw." To glimpse a state of nature as Hobbes imagined it, where human life is "nasty, brutish and short," visit the Whole Foods store on River Road in Bethesda, Md. There... you will see proof of this social equation: Four Priuses plus three parking spaces equal angry anarchy.

-George Will

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But the (Republican) nominee may emerge much diminished by involvement in a process cluttered with careless, delusional, egomaniacal, spotlight-chasing candidates to whom the sensible American majority would never entrust a lemonade stand, much less nuclear weapons.

-George Will, on Huckabee, Romney and Gingrich, et. al.

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Money is time made tangible -- the time invested in the earning of it.

-George Will

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Increasingly, the income tax is codified envy. A VAT is the political class' recourse when the resources of the minority that is targeted by the envious are insufficient to finance ravenous government.

Because a VAT would shred Barack Obama's promise not to increase any tax on households with incomes less than $250,000, he must hope the deficit reduction commission he created will provide cover for his apostasy.

-George Will