Ideas move the world. Want a better world, spread good ideas as widely as possible.
If you can expose enough people to the right ideas, everything will work out for the best, with an ever-wider vista of freedom and achievement as the inevitable consequence. Right?
Well … not quite. Ideas and values don’t have any kind of independent existence. Individuals must accept and apply them. Hillary Clinton once admitted to being inspired by Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s mammoth novel celebrating freedom and entrepreneurship and attacking socialism. Yet Hillary still ended up trying to ram socialist health care down our throats. And she ain’t done yet.
Or take Vladimir Putin, the repressive semi-post-Communist Russian leader whose government just invaded the former satellite country of Georgia. The autocratic Putin is no Stalin, but he’s no Jefferson either … even if he did attend a Cato seminar on the values of a free society.
It’s true! I recently stumbled across a 2004 issue of Cato Policy Report, published by the libertarian Cato Institute. Ed Crane, Cato’s president, reported that during a long meeting with Putin, Crane and others discussed the benefits of a free press and concerns that the Russian government was repressing the media. Putin seemed open to a more across-the-board freedom. He even said he wanted to “make Moscow the center of liberal debate in Europe.”
Really? Try a little harder, Vlad.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
4 replies on “Ideas Semi-Move the World”
I of course agree. I would like to know more about Cato and Putin.
One small error. Using normal terminology, Georgia (Gruzia) was
a “republic” in the Soviet Union,
one of the 15 republics (even if it was a marriage of one elephant,
Russia, and 14 mice). Countries like Poland and Czeckoslovakia,
nominally (but not acually) independent, were called “satellites”.
Nils Andersson
I too read Ayn Rand. I remember the theme of the book was that personal selfishness was the ultimate ‘good’ for everyone. Hilary Clinton must have selfishly decided her political power needed to be expanded. The obvious means of getting that power was attempt to push socialized health care down the public’s throat. Wives of presidents get free health care. She bought the ugliest PART of Rand’s theme.
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Great ideas, even if logical and have emperical support will not be accepted unless there is the political benefits to them personally or professionally. For example, there is much documented research, which I can supply if desired, that all the USA K‑12 education must do to improve all student performance is to promote students from grade to grade by achievement proficiency, independent of age and attendance. Ironically, this is what the federal NCLB law mandates, but the state, district, and school educators either do not know how to do this or lack the political guts to implement and evaluate this effectively. Question and challenge: Find one educator to dispute this observation and have them give supporting comments to support their case? Have them contact me or publish these comments, so that the public can critically examine their reasoning.