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Because they're not rich enough to (1) afford ubiquitous personal car transportation, (2) isolate themselves from the effects of luxury beliefs like "we should prioritize the feelings and welfare of criminals over having orderly public places"
Right, rich enough to afford personal cars for most people, and luxury beliefs allying the guilty-feeling, effeminized elites and the underclasses.
This makes a lot of sense, but I know a number of residents of SF, Oakland and other places like that, who aren't in any way rich enough to avoid the effects of the luxury beliefs, and they still largely support the policies that led to them. I mean, they're certainly not happy about people pooping on the streets or open drug markets, not to mention unending car breakins and other criminality, but somehow they never make the conclusion the policies they support are responsible for it. They just think it's "wrong Socialism" and as soon as they figure out how to make "true Socialism, that has never been tried" - which is right around the corner, we only need to tweak a couple of things and spend a couple of billions more - and it all will be fixed.
I guess my question is where do these magical beliefs come from? They seem to be ubiquitous among Reddit users but also white collar progressives in general. I'd like to blame midwit tier intelligence, but I don't think that's it. In fact, I would guess that intelligence and socialist beliefs are positively correlated.
Why is socialist worldview so appealing, even when (or especially when) it fails time and time again? And why is the more practical worldview (that people respond to incentives) so looked down upon?
Possibly because socialism is extremely common and extremely successful on the very small scale. As a general rule, this is how families work, and sometimes extremely tight-knit groups with very high in-group loyalty, like cults. The problem is that it doesn't scale up, and this is a massive problem when you're talking about organizing a society.
The insight of incentives, free markets, etc. is that you can have net-positive interactions without the reinforcement of high in-group loyalty to control defection. The "problem" is that this type of interaction doesn't scale down--it would be a bit ridiculous to run a family on a barter system: infants don't have anything of value to trade for food and diapers beyond weaponized cuteness. This is an illusory problem, though, when you're applying a system to the matching scale of its competence--socialism for family structures, markets for societies.
Yes, and western culture seems to be trying to force the exact opposite on people at the moment: socialism at the society level and individualism at the family level.
This is wicked and can only end badly.
This is a great point. Also love the phrasing. Bravo.
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