jwhend49

David Boaz has a thoughtful critical essay on Socialism and Social Darwinism at Cato at Liberty.  He references critics of those who, like Richard Hofstadter, use this term in error when they do not have better arguments.

The Encyclopedia Britannica says that social Darwinism is

the theory that persons, groups, and races are subject to the same laws of natural selection as Charles Darwin had perceived in plants and animals in nature. According to the theory, which was popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the weak were diminished and their cultures delimited, while the strong grew in power and in cultural influence over the weak….The poor were the “unfit” and should not be aided; in the struggle for existence, wealth was a sign of success. At the societal level, social Darwinism was used as a philosophical rationalization for imperialist, colonialist, and racist policies, sustaining belief in Anglo-Saxon or Aryan cultural and biological superiority

Quotation of the Day (from Cafe Hayek)

 In commemoration of the 20th anniversary, which is today, of Hayek’s death.  The quotation is from page 133 of Hayek’s last book, his 1988 The Fatal Conceit (original emphasis):

Life exists only so long as it provides for its own continuance.  Whatever men live for, today most live only because of the market order.  We have become civilized by the increase of our numbers just as civilization made that increase possible: we can be few and savage, or many and civilized.  If reduced to its population of ten thousand years ago, mankind could not preserve civilization.  Indeed, even if knowledge already gained were preserved in libraries, men could make little use of it without numbers sufficient to fill the jobs demanded for extensive specialisation and division of labour.

Quotation of the Day…

… is from page 209 of David Friedman’s excellent 1996 book Hidden Order; here, Friedman uses the term “economic imperialism” in its older form, namely, as a term to condemn private investment in ‘developing’ countries by firms and investors from ‘developed’ countries:

People who attack economic imperialism regard themselves as champions of the poor and oppressed.  To the extent that they succeed in preventing foreign investment in poor countries, they are benefitting the capitalists of those countries by holding up their profits and injuring the workers by holding down their wages.