"This Should Work": The Biggest Liberal Canard

In matters of pragmatism, the two issues that divide conservatives and liberals come down to these issues:

Conservatives work with what works.

Liberals complain and carp about what should work.

Like adolescents still petulant and fussy that their idealized dreams have not come true, many complain: "Life is not fair, but it should be."

I was struck when one instructor at Cal State Los Angeles interrupted me, chiming in with her smug smile, "Why can't it be fair?"

Fairness is a doctrine which has caused more harm than good, for if a state, or any agency, insists on imposing its concept of "fairness", they will of necessity clash with the individual notions of everyone else. Simply put, what is fair to me will not necessarily be fair to you or to anyone else.

"This should work," is the common mindset of liberals.

What causes liberals to fall for this fatuous fallacy?

Part of this stems from the fatal conceit that ensnares liberals.

"The fatal conceit," coined by economist Friedrich Hayek, describes the myopic arrogance of intellectuals who all too readily trust to their limited intellect not just to understand complex phenomena in human life, but arrogate to themselves the mystical ability to tinker with the established, extended order to make it "better", or "more fair."

Because they possess the capacity to reason and to analyze the world, they therefore presume to improve upon what took many years, if not centuries, of human tradition and trial and error to develop.

At the heart of "the fatal conceit" is that an intelligent mind can coordinate activities in a polity or an economy, where there is such an array of diversity and risk, that no mind, no matter how informed or invested, can begin to account for the needs and wants of a society's individual inhabitants.

"This should work," according to liberals, because in their mind they have planned out what they would do, what we be needed, and how every need will be defined and implemented. Besides the immoral implication of dictating to an extensive community its individual needs, there is the practical impossibility of such a venture, which has given birth to wasteful socialist experiments and Communist tyrannies through modern history.

"This should work" is a mindset, a frame of mind which simply does not work.