Somebody once said that Socialism is the most successful movement of the last 40 years.  Or maybe it was the last 3000 years.  No matter.   This is the sort of statement that Conservatives are likely to agree with regardless of its veracity, since the constantly encroaching government is their great bugbear.   For the most part, small-government conservatives have a point and can be forgiven the occasional over-reach. After all, if you have been a nail your whole life, everything starts to look like a hammer.

I tend to agree with that statement: Socialism has been undeniably insidious. However, I suspect that Jonah Goldberg could put the lie to it with his brand of Big Picture conservatism.   He’ll argue that we are freer now than ever, for instance, by bringing up how technology enables us to go anywhere we want, and do things we never could do before.   Even if they disagree with him, his argument forces people to realize is that you can’t measure freedom by counting up the infringements on freedom, you must also count the advances.

And so it goes with the issue of Socialism. It may in fact be the most successful movement in history, but maybe the second biggest is liberty?

I’ll leave that for another day, because I am more curious as to what the least successful movement has been.   The first one that comes to mind is ‘Race Relations’.    Today, the old-school Black Leaders have jumped-the-shark and are reduced to asking for Reparations, and the would-be new ‘leaders’ have no followers.    I don’t mean to suggest that the situation in this country is the worst it has ever been, just that the efforts of those people who have appointed themselves towards fixing ‘the race problem’ have been disastrous.

Oh well, I forgot my point.  In the mean time its worthwhile to note that at both the Failed and the Successful ends of the ‘movement’ spectrum there are non-movement that hedged the outcomes.   This is no great discovery and I certainly don’t think this to be a startling paradox.