[The following argumentative answer to what blocks a better future and thus needs to be changed is one that has considerable personal plausibility to me as a 1977 graduate of Harvard University and a 1981 graduate of Harvard Law School. That background conditions me to see the current order of the world as one in which the attitudes of people within my old school and others like it occupy a central position, and a potentially better world as one in which those attitudes have undergone substantial rectification.
At the same time, I strongly believe that the way the world looks to me, though one hopes not altogether detached from reality, captures only a part of reality of what the world is. If Smith-Hume for the 21st century is to be a viable vision, it needs to be one that works for people who see blockages to progress in places other than the ones my personal experiences and my personality incline me to see them. So if you find yourself irritated by the grafs below, fair enough...stay tuned for the next post...]
"First: To encourage econonomc entrepreneurship and accomplishment among more people all across the economic spectrum, a key thing that needs to happen is the blasting out of the antipathy to money-making as a goal that was at the core of Marx and that remains intertwined with the way many left of center people think and feel. Only if deep-seated left ambivalence about economic entrepreneurship can be firmly consigned to the scrapheap of history as decisively as the old, dead vision of a nationalized, post-capitalist economy has already been can we really move forward.
Second: To encourage cultural entrepreneurship and accomplishment among more people, a key thing that needs to happen is the blasting out of a unionist, "it's just a job," clock-oriented mentality. Though that reactionary, resentful state of mind is found among all kinds of people in all kinds of positions, its political home is on the left and its practical base lies in teacher's unions and other groups allied with the left.
Finally: To open up more room for people lower down in the socio-economic spectrum to be social entrepreneurs, it would be a very good thing if the elite in our society turned their moral fervor away from politics toward some other arena. Just as the decline in religous faith among the elite empowered ordinary people, so too with an elite decline in political faith. The heart of elite political fervor lies on the left, and so here as in the other domains it is encrusted left ideology that presents the greatest obstacles to a more open, more entrepreneurial, more successful future."
Stay tuned for an opposing approach...
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