Is "Tiger By The Tail" just space opera or does it address any current issues?
"The Imperial magnates would be terrified at the prospect of having their comfortable lives interrupted by heavy demands... None but a few eccentrics would point out that the dismemberment of the Empire had commenced and the Long Night was ineluctably on its way." (p. 255)
Does that sound like now? Instead of "Empire," read: current global industrial economy. However, more than a few eccentrics are pointing it out...
Will we get through our Chaos?
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I emphatically disagree with the "solutions" offered by those "eccentrics" for our current problems if what they advocate will not WORK. I mean those who want socialism, ever bigger gov't, destroying free enterprise economics, ideas about limiting the state, etc.
I don't know if our civilization will get thru this Time of Chaos, but I also believe that is at least possible. And that will largely happen thru limiting the state, free enterprise economics, and the right use of science and its tools.
Ad astra and Happy New Year! Sean
Sean,
Only one approach to any and every problem begins to sound doctrinaire which is the last thing you would want to be.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
As you know, I distrust concentrating too much power in the state, any state, because SO OFTEN that has led to baleful consequences. And I pair socialism with the all mighty state because it's impossible to have socialism without using the coercive powers of the state. To say nothing of how socialism quite simply fails to deliver what it promises (the chaos in Venezuela is the latest example of that!).
In fact, I saw warnings at the Sarasota Airport in Florida warning travelers to and from that country of the dangers of going there by air flight.
Whereas, by contrast, the limited state (under whatever form) and free enterprise has WORKED every time it's been honestly tried. And Robert Zubrin's discussion in his book THE CASE FOR SPACE of how iron sulfites has done more to sop up excess carbon dioxide than all the demonstrations, high taxes, and useless bureaucratic regulation advocated by the left, is a good example of the EFFECTIVE use of science, with no need for big gov't to gum things up.
It's right to decry taking a too doctrinaire approach to our problems. But it's also right to remind leftists that they might be wrong in what they advocate.
Ad astra and Happy New Year! Sean
Sean: markets are like fire, a good servant but a bad master.
In particular, they're inherently disruptive and revolutionary -- note how old-fashioned the East Bloc countries looked in 1991, with their hosts of cloth-capped proletarians, belching smokestacks, countries where the government was genuinely concerned with the influence of novelists and so forth -- like a snapshot from the 1950's, in many ways, preserved in amber.
To operate well markets require a set of cultural/political underpinnings which, unchecked, they tend to undermine.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Again, I don't disagree with you. For free enterprise economics and the limited state to work requires the right "...set of cultural/political underpinnings." And the advocates of these ideas in turn need to remember that man does not live by bread alone.
That last sentence was inspired by an article I read about the recently deceased writer Gertrude Himmelfarb, a historian who focused on Victorian writers such as Lord Acton, Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, etc. Acton believed the limited, classically "liberal" state needed belief in something beyond itself to preserve what was good in that kind of state and free enterprise economics.
Ad astra and Happy New Year! Sean
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