Why she may have done more for libertarianism than even Milton Friedman: Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy.
8 thoughts on “J. K. Rowling”
Comments are closed.
Why she may have done more for libertarianism than even Milton Friedman: Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy.
Comments are closed.
The 14 years since that piece appeared have not been especially good for libertarianism. I don’t think Rowling has been influential in that regard.
Libertarianism was hijacked by the left. Most of the libertarians I know moved on long ago.
But it is amusing that Rowling makes the government an enemy in her books, but donates money to the Labour party, which wants ever-larger and ever-more-bureaucratic government in the UK.
There’s something about Lefty authors that keep producing anti-lefty stuff, like Joss Whedon and Firefly, or John Scalzi and Old Man’s war.
How does the old quote go? “Sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
To her, the government is bad, but the government run university is virtuous. Where you find contradictions, re-evaluate your assumptions.
Actually, if you look at her moral hierarchy, the University, and its Administrator, is the peak of morality. It is the inability of government to match that peak through agreeing with it, that makes it bad. Thus, Rowling cottoned to the continuing idea from the beginnings of academia’s creation of progressivism, that academia is the right and proper guide for society, and government is bad when it rejects academia.
Its a nice little dream, that has nothing to do with reality, other than aggrandize academic hierarchies, but it has enormous power in people’s minds, …especially after they have graduated from college.
They don’t dislike the bureaucracy — they just want to be one of the favored that get special treatment from petty officialdom
To that particular flavor of leftist, winning concessions from the bureaucracy is the only kind of heroism permissible — so of course there needs to be the bureaucracy, peopled by earnest meddlers who grind down on those who are unable to fight back, taking out on them their frustrations at not being able to grind down the ones who can and do.
Obviously, those who can win concessions from the bureaucracy are the <sneer quotes> meritocracy, </sneer quotes> the people naturally suited to rule.