Great essay on why progressivism / socialism never works. It sounds good and a lot of people push a narrative instead of facts but... From the Mises Institute:
How Countries Fall into the Welfare Trap
People like the welfare state because they suppose that it comes at no costs and provides many benefits. If people knew how much the present consumption of social benefits entails less prosperity in the future, the population would have a critical attitude towards the welfare state and politicians would have a harder time selling their fraud. Just as a society that ranks security over liberty loses both, a society that attributes a higher value to social benefits than to wealth creation ends up with neither wealth nor benefits.
A short-term perspective is intrinsic to modern democracy. It is run not by the people but by political parties. Such a political system promotes the redistribution of the cake and neglects that the goods must be produced before they can be consumed. Without production, however, there can be no distribution. The illusion is widespread and propagated by the political machinery that production is independent of its distribution so that one could redistribute without weakening production. Yet how the product is distributed affects its future making.
A long read but a very very good one. This is what I consider to be the key difference between the liberal and the conservative thought process - the liberal mind seeks out a narrative, a story. Many of the failed liberal policies started because they sounded good without people looking at the consequences. In philosophy, this is called rhetoric. The conservative mind looks for numbers and analysis. This sounds good but what if? This is dialectic - not to be confused with Karl Marx's appropriation of this word for his own fuzzy-headed scribblings.
Interesting that the Greek Philosophers had this all figured out in 700AD
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