The government has embraced an arrogant ideology. They claim to know the key to prosperity. It’s analogous to communism. They thought the same thing. The clever ones – themselves – would run everything. That’s the analogy. The key to prosperity is to let things run themselves. We’ll liberalize everything, let everyone look after himself, let business, not the state, run the economy. The state should have no views, no policies of its own. Just open it all up, step back, let it go and you’ll see how well everything will work if we just leave things alone.

Vaclav Havel

(Link)

Unfortunately, that will not end the matter.
Wherever some people have failed, others think "Maybe WE can succeed! Maybe WE are special enough to make it work!!!"
Or people imagine that new technology gives their socialist fantasies an opening. When the Internet first appeared, some anarchists said things like, "Information wants to be free! This changes EVERYTHING!!!"
The Utopian complex (I am special enough to design a perfect society!) is a deep-seated one, and there don't seem to be any pills to cure it.

Nuke Gray - Check.

Good news for backstabbers- Labor's Gillard has been able to stitch together a coalition of Labor and Independents, giving her 76, or 77, seats out of 150. gillard is a ginger who was born in Wales. Thanks, Britain! We won't forget!!! Expect a drubbing at any sporting contest!
On Topic, this coalition will need to make a third way, we are told. I wonder how long that will last?

Utopians are a bit like spectators at a cricket match who insist on picking up a ball that is still in play.

They don't comprehend that it was hit out there deliberately, and people want to see what will happen if the rules of the game are allowed to play out without interference.

Indeed it's worse - whenever you set something loose from state control, authoritarians make it there business to go about gathering it all up again. You set one thing free, they go out and gather it, and five formerly free others back into the fold.

This is a losing battle I'm afraid.

Western countries have state funded universities dominated by 'liberal', left wing staff which churn out ever more graduates in subjects like politics, economics and sociology, as well as new fangled degrees like environmental studies.

As long as this situation persists there will never be a shortage of ideologically driven authoritarians keen to tell everone else how to think and behave from their jobs in all parts of government and administration, both national and local.

That may be true, Pete, but it's worth remembering that the vast majority of the people who study those disciplines aren't particularly bright. Not scholastically, certainly not in the common sense department, nor even rat-cunning intelligence that's a prerequisite for the political arena.

I know this from experience, as I hold one of those degrees myself, and remember my, for the most part, rather dim-witted alumni well. I'm sure most of them are desk-driving bureaucrats these days. They're a symptom, not the disease.

Yeah, but it's the symptoms that kill you.

It is an ancient belief, truly prehistoric, that nothing happens by itself, but all things are directed by gods or spirits or some other variation of supernatural forces.

Indeed, when governments began to be built from the previous clan groupings, leaders quickly claimed a direct connection with the controlling spirits, or even to be one of those divine entities themselves.

In the modern, more secular world, communing with the spirits is viewed with some suspicion, although many powerful people still claim a connection, and has been replaced with the myth of "scientific planning".

Just as any number of quacks and snake oil salesmen in the 1800's claimed that some secret formula only they knew could cure all ills, or that the latest scientific phenomenon was the basis for a new miracle cure, such as electricity or magnetism, both of which spawned numerous "miracle machines" which were claimed to cure all one's diseases, so too did the emergence of industrial and technological innovation fuel the claim that now, at last, the "scientific managers" could plan our entire economic life, eliminating all those troublesome ups and downs that plagued society.

The 20th century was a worldwide experimental laboratory for these assertions of scientific infallibility.

In the movie Apocalypto, the priest and his acolytes extract the beating hearts and chop off the heads of an endless line of captives, all in the name of appeasing the spirits who control the world, and bring the light of the sun to the earth. When an eclipse occurs, the priest joyfully reassures the crowd that it is the hearts he has cut out that caused the light to reappear.

Well, there have been innumerable eclipses in human history, both literal and figuative, and for more than a century, the priests of the modern sacrificial ideology have been cutting the hearts and souls out of countless victims, each time promising that, soon, very soon, the voracious appetite of economic necessity would be satisfied, and an unending light would appear to warm the world.

The new priesthood cannot accept the idea that things should be left alone. If that were true, what need of priests?

The Third Way was Il Duce's term for his racket - a term that Blair borrowed utterly oblivious to any irony.

Show a junkie a dead junkie and he just says "He died because he was stupid. that won't happen to me because I'm not." Show a socialist politician a failed socialist state and you get much the same response.

My favourite quote from Klaus is simply "The Third Way is the fastest way to the Third World".