● Thousands of people regularly read our blogs. Yet 99% of them do absolutely nothing to help us.
It seems likely the welfare state has dulled rather than enhanced any innate willingness to help others. I mean “others” in the sense of people one knows about — rather than the supposedly needy as marketed by governments and NGOs.
Similarly, the existence of a bloated ‘university’ sector — producing oceans of verbiage, most of it valueless — has apparently generated a false identification between “academic” and “cushy”. Both these phenomena can be regarded as examples of crowding out.
I have observed that people tend to (like to?) underestimate the work involved in running an organisation that is operating without the approval of the collective. Even if the organisation is too underfinanced to do much more than survive.
One can sympathise with a person’s tendency to glamorise storybook roles (baker, accountant, doctor, etc.), especially if he or she happens to be playing one of them. People like to be identified with what they do; this no doubt generates a desire to believe in an ideology that will reinforce the identification.
In a mediocracy, the bias in favour of socially accredited occupations becomes exaggerated to the point of absurdity, given that many of them have little connection to what people actually want. Doctors deliver the sort of service they, in consultation with the state, see fit to provide; teachers teach what is prescribed by the dominant ideology; executives spend a large proportion of their time attending self-referential meetings and conferences.
Only those who have to run their own business seem to have any appreciation of the realities of genuine individual demand, undistorted by the coercive collectivist economy.