Social Planners Just a Marxist Front

Vincent J. Curtis

24 Aug 20

Today the Spectator ran a front-page above the fold opinion piece ostensibly by reporter Steven Buist.  Buist is a good enough reporter that he faithfully reported the opinion of the group he was reporting on, the Social Planning and Research Council.  The SPRC released a report that allegedly showed a statistical correlation between poverty and likelihood of getting infected by COVID-19.  (Mysteriously, the several homeless camps in Hamilton are not breeding grounds for COVID, so you can take the statistical study for what its worth.)  As the saying goes, if you torture the numbers enough, they'll confess to anything.  The study concluded that if you're less likely to be infected,, it's because you're white and well off, whereas those more likely to get infected are poor and less likely to be white.

The Social Planning and Research Council must be kicking off a new fundraising campaign.  That’s my explanation for the tendentious conclusion offered in Steve Buist’s column of August 24.  The conclusions were summarized as: that if you’re wealthy, you’re white and healthy, while if you’re poor, you’re less likely to be white and more likely to get sick with COVID-19.

What could be more affirmative of Marxist ideology than that?  Division by race and class correlated with infection.  Since the virus doesn’t know of those divisions, the adverse correlation between health and wealth and race must in some insidious way be caused by those divisions, right?

As few understand, statistics do not prove a cause-effect relationship.  But the unscrupulous know that statistics can be highly suggestive, and use that suggestiveness unscrupulously for political ends.  The end in this case is to affirm Marxist grievances, to imply that the white are wealthy, unfairly privileged, and careless of the fate of the poor underclass.  If you want to know what decades of insinuating of that poison results in, have a look at Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, and now Kenosha, Wisconsin.  All bastions of liberalism.

The very idea of “social planning” is anachronistic.  Economic planners lack sufficient data to run an economy, and that’s why socialism results in economic catastrophe.  Social planning is no different, to say nothing of the arrogance implicit in superiors planning for you, without your consent.

Time to extinguish the SPRC parasite.

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