ABSTRACT
Pooh is the almost perfect symbol of what might be called the decent left: furry, attractive, and rather simpleminded about honey. Jews, Christians, and Communists see history as a one-way street with a triumphal arch somewhere down the road: as we approach the moment of triumph things get worse all the time, until the end of history and the beginning of the new heaven and the new earth. The fact that revolutionaries are heroes enables them to justify the enormous amount of human misery which they cause, and the fact that bankers are not heroes prevents them from justifying even the inconspicuous but possibly quite large amounts of human betterment which they foster. The great political virtue of the market mechanism that it makes political decisions virtually unnecessary and relies on the cumulative impact of the small decisions of little people, which are much less likely to be in error than the large decisions of the great.
