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Strauss-Kahn, Exemplar of Socialism
The libertarian critique of socialism, or “social democracy,” has usually gone something like this:

The socialist program demands a planned economy. A planned economy can result only from plans. Plans must be made by a group of experts who are not subject to the vagaries of the electoral process. To form and implement their plans, the planner-kings must know everything crucial to the economy. They must know everything significant to their own plans, and be able to predict everything significant that may result from them.

But that is impossible.

This being true, the people who become planners will be those who are either stupid enough to believe that Plans can succeed or cynical enough to care only about the personal power that can be acquired by Planning.

The libertarian critique has a logic that no socialist program ever possessed.

Now we witness the reductio ad absurdum of the socialist idea: Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund, chief honcho of the French Socialist Party, and prospective president of France, who was arrested Saturday on charges of trying to force a maid in his $3,000 a night hotel suite to have sex with him.

Suppose that the charges turn out not to be true. Suppose that Strauss-Kahn’s nickname, “the great seducer,” means nothing. Suppose that consensual sex is nobody’s business but one’s own. Suppose all these things — the last of which is certainly true. The $3,000 a night hotel remains a problem....