Apologies if you were offended somehow. It just didn’t seem like you were truly absorbing what I’ve said. Multiple times you restated things I myself explicitly mentioned, as if it were refuting something I said. And you do seem to have an averseness to accepting the idea that man is flawed by nature, and I can’t understand that. It seems like a very simple, easily acceptable premise.
But to answer your question, I see that striving for an ideal or a “solution” means you operate under the assumption that perfection is attainable. “Ideal” is literally defined as “a conception of something in its perfection” and “a standard of perfection or excellence”. And in the same way, when you have “solved” something, there is nothing more to do. There is no more improvement that can take place. You have perfected that area which you have attempted to correct.
In contrast, striving for improvement is a much different thing. For one thing, it does not assume that perfection is attainable. That is a very important distinction…because it influences virtually every facet of how you go about attempting to achieving your objective. Second, striving for improvement is a constant process. There is no end goal…the practice is ongoing. When you strive for improvement (and not some “ideal”), you recognize that things will always be able to become better in some way…that there is no such thing as ideal…and that is due to the fact that scarcity exists, and man is fallible.
Leftist ideas do not pass those questions posed by Sowell (Compared to what?, What hard evidence do you have?, At what cost?) because they operate under this notion that heaven can exist on Earth. Again, as Friedman noted, they’ll never say that…but if you follow the logic of their arguments and prescriptions…all the logic of their arguments proceeds as if perfection were attainable. They completely ignore the fact that we live in a world of scarcity, and therefore it is a world of tradeoffs. They completely ignore the law of unintended consequences and they are completely oblivious to Hazlitt’s one lesson.
“The idea to the Left of tolerating any evil—they want to stamp out the last vestige of segregation…really, at what price? At what price?”