School for Scolds

Another great column from Thomas Sowell. Of course, when does he write one that isn't?

I suspect that even most conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the liberals’ imagination rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck with.
 
...

Whether in housing, education, or innumerable other aspects of life, the key to busybody politics, and its endlessly imposed “solutions,” is that third parties pay no price for being wrong. This not only presents opportunities for the busybodies to engage in moral preening but also to flatter themselves that they know better what is good for other people than these other people know for themselves.

Right now, there are people inside and outside government who are proposing new restrictions on how you may or may not visit the national parks that your taxes support. Among their proposals is doing away with trash cans in these parks, so that visitors have to take their trash out with them. Just how they would enforce this, when millions of people visit places like Yosemite or Yellowstone, is something the busybodies need not bother to think through — much less pay the price when trash simply accumulates in these parks after trash cans are removed.

Obamacare is perhaps the ultimate in busybody politics. People who have never even run a drugstore, much less a hospital, blithely prescribe what must be done by the entire medical system, from doctors to hospitals to producers of pharmaceutical drugs to health-insurance companies.

The soft bigotry of low expectations...

... are on display in this Michael Kinsley endorsement of Barack Obama...

President Barack Obama navigated us through the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression in a way that (in my opinion) deserves a B+. He didn’t get us into any wars, and there were no major terrorist episodes on his watch. That, to me, seems like a pretty good record.

That B+ is a little ... generous, I think.

And not much else there to really pump up the crowd, is there?

"The Marriage Problem That Comes Every Four Years"

This passage is something that would seem ham-handed in a novel about modern liberals...

As Isaac Pollak, an ardent Republican, kissed his wife goodbye before heading out on a business trip to Asia several years ago, he handed her his absentee ballot for the coming presidential election and asked her to mail it.

Bonnie Pollak, a Democrat, weighed her options. Should she be loyal to her spouse, respect his legal right and mail the ballot? Or remain faithful to her deeply held beliefs and suppress his vote?

"It was a real dilemma," says Ms. Pollak, 58 years old, a student in a doctoral program in social welfare who lives in Manhattan. "I decided to do the right thing."

Ms. Pollak threw the ballot away.

The one trope missing is that they do actually share the same last name. Otherwise...
 

I'm actually not certain whether I'm more amused or irritated.  But, in addition to illustrating the little liberal tropes (Ms. vs. Mrs., the advanced degree in a questionable soft subject), it illustrates one of the big ones - the conflation of public policy with private virtue.  She is so self-righteous in her public policy beliefs, that she believes the virtuous course of action is to betray her spouse in order to prevent one vote for Republicans,  a vote which would have had no impact on any race.

And that's just one event, one action by one person, so you can't blame everyone who shares her party and policy positions.  But it's symbolic of an attitude that I see expressed repeatedly.

Can liberals cure stupidity?

Over at Salon, Thomas Schaller wonders, Can liberals cure stupidity?

a confused public makes life difficult for liberal policymakers. The public grossly misunderstands who owns how much in America and who gets what from the U.S. government in ways that make liberal policy prescriptions harder to sell. Americans drastically underestimate wealth inequality in the country, undermining the case for raising higher-bracket income, inheritance or capital gains tax rates.

...

Such findings explain the paradoxical public preference for shrinking government spending even though, according to a YouGov/Economist survey last year, a majority of Americans only advocated less spending for one of 14 items polled — that dastardly 1-percenter: foreign aid.

...

to President Obama’s great chagrin and partially resulting from his own communication failures, Americans remain very confused about the provisions of the Affordable Care Act: what it does and doesn’t do, when certain provisions kick in, what the law will cost, and so on. Again, it’s hard to square the circle of a public evenly divided on the legislation overall despite the fact a plurality if not majority of polled respondents support every major provision of ACA except the very unpopular individual mandate.

Can liberals cure stupidity? Not until they can stop producing fantasyland analyses like this one and recognize that some options are mutually exclusive. The idea that because, for example, people like many of the individual components of Obamacare, they should like the whole thing, and it must be a communications failure that they don't is delusional. It assumes that you can have all of the good things you want at no cost and with no trade-offs, and that there won't be any negative repercussions as a result. The world doesn't work that way.  Most people recognize that.

Consider transportation. You can ask people if they want a stylish new car. You can ask if they want good gas mileage, lots of seating and cargo space, good performance on the highway, strong and safe construction, and a low price. Guess what - the answer to all of those will be "yes" from a strong majority. But they can't have them, because some of those things are mutually exclusive. The same thing is true of the health care bill. 

In the real world, people recognize that those trade-offs exist. In the cocoon of progressive fantasyland, it's just a communication problem.

The pro-government mindset

Perfectly illustrated in a facebook discussion:

I'm happy to pay taxes so that my fellow citizens who are "non-earners" can enjoy good health and food on their table. Does that make me a better human being than somebody who couldn't give a s***? Why yes, yes, I think it does.

(For the record, it's my position that provides the negative half of this comparison, though I wouldn't have expressed it [and didn't] in exactly those terms...)

I've said for years and years and years (and I'm not the only one) that "conservatives think liberals are wrong, and liberals think conservatives are bad." Yup...

Busting the budget myths

Robert Samuelson is right about some of this:

The conservatives’ fiction is: We can reduce deficits and cut taxes by eliminating “wasteful spending.”

The liberals’ fiction is: We can subdue deficits and raise social spending by taxing “the rich” and shrinking the bloated Pentagon.

You will notice one similarity. Both suggest that reducing deficits involves little real pain. No one, after all, favors “wasteful spending.” Similarly, taxing “the rich” doesn’t threaten most people who aren’t rich. Liberals and conservatives alike can reconcile all good things: fiscal rectitude (for both), tax cuts (for conservatives) and high social spending (for liberals). I wish it were so.

It isn’t.

I've said some of this before...

There are trade-offs that have to be made at the national level, too. If we want a cradle-to-grave welfare system, guess what? It has to be paid for. And there's not enough money in the pockets of the "rich" to pay for it all. So poll results like the above CNN poll are not useful. They're not helpful. They offer a bunch of a la carte options that people can't actually simultaneously get. They present "or" choices as "ands." You can have a cradle-to-grave welfare state which provides all things for all people OR you can have low middle class tax rates and economic freedom. One or the other. Not both. The math doesn't work.

That all remains true.

And the second of his fictions, the liberals' fiction, appear to me to be dead-on accurate. As near as I can tell, the left in this country has no other argument, no other position than raising taxes on "the rich" and the only cutting they are willing to contemplate is the military budget.

But I don't think that the conservatives' fiction is accurate. At least, it's not accurate in the way those terms are usually used. Do conservatives really believe that you can reduce the deficits simply by cutting "wasteful" spending?

I don't.

At least, not in the way that the term "wasteful" spending is usually used. "Wasteful," in common political parlance, refers to the anecdotal $500 hammers, the "waste and abuse" of the Medicare system, spending that is allocated for useful purpose and then gets lost or spent badly. There is, I suspect, far too much of the taxpayers' money that's squandered in that way, but it's unlikely to be enough to close the current deficits.

And that isn't the problem that most conservatives have with Government spending. The problem is not the money that the Government is "wastefully" spending on things that it should be doing. The problem is all of the money spent, "wastefully" or efficiently, on things that the Government shouldn't be doing at all. I don't want an "efficient" Federal Department of Education - I want the Federal Government out of the Education business entirely. I don't want to crack down on "fraud and abuse" in Federally guaranteed student loan programs - I want the Government out of the student loan business entirely. I don't want to crack down on "fraud and abuse" in Federally guaranteed mortgage programs - I want the Government out of the mortgage business entirely. I don't want to crack down on "fraud and abuse" in Federal health care programs - I want the Government out of the health care business entirely.

You see, the biggest waste of taxpayer dollars doesn't result from the Federal Government "wasting" money on things that it should be doing. It comes from the Federal Government spending money on things that it should not be doing. Spending money on things that not only don't benefit the private sector, and the general welfare, but actively impede and obstruct it.

We, as a nation, would be a lot better off if all politicians would be bound by the Hippocratic oath - "first, do no harm..."

Quote

As with so many things I think, and say, C.S. Lewis said it first and better...

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

- C. S. Lewis in The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment, Res Judicatae (June 1953)

Making Ignorance Chic

So sometimes, someone links a Maureen Dowd column and I read it. Someone did that today on facebook, referring to this in glowing terms. So I clicked. And it demands a response. Which I generally refrain from doing on facebook, but did today anyway. Please, do NOT try this at home. Reading a Dowd column almost inevitably kills brain cells, and frankly, it hurts, so don't do it. I did it so that you don't have to.

Making Ignorance Chic

...unlike Paris Hilton and her ilk, the Dumb Blonde of ’50s cinema [Marilyn Monroe] had a firm grasp on one thing: It was cool to be smart. She aspired to read good books and be friends with intellectuals, even going so far as to marry one. But now another famous beauty with glowing skin and a powerful current, Sarah Palin, has made ignorance fashionable.

What a load of hogwash. Take a whole lot of individual people with whom you disagree, find one misspoken phrase from a couple, misrepresent things that a couple of others have said or done (does Marueen even understand that the phrase "separation of church and state" is not in the first amendment? Christine O'Donnell does.), take a sardonic spoonerism that you've just missed, and accuse them of making ignorance chic.

What if someone had said that he'd campaigned 57 states and only had one more to go? Said "How's it going, Sunshine?" while campaigning in Sunrise, FL? Said that he sees many of America's "fallen heroes" in the audience? Claimed that 12 dead were 10,000? Is that person making ignorance chic? No, you ignore it, because Barack Obama's a Democrat.

You may not agree with Sarah Palin, but that doesn't make her ignorant, and it doesn't make those who agree with her ignorant. It is one of the least attractive memes of those on the left that those on the right are stupid. It's not true, it's unpleasant and it's unattractive. (Like pretty much everything Maureen Dowd writes.) It goes a long way to provoking the kind of bitter partisanship that you claim to dislike, because it creates an attitude and expectation that you never have to listen to anything that anyone on the right has to say. You just brush it off, because they're lesser beings, stupid, racist, homophobic, "bitter, cling(y), scared" and so you don't have to deal with anything they say. (Yes, I've noted this before.) You can ignore their arguments, because what could they be worth, anyway? You don't need to debate or discuss - you can just belittle. (Like pretty much everything Maureen Dowd writes.)

It's just like all of the leftists and Democrats and "journalists" (I know, that's redundant) laughing at Sarah Palin on Tuesday for her comment at a Tea Party rally on Monday that it was too early to "party like it's 1773." "She's so smart" said one. "Ummm..." said another. "WTF happened in 1773?" asked a third?

Umm...The Boston Tea Party.


(Skip the first link - it goes to the Dowd column at the Times and, as I said, it's not worth the time. The other two links are fine, and you should click them...)

Moral Myopia at Ground Zero - Krauthammer

Moral Myopia at Ground Zero

It’s hard to be an Obama sycophant these days. Your hero delivers a Ramadan speech roundly supporting the building of a mosque and Islamic center at Ground Zero in New York. Your heart swells and you’re moved to declare this President Obama’s finest hour, his act of greatest courage.

Alas, the next day, at a remove of 800 miles, Obama explains that he was only talking about the legality of the thing and not the wisdom — upon which he does not make, and will not make, any judgment.

You’re left looking like a fool because now Obama has said exactly nothing: No one disputes the right to build; the whole debate is about the propriety, the decency of doing so.

...

At least Richard Cohen of the Washington Post tries to grapple with the issue of sanctity and sensitivity. The results, however, are not pretty. He concedes that putting up a Japanese cultural center at Pearl Harbor would be offensive, but then dismisses the analogy to Ground Zero because 9/11 was merely “a rogue act, committed by 20 or so crazed samurai.”

Obtuseness of this magnitude can only be deliberate. These weren’t crazies; they were methodical, focused, steel-nerved operatives. Nor were they freelance rogues. They were the leading, and most successful, edge of a worldwide movement of radical Islamists with cells in every continent, with worldwide financial and theological support, with a massive media and propaganda arm, and with an archipelago of local sympathizers, as in northwestern Pakistan, who protect and guard them.

It's a good piece, as is usually the case for Krauthammer pieces, but there's a sub-head to the title that caught my eye:

Supporters of the mosque fail to see its true significance.

That statement is false.  But to see it, we have to divide people not into two groups, but three.  It's easy to talk about there being "supporters" and "opponents" but that's too simplistic.  There are supporters, and that group consists of the people trying to build the mosque (community center, learning annex, whatever else they're calling it today) and their supporters, many, if not most, of whom are overseas in the "Muslim street."  There are definitely opponents, who feel that the site is inappropriate and insensitive to the feelings of Americans who lost loved ones (and most other Americans as well).  I think it's fair to say that most of the people in both of those groups see and understand the "true significance."  

But there's a third group, and that's the group that does doggedly and determinedly "fail to see its true significance."  Those are the American liberals, who cannot be truly said to be supporters of the mosque, because they really don't care whether it's there or not.  (Many of them would tend, as a default position, to be against places of worship rather than for them, too.)  No, they "support" it only because the opponents oppose it.  They aren't supporters, they're "opponent-opponents."

They aren't in favor of the mosque, they're in favor of calling their more conservative American brethren "bigots," because that makes them feel morally superior.  It gives them an opportunity to exercise their dudgeon, flaunt their moral superiority and cast the same aspersions at conservatives that they always cast - that the conservatives are intolerant, closed-minded, bigoted racists.  They don't care that the true supporters are calling it Cordoba house, after the site in Spain that represented the high point of the Muslim penetration of Europe, that they planned to open it on September 11, 2011, that every Islamist in every corner of the earth would look at it as marking an important Muslim victory.  No, the "nuanced" thinkers of the American left, those who can find racist code words in a discussion of whether "taxes" are too high, are perfectly happy with blatant anti-American, anti-freedom symbolism as long as they can maintain a fig leaf of neutrality and beat on conservatives as bigots.