Maggie's Farm

It's good to hear Tom Sowell say it: How Smart Are We? Elites may have more brilliance, but they can’t have as much experience as the people whose decisions they preempt.

One quote:

One of the ideas that has proved to be almost impervious to evidence is the idea that wise and far-sighted people need to take control, and plan economic and social policies so that there will be a rational and just order, rather than chaos resulting from things being allowed to take their own course. It sounds so logical and plausible that demanding hard evidence would seem almost like nit-picking.

"Things taking their own course" means, of course, people exercising free choice.

Some of us here have been accused of being elites ourselves. If I am in that category somehow, put me in the subgroup that has no interest in controlling anybody but myself. Just that is difficult enough, and often impossible.

From Applebaum's A government of the people's every wish? which we linked this morning:

Americans -- with their lawsuit culture, their safety obsession and, above all, their addiction to government spending programs -- demand more from their government than just about anybody else in the world. They don't simply want the government to keep the peace and create a level playing field. They want the government to ensure that every accident and every piece of bad luck is prevented, or that they are fully compensated in the event something goes wrong. And if the price of their house drops, they will hold the government responsible for that, too.

VDH nails it, from our link last night to The Psychology of Recession. It is what I am hearing from everybody on Main St. around here. One quote to encourage reading of his post:

Obama, past and present, seems always to talk of how someone else’s money should be spent, dispersed, and redistributed, but never to worry about how it can be made in the first place.

So, fairly or not, when the president talks, business people do not gain confidence that he knows, or cares, much about them or what they do. If he thinks even surgeons are greedy profiteers, who then escapes presidential disdain?

Rainbow ponies do not create jobs or careers. Politicians can create temporary make-work - with our money and our kids' money - but that's all.

At Globe and Mail:

“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb,” Benjamin Franklin reputedly said, “voting on what to have for lunch.”

The article is mostly about Italy, as an example.

Thanks to a reader for pointing out this remarkable piece by Woodrow Wilson, Socialism and Democracy. A brief sample:

In face of such circumstances, must not government lay aside all timid scruple and boldly make itself an agency for social reform as well as for political control?

'Yes,' says the democrat, 'perhaps it must."

Wilson's short essay, in which he claims that democracy and socialism are inseparable, is certainly relevant to Kesler's Friday post, Demonization Does You In.

A discussion of Wilson's progressivism here.

Ed. comment:  Interesting. It is an antique view of the world, indeed. I believe Wilson wrote that blog post essay in the 1880s. As we always ask here, 1. What about freedom? and, 2. Where's the money and wealth gonna come from? I am with CS Lewis, who preferred that people aspire to wealth than to power if they must aspire to worldly goals. Wealth is harmless, and often beneficial. Power is scarey.

Double addendum, Goldberg via Driscoll:

...it is my argument that American liberalism is a totalitarian political religion, but not necessarily an Orwellian one. It is nice, not brutal. Nannying, not bullying. But it is definitely totalitarian–or ‘holistic,’ if you prefer–in that liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say. Sex is political. Food is political. Sports, entertainment, your inner motives and outer appearance, all have political salience for liberal fascists.

If politicians had more common sense than my plumber or Tom Jefferson, it might almost be a debatable argument. One which Aristotle settled long ago, however.

Prelutsky.

Same here, and I am not as old as he is. He is an old guy.

It is happening. A good thing, indeed. Monopolies are bad policy, especially government monopolies. Monopolies do not respond to market demand.

However, I am an extremist. I do not believe in government education in any form. We did better before we had any of that. See John Adams and Abe Lincoln...

As I repeat ad nauseum, education cannot be "delivered." It can only be grabbed by those who wish to grab it. I also believe Harvard or Yale (your choice) diplomas should be an entitlement for all American kids on reaching age 21. Like the Wizard of Oz did.

Let's face it: How many Ivy grads know Fermat's last theorem, today? Or can translate Caesar or Plutarch? The education industry today is a giant rip-off and nothing more than a credential sales scam.

"Cooperation" has been the mantra of the Kindergarten-minded in our midst for years. "Competition" is supposedly male, leads to Capitalism and war and other not-nice things, and is thus evil and a human trait which must be eliminated.

Of course, I have never noticed women to be any less competitive than men. Everybody enjoys a bit of the spice of competition in life, even when you lose.

Competition vs Cooperation a phony duality which, I assume, comes from some wacky ideology. Case in point: The Dark side of Cooperation.

From Washington Reb's excellent, quick run-thru of political science and moral education:

America had the best of all worlds for probably 150 years: the Red Man was a man of honor; the Irishman and the Scot, wearing leather leggin's and fighting the Red Man, produced an entirely new creature. Combine those raw ingredients with the puritan's congregationalism, and you get a human being uniquely suited for republican citizenship. Raise such a man in atmosphere that punishes public cursing and public drunkenness -- a society whose women value the family over the orgasm -- and you have a country ready for business.

You got yourself a pretty safe place for kids to grow up in.

You don't have that now, do you?

Well, then, you might want to give some constructive thought to whether you can get that back, 'cause no one's gonna get it for you, punk'n.

From Reason (h/t Insty): Will Elena Kagan Allow Books to be Banned - Understanding the Supreme Court nominee’s chilling argument in Citizens United.

Each Supreme nomination provides an opportunity for education about the Constitution.

Insty at Pajamas concludes:

Gun ownership by law-abiding citizens is the new normal, and the Second Amendment is now normal constitutional law. It will stay so, as long as enough Americans care to keep it that way.

And from Somin at Volokh: (fixed)

The trade-off between lives and constitutional rights is one better made by the framers and ratifiers of the Constitution than by judges.

Also, meet Otis McDonald, the guy behind the McDonald decision (h/t Moonbattery)

Income mobility in America is remarkably high due to our (still) free market economy. That is a good thing. The permanently poor are as unusual as the permanently rich, from an income standpoint.

People move up and down the income scale.

The study of income mobility in the US is here. (h/t, Tigerhawk's link dump)

"The Liberals, with their emphasis on collectivism and conformity, and their willingness to use compulsion to achieve their ends, are actually suggesting a course of action which thoughtful men have rejected throughout history. The reason man must be treated as an individual is because he has an individual immortal soul. Thus, his freedom comes from God -- as do all of his rights. In the scheme of things, government's only proper role is in the protection of man's God-given freedoms and rights." [All emphases again are -----'s own.]

Answer below the fold -

Who is surprised?

A new study by the National Association of Scholars has found that 70 percent of the summer reading books assigned to incoming college freshmen in the U.S. show a liberal bias and are not academically challenging, setting off a storm of debate in educational circles.

More on Voegli's important new book, Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State, at Powerline. One quote:

Voegeli seems to understand welfare state liberalism like Whitaker Chambers understood Communism, from the inside. Jonah Goldberg has written of him: "Bill Voegeli has become my new James Q. Wilson -- the egghead I always read even if I don't think I'm interested at first."

- Washington Reb is working on getting past a sound-bite conservatism, with Russell Kirk at his side.

- Steyn on "We are the ones we've been waiting for." (I would never wait for myself. In general, I tend to be annoyed with myself.)

Very good brief history of medical insurance at National Affairs: Health Care and the Profit Motive. One quote:

When it comes to health care, liberals and conservatives often seem to be living in two different worlds. To those on the left, America's health-care system is a heartless capitalist jungle: a place where the bottom line is king, and the working poor are exploited. President Obama, for example, has accused insurance companies of holding Americans hostage in exchange for profits, and doctors of cashing in on children's sore throats by needlessly removing their tonsils. The right, meanwhile, sees American health care as an outpost of socialism: The government distorts prices and suppresses innovation, impairing the quality and affordability of care and constraining individual autonomy. Hence Republicans' call for less government involvement in insurance, and their complaints that heavy-handed Medicare rules are the source of our woes.

Simply put, liberals believe that health care is treated as a market commodity today but should not be, and conservatives think that health care is not treated as a market commodity but should be.

1. From Insty,

THIS IS INTERESTING: The Road To Serfdom is currently the #1 book on Amazon.

2. From Vanderleun, The Road to Serfdom as a Comic Book

Fat union guy bussed in to Arkansas to make phone calls, from Powerline's Hey, union man: Another look:

From Am Thinker, How to Fight Back against Public Unions: A Primer. He begins:

We have reached a potential turning point in the relationship of public employee unions and the electorate they ostensibly serve. Over the past year, there has been a steady drumbeat of criticism focused on public unions and the havoc they have wrought on our public finances. Governments -- city, country, state, and federal -- are drowning in red ink Our taxes are flowing to ever-voracious government workers (whose own ranks are growing steadily while the private payrolls shrink); they are better compensated than private workers in comparable positions.

What is to be done?

In my view, public unions should be illegal due to conflict of interest.

Self-identified liberals and Democrats do badly on questions of basic economics.

No kidding. You can't even try to discuss economic issues with them. I call it "Fairy-tale Economics." Exceptions to the rule? Plenty of them, mainly the Wall Streeter limousine Libs who dominate the upper levels of finance in America.

Goldberg: In a welfare state, how much is 'enough'?

A quote:

Governments do not generate wealth; they can merely distribute it. The challenge for both liberals and conservatives is simply to define how much distribution is "enough." What would an acceptable safety net look like? Who should be taken care of by taxpayers and for how long? Paul Ryan offered an answer to that question, and liberals scoffed because they reject the question. There's no such thing as enough. That's what the Greeks thought.

That's what the Greeks thought until Mr. Reality in the form of the Bond Market appeared to them.

There is no such thing as "enough" as long as there is one more vote to be bought.

Conservatives claim that government is incompetent, inefficient, and intrinsically corrupt (eg vote buying), and therefore can be trusted to do very little.

Libs and Lefties seem to believe that government is smarter and possessed of superior motives to those of the private sector.

When governments fail to demonstrate effectiveness (as in the IRS' failure to make money on a Nevada whorehouse, or the oil spill, or managing money, or border control, or Fannie and Freddie, or...), many Conservatives complain that government isn't doing its job with all our dough. Libs and Lefties complain that the failure will damage the notion of big government's omni-competence and virtue and thus their claim to our hard-earned dollars and pennies.

Readers know my view: Much of government is a legal racket, a special interest in itself devoted to its own interests of power and money and ego. Government has limited power against reality, and disproportionately more power over people's lives. Obama can no more control the oil spill than he can legislate the weather or the economy.

I am entirely in agreement with Steyn who we quoted this morning, "Almost every problem we face today arises from the vanity of Big Government."

I do not blame Obama for the oil (or the weather). I never rush to blame anybody for anything. Shit happens. However, government worshippers like Obama cannot say so because it would undermine the vision, which they market, of governmental godlike omnicompetence and virtue leading towards Progress and Worry-Free Life and General Wonderfulness. The Achilles' Heel of taking that position is that you must accept blame for almost anything that goes wrong.

Reality is relentless. Even if you control the media, reality wins in the end.

A good read from David Warren (h/t, Vanderleun). One quote:

To the mainstream media -- to that liberal elite generally -- the question has not been whether we should have vast intrusive bureaucracies, but rather, what their policies should be, and how to pay for them. That is their playing field, on which they locate some "middle ground" or scrimmage line -- itself shifting constantly to the left, toward some vague, Utopian endzone. It comes as an inconceivable shock to them to discover millions of people who are not merely pushing back against this "progress" -- which they could understand -- but want no part of the game.

Their lives are centred on family and church and productive labour, not on politics. They are often poorly informed about things they care little about; poorly researched on current rights and entitlements; real boobs when they stray into debates about such things; and thus, hicks to the politically sophisticated. The latter, in turn, know little enough about family and church and productive labour.

From a review of Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State, by William Voegeli. One quote:

Liberalism's most acute critics such as University of Virginia political scientist James Ceaser emphasize the centrality of crises, real or manufactured, in expanding the size and reach of the liberal state (as in the recent case of the supposedly imminent global warming catastrophe). In Never Enough, Voegeli, a visiting scholar at Claremont McKenna College's Henry Salvatori Center and a contributing editor of this journal, points to a complementary concept: liberalism, he argues, "lacks a limiting principle." This boundlessness, as it might be described, is familiar to Americans across the country who have watched, for instance, secondary school costs and college tuitions grow at roughly twice the rate of inflation for a quarter-century now. This boundlessness generates some of the apprehension that animates the Tea Parties. As a friend asked me rhetorically—referring to the fact that the failing schools in Washington, D.C., spend $28,000 a year per pupil while Harvard tuition costs $34,000 a year—"When will enough be enough?"

In my view, never. It's a vote-buying game built on the childish wish-fulfillment fantasies of voters. Long ago, when Mario Cuomo had a short-lived radio talk show, I called in and asked him what the end point was of Progressivism. The gabby Cuomo became instantly tongue-tied when I asked him about government auto insurance.

Another quote from this excellent review:

"Democracy," said liberalism's pre-eminent founding father Herbert Croly, "must stand or fall on a platform of possible human perfectibility." These were the words of a radical, not a reformer—a man who, like Karl Marx and Auguste Comte, saw himself as leading humanity to a higher and more refined stage of civilization. Croly wanted the collective power of society put "at the service of its ablest members," who would be given the lead roles in the social drama of Progress. Boundlessness is built into the DNA of American liberalism.

Liberalism was to be a new covenant in which the priests of Progress led the people into the promised land of a full blown European-style welfare state. But in the intervening century, two of the key building blocks of liberalism—namely the concept of Progress and the popular appeal of government—have become problematic, the first for liberals themselves and the second for much of the populace.

Well said. Funny how many folks do not wish to be perfected by their betters, and prefer to be left alone. I guess most Americans aren't Euroweenies at heart, and prefer to be citizens, not subjects.

Every murderous totalitarian government of the 20th century began with some insulated group of faux-intellectuals congratulating each other on how smart they are, and fantasizing about how, if they could just install a dictatorship-for-a-day, they could right all the wrongs in the world.

Ed Driscoll, in The New York Times: Forever Trapped in 1917

Ed: Woops. Quote is from Anchoress, via Driscoll. Sorry, Anchoress.

Freedom gets in the way of Progress. We need enlightened dictators, Plato's Philosopher-Kings.

Perfectly fine with me as long as I get to be the Philosopher-King and not you. I am an elite and would make a fine, plump Mandarin - except that I don't like to hold power. Plus I don't believe in the notion of Progress either (except in the most trivial sense), but that's another topic.

Harsanyi discusses in Enlightened tyrants - Is freedom getting in the way of "progress"?

Gremlins - evil gremlins - kept our site down all day today. This is good, from Bergner at Weekly Standard: Europe Is No Model - The genius of American politics.

No regular American would want to be anything like Europe, however much we like to visit them to try to experience their interesting and colorful history, and to hear their quaint accents and languages. The real Disney Europe is what I call it. A receding, suicidal civilization. The charm comes from their having been frozen in time by insane governments - not from their present condition.

Go see it before it disappears and becomes a subject for anthropological study.

Taking offense, these days, seems to confer the moral authority of sacred victimhood rather than to identify one as a hypersensitive twit, as a disguised bully, or as a manipulative schemer.

I don't know how that happened, but two can play: Offense works both ways. 

From Smith's The Ghetto-ification of America at Pajamas:

What big government has done to the nation’s inner cities and poor blacks is nothing short of a moral crime. Unless the Democrats are stopped, a lesser though damaging crime will be committed against every other community. Ghetto-light may be your neighborhood all too soon.

It is reminiscent of Dalrymple's observations in the UK which I linked a week or so ago.

I mumbled briefly about Positivism last week, alluding to its potential as a fuel for hubris. No philosophy is the "cause" of human evil and destructiveness, but Human Nature is. Pure rationalism (if there is any such thing) is a frightening way to run the world, or to run anything.

This weekend, in timely fashion, I stumbled on a review of Grayling's latest screed against irrationalism by the esteemable John Gray. One quote from the thoughtful review:

Reading Grayling, it is hard to resist the impression that he believes Western civilization would be much improved if it did not include the Judeo-Christian inheritance. Absurd as it is, there is nothing new in such a claim. It is one of the most venerable clichés of Enlightenment thinking, and Ideas that Matter is a compendium of such dated prejudices. When Grayling condemns religion on the grounds that “a theory that explains everything, and can be falsified by nothing, is empty,” he takes for granted that religions are primitive theories, now rendered obsolete by science.

J. Robert Smith has exactly the right metaphor at American Thinker. Who gets to be Zoo-Keeper, though?

Speaking of zoos, Dalrymple recently visited some government zoos in the UK, and it was not pretty. Old steel towns where the main jobs involve welfare administration.

Via Chicago Boyz:

…There is also the problem of the elite’s lack of humility. I’m a pretty smart guy, and I think I could do a decent job of re-ordering the world if given absolute power.
 
But … It wouldn’t be right. It is not up to me to tell my fellow humans how to live. I think bowling, for instance, is stupid, though many people enjoy it. What/who gives me the right to tell bowlers that they should be going to the symphony instead?
 
But nobody is forcing me to go bowling and nobody is using my tax dollars to subsidize bowling, so I don’t care. Not my business, and not a problem. This is the essence of liberty.
 
For a thought experiment, substitute guns, french fries, or abortion for bowling above and see how you feel. The realization that you do not have the Moral Authority to try to construct a perfect world that eliminates what you dislike is the essence of humility. Many very bright people lack humility.

"I can’t understand how these same people who distrust the power of large corporations tend to throw all their trust and faith into government.  The government tends to have more power (it has police and jails after all, not to mention sovereign immunity), is way larger, and the control mechanisms and incentives that supposedly might check bad behavior in governments seldom work."

Coyote, in his And People Trust Government?. Well, the polls say most people do not. However, America is divided between those who want to be left alone and those who want stuff. At present, that is the gist of what Vanderleun terms The American Argument.

Similarly, Betsy addresses the two visions of government. In my view, too few Americans today see liberty as something precious, and I often wonder how many people would prefer to be slaves and serfs (as long as those terms aren't used) in exchange for life's necessities.