Buckrub
01-13-2014, 08:40 PM
Yeah, I know already. I know which of you hate this guy, and these ideas. I get it. But I just dearly love to read folks who can succinctly write what I believe, when I can't do it very well. I know you don't believe it, but I do NOT agree with this guy all the time. But I do agree with the people here that he is quoting. These are pretty good comments that coincide with my ideas of why I dislike Liberalism so much.
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They said it (Part I)
By Bradley Gitz
Those of us who write op-ed columns tend to have favorite quotations or anecdotes that reflect principles we find congenial. Among mine, in the first of two parts, are the following, some old but aging well, others of more recent vintage.
Winston Churchill’s observation that “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried” nicely complements another quote attributed to him that “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” The ironic part is that Churchill also did perhaps more than any other over the past century to save democracy from totalitarian assaults upon it.
Implicit in those observations is a crucial axiom-that all government, even democratic government, is at best a necessary evil. And that the solution to the primary defect of mass democracy (mass ignorance) is to limit government to the performance of only truly vital tasks.
National Review’s Jonah Goldberg echoes the notion that even democratic government must be constrained in various ways with a recent essay on the pleasures of cigars, wherein he notes that “I am a conservative in large part because I believe that politics should intrude on life as little as possible. Conservatives surely believe that there are times when the government should meddle in the daily affairs of the people but they normally reserve those times for large questions of right and wrong, good and evil.” On the other hand, “So much of liberalism is about unleashing the Joy Police on us, politicizing our prosaic wants and desires because some expert somewhere thinks he or she knows better how to live your life than you do. The result is to scrub the Hobbit warrens of our daily lives of the simple pleasures and to make many of those simple pleasures ‘political’ even when properly speaking they are not.” Thomas Sowell added further insight to the dynamic of contemporary liberalism in a recent column in which he claims that the agenda of the left largely consists of “promoting envy and a sense of grievance, while making loud demands for ‘rights’ to what other people have produced.” Sowell notes that “This agenda has seldom lifted the poor out of poverty. But it has lifted the left to positions of power and self-aggrandizement, while they promote policies with socially counterproductive results.”
Thus is identified the ultimate source of leftist success-every disaster inflicted can be used to demand still more of the same (as will likely soon be demonstrated when Hillary Clinton and other liberals propose a single-payer healthcare system as a means of cleaning up the mess caused by Obamacare).
Consistent with Sowell’s observations, Margaret Thatcher famously devastated the underlying logic of the left when she said that “the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” This is because government is necessary to provide a secure and orderly foundation for the creation of wealth but does not itself create any, thus any socialist scheme must invariably take money from those who are productive and give it to those who aren’t, which only works for so long. And as Herbert Stein memorably put it, “if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” On the misguided effort to use government to “create” jobs and wealth by shifting money from the (efficient) private sector to the (inefficient) public, we also have the wonderful anecdote attributed to Milton Friedman.
As retold in a Wall Street Journalpiece by Stephen Moore, “Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: ‘You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.’ To which Milton replied: ‘Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.’”
As the antidote suggests, government “make work” jobs and related concepts like minimum-wage increases and the indefinite extension of unemployment benefits (all justified on the grounds that they increase the buying power of beneficiaries and thereby stimulate the economy) ultimately make no sense because nothing of value is actually being added and the money to pay for those things has to come from somewhere, in most cases more productive endeavors. In the end, there is no way of getting around the dismal fact that a society’s standard of living can only be improved by increased productivity.
Finally, an amusing story that involves former U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas. Appearing on a television news program with a woman from the education establishment, Gramm claimed that “My educational policies are based on the fact that I care more about my children than you do.” When the woman from the education blob said “No, you don’t,” Gramm responded “OK, what are their names?”
It’s hard to find a more succinct rebuke of “it takes a village” and the broader collectivist mindset than that. -
_____
They said it (Part I)
By Bradley Gitz
Those of us who write op-ed columns tend to have favorite quotations or anecdotes that reflect principles we find congenial. Among mine, in the first of two parts, are the following, some old but aging well, others of more recent vintage.
Winston Churchill’s observation that “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried” nicely complements another quote attributed to him that “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” The ironic part is that Churchill also did perhaps more than any other over the past century to save democracy from totalitarian assaults upon it.
Implicit in those observations is a crucial axiom-that all government, even democratic government, is at best a necessary evil. And that the solution to the primary defect of mass democracy (mass ignorance) is to limit government to the performance of only truly vital tasks.
National Review’s Jonah Goldberg echoes the notion that even democratic government must be constrained in various ways with a recent essay on the pleasures of cigars, wherein he notes that “I am a conservative in large part because I believe that politics should intrude on life as little as possible. Conservatives surely believe that there are times when the government should meddle in the daily affairs of the people but they normally reserve those times for large questions of right and wrong, good and evil.” On the other hand, “So much of liberalism is about unleashing the Joy Police on us, politicizing our prosaic wants and desires because some expert somewhere thinks he or she knows better how to live your life than you do. The result is to scrub the Hobbit warrens of our daily lives of the simple pleasures and to make many of those simple pleasures ‘political’ even when properly speaking they are not.” Thomas Sowell added further insight to the dynamic of contemporary liberalism in a recent column in which he claims that the agenda of the left largely consists of “promoting envy and a sense of grievance, while making loud demands for ‘rights’ to what other people have produced.” Sowell notes that “This agenda has seldom lifted the poor out of poverty. But it has lifted the left to positions of power and self-aggrandizement, while they promote policies with socially counterproductive results.”
Thus is identified the ultimate source of leftist success-every disaster inflicted can be used to demand still more of the same (as will likely soon be demonstrated when Hillary Clinton and other liberals propose a single-payer healthcare system as a means of cleaning up the mess caused by Obamacare).
Consistent with Sowell’s observations, Margaret Thatcher famously devastated the underlying logic of the left when she said that “the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” This is because government is necessary to provide a secure and orderly foundation for the creation of wealth but does not itself create any, thus any socialist scheme must invariably take money from those who are productive and give it to those who aren’t, which only works for so long. And as Herbert Stein memorably put it, “if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” On the misguided effort to use government to “create” jobs and wealth by shifting money from the (efficient) private sector to the (inefficient) public, we also have the wonderful anecdote attributed to Milton Friedman.
As retold in a Wall Street Journalpiece by Stephen Moore, “Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: ‘You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.’ To which Milton replied: ‘Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.’”
As the antidote suggests, government “make work” jobs and related concepts like minimum-wage increases and the indefinite extension of unemployment benefits (all justified on the grounds that they increase the buying power of beneficiaries and thereby stimulate the economy) ultimately make no sense because nothing of value is actually being added and the money to pay for those things has to come from somewhere, in most cases more productive endeavors. In the end, there is no way of getting around the dismal fact that a society’s standard of living can only be improved by increased productivity.
Finally, an amusing story that involves former U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas. Appearing on a television news program with a woman from the education establishment, Gramm claimed that “My educational policies are based on the fact that I care more about my children than you do.” When the woman from the education blob said “No, you don’t,” Gramm responded “OK, what are their names?”
It’s hard to find a more succinct rebuke of “it takes a village” and the broader collectivist mindset than that. -