Media Criticism, Political Commentary

We’re Not As Dumb As You Want Us To Be

18 Comments

…and you’re not as smart as you think you are.

[Update a few minutes later]

This is worth repeating:

If I had said a day ago that your typical New York Times reporter doesn’t have the vaguest sense of what the rule of law means, I would have heard from all sorts of earnest liberal readers — and probably some conservative ones too — about how I was setting up a straw man. But now we know it’s true. It’s not just that she doesn’t know what it is, it’s that even after (presumably) looking it up, she still couldn’t describe it and none of her editors raised an eyebrow when she buttered it.

I wouldn’t mind this rule by the “elites” quite as much if they really were elite, and not just graduates of grade-inflated Ivy-League schools who apparently never learned much of use in the real world, (assuming that they even had the cerebral propensity to do so).

18 thoughts on “We’re Not As Dumb As You Want Us To Be”

  1. “Road to Serfdom” is the right’s version of “The Limits to Growth”; each makes a bold prediction that time has proven spectacularly wrong. It’s an odd book to pick as evidence for the superior intelligence of those on the right; you might as well choose “Dow 36,000”.

  2. each makes a bold prediction that time has proven spectacularly wrong.

    Jim, from what planet are you posting this? Because on mine, where the sky is blue, and the book was written, it appears to be quite prescient (as does Atlas Shrugged).

  3. it appears to be quite prescient

    Hayek predicted that any move towards socialism, specifically the welfare state measures in the Labor Party platform of 1944, would lead swiftly and inexorably to totalitarian tyranny of the sort then seen in the USSR. Labor won, the British welfare state expanded, and yet six decades later the British still vote in free elections, own private property, and openly criticize their leaders. They did not become serfs.

    Hayek was utterly wrong.

  4. six decades later the British still […] openly criticize their leaders.

    Except, of course, where that criticism also involves the criticism of a politically protected group, such as Muslimes.

    Jim is utterly wrong.

  8. Hayek wasn’t talking about the mechanics of tax withholding. He wasn’t talking about policies that remind one of serfdom, or make one feel like a serf. He was talking about actual, literal serfdom.

    If the UK enacts this tax proposal, and the voters don’t like it, they can vote in a new government and change course. That’s exactly what has happened tens of times since Hayek wrote Serfdom, a book that denies the possibility of a welfare state like the UK ever changing course. If Hayek was right, Thatcher was never prime minister.

  9. Both the UK and the US are steadily becoming more and more totalitarian under socialism. It doesn’t happen overnight. These things take time, absent a violent revolution, which neither country has had.

    How much time?

    If you’d like to be a latter-day Hayek, then make some specific, falsifiable predictions about where we’re heading. Then we can see how things turn out. Hopefully (for all concerned) your predictions will prove to be as wrong as Hayek’s.

  11. Jim:
    Looking back, both Thatcher and Reagan were merely temporary interruptions of the (apparently) inexorable march of the welfare state. It may be debatable whether or not both countries are worse off now than they were when Thatcher and Reagan first came to power, but there is no denying that both are worse off today than when they left power.

  12. If you’d like to be a latter-day Hayek, then make some specific, falsifiable predictions about where we’re heading. Then we can see how things turn out. Hopefully (for all concerned) your predictions will prove to be as wrong as Hayek’s.

    OK, I’ll bite: Spreading poverty, shortages, rationing, civil war, gulags, and death camps. No, I don’t have a time frame.

    I hope I’m wrong too. But given socialism’s track record, I’m more likely to be right if we continue down the path we’re on.

  14. Who’s smarter, 300 million consumers in a Free Market or Nancy Pelosi and 7 cronies in a back room cutting political deals.

    I’ll go w/Hayek.

  15. “He wasn’t talking about policies that remind one of serfdom,..”

    What part of the government getting the money you worked for before you and giving you what they think you should get doesn’t remind you of serfdom? Jim, you’re a knee-jerk leftist through and through. Why you think a group of people with no experience at running anything can run a 14 trillion dollar engine is beyond any rational thought.

  16. Let me amend that last one. When I’m dependent on authority to give me what I earned, I’m a serf.

  17. Jim read Hayek? What a guy! Of course, Obama has claimed that he, too, has read Hayek? And although my rule-of-thumb is to assume that anyone who favors legalized looting (which is essentially what “liberalism” has devolved into by this time) is probably lying (if you want to lift my wallet, why would I trust you?), maybe they have. They may have read THE ROAD TO SERFDOM and seen it was a helpful road-map: “Yes! We can totally do this!”

    Besides, at what point would Jim (or Obama) decide “This much taxation, but not one penny more!”? Eighty-per-cent taxation? Ninety? Ninety-five? Obama’s commie dad (from whom the Chosen One, according to the title of his book, gets his dreams) advocated 100% taxation. Wouldn’t that be serfdom, or slavery? A slave is essentially someone forced to work for the benefit of someone else. I believe the average mediaeval serf had to pay ten per cent of his wealth to the his liege lord. Would that today’s State-shtuppers were so easily satisfied.

  18. Ten percent? Make me a serf. That’s the definition of liberty in todays America. I wonder if that’s related to the biblical definition of usury of being anything more than ten percent on a loan?

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