Why should we believe that the motives of people in (cough, cough) “public service” are different from the motives of people in the for-profit sector? Was Jon Corzine a rapacious self-seeker at Goldman Sachs, then a public-spirited man when he was in the Senate and in New Jersey’s governorship, only to revert to form when he went to MF Global? If you doubt that this is true, and suspect that Jon Corzine was the same guy all along, why would you want to give government more power?
It’s a question that big-government supporters never answer. Partly because when it’s a John Corzine or a John Edwards, it’s not that big a deal. If either had been a Republican, it would have been second-coming type in the New York Times.
The Founders wrote a constitution on the basis that men are not angels, but “liberals” apparently believe that when they call themselves “liberal” and Democrats that they are, and will rule us wisely.
That Democrats are generally illiterate about basic economics is not a matter of mere conjecture. In 2010, Daniel B. Klein and Zeljka Buturovic analyzed answers provided by a random sample of 4,835 Americans to a list of eight questions about economics. The results, which noted the party affiliation of the respondents, were not flattering to our friends on the left. “Those responding Democratic averaged 4.59 incorrect answers. Republicans averaged 1.61 incorrect, and Libertarians 1.26 incorrect.” And these were not arcane questions. They involved elementary concepts, like the effect of price controls, covered in any Econ 101 course taught at the lowliest community college and even some of the better high schools. Yet the average Democrat respondent got nearly 60 percent of the answers wrong.
It is precisely this kind of ignorance that led so many Democrats to believe Obamacare would somehow render health care less expensive. One of the first items covered in any introductory economics course is that the price of any good or service will rise if the quantity demanded increases without an accompanying increase in the available supply of that commodity. Nonetheless, it held no message for the average Democrat that the supply side of the equation was ignored by “reform,” though it increased the number of patients in the health system as well as the range of services to which they are entitled. The issue of supply and demand was utterly lost on Obamacare’s Democrat supporters. Thus, at the time of its passage, fully 78 percent of them favored the law. Even now, 52 percent still support it.
This is typical of the ignorance that was on full display in the president’s speech the other day.
Well, doesn’t that depend on what one thinks their job is? If it’s their job to whitewash the anti-semitism among the Occumorons, they’re doing it very well.
Maybe it’s time for us to really take a look at ourselves and ask: Is Obama actually a great president, and we’re just a lousy country?
It’s not really that radical a question. I mean, look at him: He’s a bright, Harvard-educated man who’s not only been to other countries but has actually lived in them — he knows cultures and viewpoints beyond the narrow ones we have here. And he surrounds himself with the greatest minds on earth. And who are we, compared to him? We’re a bunch of slobs, really. Kind of ignorant. Maybe a little racist. And we surround ourselves with bowls of flavored corn chips. But the country’s problems are supposed to be his fault? Does that make sense?
Look at what Obama did to try and get our economy going. He had this big, hundreds of billions of dollars stimulus that was designed by all the great economists who work in his administration — the top minds. It should have worked. The economy should be roaring right now and unemployment a thing of the past. America should be a utopia. So what was missing from the equation? That the people the stimulus was used on are a bunch of lazy dimwits. Obama did everything he possibly could, but apparently Americans just aren’t very good at running businesses and creating jobs. Obama has given us so many advantages that even chimpanzees should have been able to create jobs, but we just sit there like useless blobs while our companies crumble around us. We’re failing the country. We’re failing him.
I’ve been saying for years that we’re just not worthy of him.
Dan Foster and Rich Lowry have some thoughts on why there is so much hostility to the openly Christian quarterback.
As a non-believer (but not a fundamentalist atheist), I think that he raises hackles in two different groups of people — those who are bigoted against Christians in general (and they are legion — it is the last acceptable bigotry in our society) and those Christians who feel guilty because he sets the bar too high (and there is actually a non-zero intersection of those two sets). I would think of him as the Ned Flanders of the NFL, the completely unironic guy who is made fun of because in living up to his beliefs rather than down to his impulses, he makes everyone else look bad. And because he’ll continue to do so, he won’t care. Which will just make them all the angrier.
Thoughts on sex-selective abortions. It really does seem like the objective goal of the “pro-choicers” is to maximize the number of terminated pregnancies, not offer women real choices.