Posted on 05/29/2014 2:48:22 AM PDT by markomalley
On this week's Radio Free Delingpole podcast I discuss with Peter Foster of Canada's Financial Post an issue which has long puzzled me: the liberal-left's extraordinary capacity for cognitive dissonance. Or, if you want to put it more bluntly, for epic self-delusion.
I'm thinking, for example, of Ed Miliband's proposals to introduce rent controls, despite copious historical evidence that this measure always and inevitably has exactly the opposite effect of the one intended: creating more housing scarcity; hurting the poor.
I would include in the same category several of the measures introduced by the Cameron administration: the 0.7 per cent of GDP ring-fenced for foreign aid, despite all the evidence that the billions of dollars bombarded on Africa have had the unintended consequence of leaving some countries in Sub-Saharan Africa as poor (sometimes poorer) than they were 50 years ago; the minimum wage which - as any sane economist can tell you - is a tax on jobs and therefore a disincentive to employers to hire labour; the "green jobs" the Coalition's drive for renewables has allegedly created, even though they are in fact nothing more than Potemkin jobs, entirely dependent on taxpayer subsidy, and therefore a grotesque misallocation of scare resources which would otherwise by directed towards real, lasting jobs in areas of the economy which create genuine value.
All this, as Thomas Sowell would put it, is Basic Economics. So why do so many politicians - from the Obama left to the Cameron faux-right - not get it? And why, for that matter, do all those voters who applaud their statist measures and urge still more government intervention not get it either?
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
I have been watching the 3-part series “The World Wars” these past few nights.
Democrats/liberals remind me of Hitler’s rise to power, only the circumstances that facilitated his rise, the depression coupled with the aftermath and the punitive measures from WWI, were largely external - not of his making. Here is where it differs with liberals.
They are always scheming, plotting, creating real damage to our economy and national morality, patriotism, sense of legality in the word of law - all that. They’d don’t ever stop, even when they get kicked in the teeth. They are out there day and night scheming and plotting.
They’re out there like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, discussing things like how to get rid of 25-30 million Americans who just won’t conform when they take over. Just like Hitler’s henchmen discussing how to arrive at the Final Solution for the Jew problem in Germany and what it controlled.
In the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler had 100 of his enemies executed one-by-one. Obama is doing the same thing, except his enemies are targeted by the IRS and his main targets are the US Constitution and the rule of law. Each fundamental protection is being vacated by more Executive Orders than one can count.
Once they transform us, they will start singling some of us out for their Final Solution. It might be prison, it might be knelt beside a ditch while they blow your brains out, but it will be just like Hitler.
this, to me, is funny. in the first place, the author is making assumptions of what liberals want. and he’s wrong.
seriously, does this guy think any liberal has wanted rent control to “help” the poor?
so then, his presumption that liberals are low on the evolutionary scale doesn’t fit. the elite liberals are way smarter than most of us, else, they wouldn’t be running just about every meaningful organization, from the media to academia. and the low end welfare crowd ain’t too dumb either because they know who to vote for.
Al Gore: extra chromosome conservative. Every day conservatives are turning more and more like leftists.
You present some interesting ideas, all of which are entirely plausible.
I, too, worry about where all this is going, and it doesn’t appear to be pretty.
With any luck the controllers will overplay their hand too early, i.e., while those of us who see what they’re doing and are able and willing to do something about it are still around. Then, their Final Solution will blow up in their face, literally.
At the amoeba level?
It's the right that doesn't get it. The goal of leftism is not success, wealth, or happiness at all. The goal is to destroy all objects of envy. This is so narcissistic beliefs of greatness cannot be proven wrong. Leftists are the Elliot Rodgers of politics.
As near as I can see, this whole thing is escalating to the point of disaster, particularly with the exponential increases in entitlement spending for those masses out there that contribute absolutely nothing substantive to this country.
It either blows up in our faces and checks stop rolling and EBTs unreplenished each month,or Obama (or whoever takes over after him) bites the big bullet (after Amnesty) and just takes the last remaining superfunds in this country - IRAs, 401Ks, Roth IRAs, and just plain wealth in general.
My guess is that we’ll see the confiscation and conversion to chits on your Social Security before they let the entitlement crowd go postal. Because, even he won’t be able to control them if that happens.
That's a very important point and I'm surprised that Delingpole doesn't get it.
Delingpole's argument applies to liberal/left voters, not to liberal/left leaders. That's a very big distinction.
The leaders know precisely what is going on and what they are doing: wrecking the economy in order to increase the size of government while use the method of increasing the size of government in order to wreck the economy.
They tell their sh*t-for-brains followers that it is all a matter of "fairness". But they (the leaders) know the truth. They know what it is all about.
And feeding in to this equation -- always, like an incessant drumbeat -- is the media and the education system (both run by that same left/liberal leadership), always hammering away at the mentality of the unsuspecting public, working on them in ways to increase their stupidity, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, decade after decade.
And it works.
The public grows more and more stupid, votes more and more liberal/left, and the liberal/left (including in the Republican Party) is more and more in control. Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly over a period of decades.
Just imagine if you had received information correctly detailing how all the money you gave to some gov. agency or charity to help the "poor and oppressed" did nothing to solve their, the poor and oppressed, problems. In fact, you made their lives worse by making them more dependent. A normal person, a conservative, would immediately stop and question throwing money at the problem.
But libs keep on pouring money down the rathole. And they insist that you do likewise. In short, they never learn. And that is the libs fatal flaw....they never learn.
My point as well. There's the lib sheepherders, and there is the liberal sheep. I've had conversation with a lib stepdaughter who is convinced more dollars thrown at the poor and downtrodden will eventually lift them up. If nasty, racist conservatives would just stop being nasty and racist.
No amount of statistics and facts sways her. Because she wants to help the poor and downtrodden. Like many libs, she refuses to acknowledge that the great majority of the poor and downtrodden are their own worst enemies.
A lot of pundits don’t seem to get it. Maybe they’re afraid to speak out against the controlling class. I don’t know.
Fear of losing your job... Greed for career advancement...
The left has so stacked the deck in the worlds of media, academia and “climate science” (to use a most illustrative example) that if you want to move up, you’d better repeat the party line. If you don’t want to get kicked out, you’d better repeat the party line.
Want some grant money for a “climate science study”? You had BETTER repeat the party line, or you not only get zero money but you could get kicked out the door of whatever institution you are in.
This dynamic is most easily seen in “climate science” where the left is working feverishly to shut down any debate. But it’s much more general throughout the Western World, of course, and comes into play in a thousand spheres of life.
Interesting. How old is your stepdaughter? I have a niece who is the same way. In her twenties, otherwise intelligent, but in politics, like her mother she is completely impervious to any reason at all. Of course they are both Obama voters.
As you say, the climate-change crowd is in control, no doubt. Personally, I love to debate the issue because the other side has such a weak case. They can’t even answer the most basic question of all - is it warming up or cooling down? Unfortunately, they control much more than just the narrative; they control behavior.
You’d be surprised how many of the American people are themselves enemies of the U.S. Constitution.
Liberals have not only corrupted government, but as you say, medicine and science too. It’s all about “the grants”.
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