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 ...
Liberals definitely are both here.
In her thirties...and a lawyer. A very nice person, but when it comes to politics, Hillary is a genius, and big government knows best. She’s not a real fan of Obama, but she still voted for him....because he’s not an “evil conservative.”
Interestingly enough, it was female conservatives that I met through work and school who convinced me about politics. I wish I could convince my three nutty lib sisters the error of their political ways.
“You’d be surprised how many of the American people are themselves enemies of the U.S. Constitution.”
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I wouldn’t, I learned decades ago that most people have a strange idea of freedom and very little if any knowledge of what the constitution says and even less of what it actually means.
Nailed it. IF (hugh if) the Right actually "got it", Civil War II would have already started and probably been over by now. But, all is not lost. The emergence of the TEA party movement is a sign that people are getting it. May be too little too late.
The goal [of the Left] is to destroy all objects of envy.
Envy will manifest in two ways, 1st, to take what is not allowed/rightful, and 2nd, to destroy what is not allowed/rightful. FWIW
The root of Marxism is envy!
Yeah, if a active and growing economy served their purposes of advancing their power, it would be a priority.
But it doesn’t serve that purpose. In fact, a good economy leads to too much individual independence, so it is thwarted.
BTW, Sowell’s “Basic Economics” is a must-read for any person you care about.
If the Right “got it”, they’d stop treating the left as if they were acting in good faith. They’d stop addressing the surface issues, as they are just a means to the left’s ends.
The “right” suffers from the delusion that they are the top of the pile - Randian producer-heros as it were, and that the governmental/academic elites are mere parasites and moochers.
Although it is true that through their powers these elites create a large group of non-productive dependents, an underclass, they themselves are predators, who dine as they please on the fruits of the productive.
Ecologically considered, they are the lions of the Serengeti; the struggling producers are the wildebeests.
“Who-whom?” - V.I.Lenin
Many of the enemies in Ayn Rand novels were corporate titans teaming up with the government/leftists
Jackals have to eat, too!
No one wanted the communists except for the communists and the Socialists so the Commies naturally turned to violent revolution. It was put down by elements of the remaining German army and correct me if I am wrong, outside assistance was provided as well. There's no question about it the similarities between then and now are frighteningly familiar.
Desperate hungry people do desperate things. Add that to an abundance of newly ideologized socialists, communists and the anarchists you mention and it is a prescription for disaster.
I think most people who are conservatives (i.e., not socialists, not communists, usually not anarchists as liberals tend to be when they are not in power) understand that during the post-WWI years, Germany was starving because of the armistice reparations forced on them and that people were dissatisfied - some looked to communism and socialism which were still in the experimental stage. They flirted with a pit viper, and it bit them.
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