14 Dec 2014

If the Left Could Learn One Thing…

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SmugLiberal

Robert Tracinski was challenged to identify one thing the Left could learn from Ayn Rand. Naturally, he felt initially at a loss to restrict the list to one thing. So he thought and thought, and concluded in the end that the left really needed to learn to think critically.

The War on Poverty has spent trillions of dollars over 50 years and has merely fixed poverty into place. Yet if you advocate the expansion of the welfare state, you are regarded as proving how deeply you care about the plight of the poor. Criticize the welfare state, and you are regarded as callous and indifferent to all human suffering.

If your brain is now feeding you a torrent of counter-arguments, half-remembered bits of Paul Krugman columns about how European socialism or the Great Society was really a roaring success—all I’m asking is that you take a few moments to stop that process and really, genuinely consider whether those of us on the right might have a valid point to make about the achievements of capitalism or the shortcomings of the welfare state. Assess how comfortable you are doing this. Assess whether you’re even able to do it, whether you’ve ever bothered to find out enough about our counter-arguments to fairly consider them.

Then ask yourself this. Which big-government regulatory or welfare programs would you choose to eliminate? Realistically, they can’t all be successful. Any task requires a certain amount of trial and error, and certainly there must be some programs where the costs have overwhelmed any conceivable benefit. Can you name such a program? Would you campaign to eliminate it if a politician proposed its repeal?

If you can’t name such a program, if you’ve never really asked yourself the question, ask yourself why.

The gap between the left’s laudatory self-image and the less-than-spectacular results of its programs is widely interpreted on the right as evidence that smug self-congratulation is the real purpose. It doesn’t matter whether a government program actually works, so long as you can pat yourself on the back for being progressive enough to vote for it. But I’m beginning to wonder whether the actual goal is the avoidance of evil thoughts. Ask yourself: how much of your political self-image is tied up in regarding yourself as better and purer than those wicked “deniers” on the right?

Read the whole thing.

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One Feedback on "If the Left Could Learn One Thing…"

SDD

Another thing that they could learn is the concept of opportunity cost. Even if you were to argue that the War on Poverty had some elements of success, you would still be left with defending the proposition that it was the best use of limited resources — i.e. that the results it achieved exceed what you could have done with the trillion dollars+ that was spent on it. THAT, it seems to me, is hard for even the leftists to defend.



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