Zeljka Buturovic and Daniel B. Klein just published a study of the correlation between an elementary understanding of economics and people’s levels of education and political ideologies.

The 8 simple questions used as measuring sticks of “economic enlightenment” were:

1. Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable.
• Unenlightened: Disagree
2. Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services.
• Unenlightened: Disagree
3. Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago.
• Unenlightened: Disagree
4. Rent control leads to housing shortages.
• Unenlightened: Disagree
5. A company with the largest market share is a monopoly.
• Unenlightened: Agree
6. Third-world workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited.
• Unenlightened: Agree
7. Free trade leads to unemployment.
• Unenlightened: Agree
8. Minimum wage laws raise unemployment.
• Unenlightened: Disagree

They found that education produced only a slight difference in economic enlightenment, but that political ideology produced far more significant differences.

(Although the authors note that none of the questions actually challenge conventional conservative positions, they) think that the measurement as-is captures something real. At least since the days of Frédéric Bastiat, many have said that people of the left often trail behind in incorporating basic economic insight into their aesthetics, morals, and politics. We put much stock in Hayek’s theory (Hayek 1978, 1979, 1988) that the social-democratic ethos is an atavistic reassertion of the ethos and mentality of the primordial paleolithic band, a mentality resistant to ideas of spontaneous order and disjointed knowledge. Our findings support such a claim, all the caveats notwithstanding. Several of the questions would seem to be fairly neutral with respect to partisan politics, particularly the questions on licensing, the standard of living, monopoly, and free trade. None of those questions challenge policies that are particularly leftwing or rationalized on the basis of equity. Yet even on such neutral questions the “progressives” and “liberals” do much worse than the “conservatives” and “libertarians.”

Sue Lowden, Republican candidate for the Senate from Nevada

Snotty progressives are laughing themselves silly over Nevada Senate candidate Sue Lowden’s reference to the old fashioned practice of impecunious patients compensating their doctor with gifts of goods or services.

In reality, back when I was a boy and even earlier, when you went to the doctor or the hospital, they just treated you. The modern custom of demanding that you fill out a form promising to pay and supply your insurance card before they look at you did not exist.

A small percentage of patients, of course, couldn’t, or wouldn’t, pay. In the old days, doctors just looked on treating such patients as their personal charitable contribution to the community and an inevitable part of the cost of practicing their profession.

The poor, of course, consisted of two kinds of people. There were the unfortunate but decent people, and there were the bums and deadbeats. Doctors could console themselves that they would only have to treat deadbeats once in a very long time, since shame would cause the deadbeat patient to go down the road to another physician the next time he was ill, and he’d naturally work his way through every available other doctor in the neighborhood before returning to the first.

Respectable people without money would find a way to compensate their doctor. One doctor I used to know as a boy received fresh baked bread every week from a widow on Social Security he’d taken care of. Men would turn up at the doctor’s house on Saturday, look over the premises, and find painting or repairs that needed to be done and start working without permission. Farmers without money would deliver fresh produce or meat. Yes, a doctor might well be given a number of chickens.

The left finds the idea that it is possible to try to discharge a debt informally and without cash changing hands funny. Personally, I’d say that all the sneering and crude guffawing over Ms. Lowden’s observation simply demonstrates all over again just how provincial, unsophisticated, and unfamiliar with normal life modern leftwing fashionistas really are.

One of my Yale classmates was snickering away this morning, sarcastically asking the doctors in the class how they’d like being paid by barter. I responded:

How about you? You’re a lawyer. Suppose some poor little old widow lady getting $600 a month on Social Security came to you and begged you to represent her. You know she can’t afford to pay you, and you know she needs the help. So when you solved her little problem, she sends you cookies at Xmas time every year. Does that work for you, or are you going to insist on a program forcing everybody in America to pay thousands of dollars a year for legal services insurance or go to jail, and a big federal bureaucracy rationing legal services and setting your fee schedule?

My liberal classmates rant and rave regularly about the nefarious behavior of Wall Street banks and big corporations, but in their eyes government can do no wrong (as long as Republicans are not in charge).

Coyote reflects on the strangeness of the statist perspective.

I have total sympathy with those who distrust corporations. Distrust and skepticism are fine things, and are critical foundations to individual responsibility. History proves that market mechanisms tend to weed out bad behaviors, but sometimes these corrections can take time, and in the mean time its good to watch out for oneself.

However, I can’t understand how these same people who distrust the power of large corporations tend to throw all their trust and faith into government. The government tends to have more power (it has police and jails after all, not to mention sovereign immunity), is way larger, and the control mechanisms and incentives that supposedly might check bad behavior in governments seldom work.

Hat tip to the Barrister.

These kinds of partisan displays of particularist chauvinism always offend enlightened people.

FoxNews points out a not-even-Freudian lapse in Barack Obama’s recent remarks.

To a member in good standing of the community of fashion, like the current president, internalization of a galaxy of liberal perspectives embracing Pacifism, World Government, and Equality, and viewing with distaste anything to do with the military or the use of force, competition, conflict, and above all else any presumption to superiority on the part of the United States is de riguer.

In a little-noticed remark at the close of the two-day nuclear security summit in Washington, D.C., this week, President Obama suggested the United States is somehow burdened by its military might — a comment that drew a stern rebuke from his former rival in the presidential campaign.

Obama was responding to a question Tuesday about how the summit would play into peace-making efforts in the Middle East when he addressed the downsides of — by virtue of America’s world stature — being obligated to intervene in international conflicts.

“It is a vital national security interest of the United States to reduce these conflicts because whether we like it or not, we remain a dominant military superpower, and when conflicts break out, one way or another we get pulled into them,” Obama said. “And that ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure.”

In Barack Obama’s ideal mental world, the United States would simply be one more docile and obedient member state of the United Nations, or the Federation, which long ago renounced sovereignty and the use of force and which transferred all its armaments to the Central World Authority. Any particular disagreement with Iran, China, or some minor Pacific atoll would be gravely adjudicated by the wise and disinterested Supreme High Council, a compromise imposed, and universal peace perpetually preserved.

What a pity it is that as enlightened a being as the Chosen One is obliged to conduct a competitive foreign policy based on military force representing a technologically advanced, but morally backward, predominantly Christian and European power that continually asserts its own preeminence in world affairs, in a manner inevitably offending other nations. Naturally, Barack Obama would rather apologize and disarm.

An unnamed (presumably liberal) official working in non-proliferation comments with indignation about Iran’s refusal to stop building nukes despite futile efforts by the current administration to bribe and cajole them into cooperating. The new CIA Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control Center 721 report makes it clear that they are ignoring the Obama Administration, the UN, and bien pensant liberals everywhere and going right ahead with developing all the WMD and delivery systems they can. Members of the comfortable and contented Western haute bourgeois establishment consistently indulge in the fallacy of supposing that foreign adversaries of the United States are at heart reasonable, well-meaning people like themselves who underneath it all really just want to get along with everyone. Of course, despotic totalitarian regimes don’t want to get along, they want to win.

Bill Gertz reports:

Iran is poised to begin producing nuclear weapons after its uranium program expansion in 2009, even though it has had problems with thousands of its centrifuges, according to a newly released CIA report.

“Iran continues to develop a range of capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons, if a decision is made to do so,” the annual report to Congress states.

A U.S. official involved in countering weapons proliferation said the Iranians are “keeping the door open to the possibility of building a nuclear weapon.”

“That’s in spite of strong international pressure not to do so, and some difficulties they themselves seem to be having with their nuclear program,” the official said. “There are powerful incentives for them to close the door completely, but they are either purposefully ignoring them or are tone deaf. You almost want to shout, ‘Tune in Tehran.'” …

During the first 11 months of last year, the main uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz produced about 1.8 tons of low-enriched uranium hexafluoride, compared with about half a ton the previous year.

The number of centrifuges at Natanz increased from about 5,000 to 8,700 last year, although the number reported to be working is about 3,900, indicating the Iranians are having problems with the machines. The centrifuges enrich uranium gas by spinning it at high speeds.

Last year, Iran disclosed it is building a second gas-centrifuge plant near the city of Qom that will house an estimated 3,000 machines. U.S. officials have said the Qom facility, which was discovered in 2007, is a clear sign Iran’s nuclear program is geared toward producing weapons, because the facility is too small for nonmilitary uranium enrichment.

Iran also continued work last year on a heavy water research reactor.

On missiles, the report said Iran is building more short- and medium-range ballistic missiles and stated that “producing more capable medium-range ballistic missiles remains one of its highest priorities.”

Three test flights of a new 1,240-mile-range Sejil missile were conducted in 2009, the report said, noting that assistance from China, North Korea and Russia “helped move Iran toward self-sufficiency in the production of ballistic missiles.”

The report also said that Iran has the capability of producing both chemical and biological weapons, and Tehran continued to seek dual-use technology for its bioweapons program.

Quite a lot, Frank J. Fleming opines:

[B]oth groups employ the strategy of suicide attacks. Terrorists will kill themselves to hurt Americans for the promise of sexy dames in the afterlife. Liberals in Congress appear willing to commit political suicide by cramming an unpopular health care bill down America’s throat for the promise of later living in a utopia where all the smart people like them get to make all the big decisions for everybody — the secular version of paradise.

Read the whole thing.

Retriever asks:

Why do the Democrats always blame America for whatever we did to provoke it when terrorists attack us, but fail to look to themselves when Americans are righteously angry about Democratic policies…

Christopher Demuth explains that, in endeavoring to establish European-style national health care in America, the left is acting upon a core belief: its faith in the calculative power of human reason to perfect the world.

[M]any liberals today are also progressives. They believe that the natural course of history is the emergence of secular rationality as the true way to think about problems and of state power as the effective way to organize society along rational lines. If that is your worldview, then such things as revealed religion, cultural tradition, and the marketplace (whose outcomes are spontaneous, not rationalized) are vestiges of our primitive past, sure to be displaced by the spreading application of human reason. When liberal politicians describe themselves as “progressives,” that is not just because “liberal” has acquired unpopular connotations but because progressive is the more accurate word for their core beliefs. President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid are progressives in this sense; many recent Democratic presidential candidates were as well—John Kerry, Al Gore, and Michael Dukakis.

The grip of progressivism is probably the best explanation for the Democratic Party’s astonishing campaign to nationalize the U.S. healthcare sector by all means necessary. To attempt to enact a radical and unpopular program in a bill that includes many corrupt provisions, on a party-line vote and through a procedural trick (if the “Slaughter solution” is employed) that seems clearly unconstitutional, appears quite mad and self-defeating to the outsider. But it is not mad at all to those who think it natural and obvious and historically inevitable that the government must administer medical care. In this view, the political actor is simply holding history’s coat while it does its work. Political untidiness, even the loss of an election, are transitory considerations. The progressive mindset also explains, as more than populist demagoguery, the contempt that the proponents of ObamaCare exhibit for doctors and pharmaceutical and medical-insurance companies—for they are the practitioners of a benighted form of healthcare that is about to be swept away by a new and higher form.

The best artistic expression of leftist faith is a new world ruled by secular experts is Mozart’s Masonic opera The Magic Flute (K. 620, 1791).

Liberalism/leftism is a secular religion, and the liberal impulse toward federalizing charity stems from a number of consistently present liberal impulses. Liberalism is a cult with the state at its center in which the credentialed intelligentsia is its priesthood. Anything expanding the power and responsibility of the state inevitably also aggrandizes and affirms the importance of its priesthood, so all state enlargement is good. Socializing, regulating, and nationalizing everything is seen as the fulfillment of the promise that the entire universe can be subdued and rationalized by the calculative powers of human reason wielded by the super-enlightened, educated class of experts. Mankind’s destiny and the fulfillment of the telos of History consists in the continual reduction of the natural, free, and disordered condition of mankind, the market and the world into an ordered, regulated, and managed sphere administered by the intelligentsia under the aegis of the state.

“Es lebe Sarastro! Sarastro soll leben! Er ist es, dem wir uns mit Freuden ergeben. Stets mög’ er des Lebens als Weiser sich freun, Er ist unser Abgott, dem alle sich weihn.”

9:28 video

The poor are invaluable to the priesthood of Leviathan, since it is their neediness which allows the most spoiled and privileged element of society to complain bitterly on their behalf and to demand indignantly that ordinary people surrender to them ever-increasing portions of their liberty and wealth. The poor must be assisted and cared for, you see.

The theoretical elimination of poverty by coercive wealth transfer and social engineering is a key goal of the left’s statist agenda. The replacement of the untidy state of Nature with a manicured and properly managed society is expected to demonstrate irrefutably the superiority of human reason over the former. The leveling of social and biological differences, the abolition of tragedy, and the replacement of charity with entitlement will also firmly establish the leftwing ideal of Égalité, it is supposed, as reality.

The implementation of this costly and coercive agenda is, of course, wholly agreeable to the left because each step in the process only enlarges the power, privilege, and importance of mankind’s enlightened new masters, and the entire process was always intended to be funded at the expense of the ordinary citizen, the general population.

Peter Beinart describes very accurately what has happened to the democrats.

Barack Obama is a representative of the younger, more ideologically-committed, much more naive generation of left-wing democrats, typical of that party’s radical base. He’s the type of democrat who is too young to have seen George McGovern lose 49 states or see Jimmy Carter shredded by Ronald Reagan.

[A] generation of Democrats, which includes Al From, Mark Penn, Joe Lieberman, William Galston, Elaine Kamarck, Dick Morris, Ed Koch, Jane Harman, Evan Bayh, and to some extent Bill and Hillary Clinton, being a liberal is like walking past a bear. Move cautiously and reassuringly and the bear will purr contentedly. But make any sudden or threatening gestures, and you’ll be mauled because, fundamentally, the bear distrusts liberals. As Galston and Kamarck wrote in their famed 1989 essay “The Politics of Evasion”—a document that helped define the “don’t scare the bear” wing of the party—Democrats can pass liberal programs “but these programs must be shaped and defended within an inhospitable ideological climate.” To pretend that the American people are liberal at heart is to evade political reality, with devastating results.

By the late 1990s, “don’t scare the bear” Democrats pretty much dominated Washington. But in the Bush years, a new faction began to emerge. These Democrats were mostly newer to politics. They had never seen a McGovern or Mondale mauled for being too far to the left. What they had seen was the post-1994 Bill Clinton, who shied away from ambitious liberal reform. And they had seen the Iraq War, which DLC types largely supported, partly out of fear that opposing it would allow Republicans to paint Democrats as soft on defense.

By 2003, this new group of Democrats was angry as hell. The Iraq War, which party elders had mostly backed, was proving a disaster, and to make matters worse, Republicans were clobbering Democrats as weak anyway. So these Democrats began fashioning a different theory: Perhaps the problem wasn’t that Democrats looked weak because they were too liberal, perhaps the problem was that Democrats looked weak because they didn’t stand up for what they really believed. In 2005, the historian Rick Pearlstein—who became something of a hero to these folks—published a book entitled The Stock Ticker and the Super Jumbo. Republicans, he argued, were like Boeing: a company that persevered in building a super jumbo airplane even when the market was bad, and thus built a dominant brand. Democrats were like the stock ticker, constantly shifting with the public mood and thus winning momentary victories but failing to build a brand people could identify with.

To change, Perlstein argued, “Democrats need to make commitments, or a network of commitments, that do not waver from election to election.” They must stick with them “even if they don’t succeed” at any given moment because doing unpopular things because you believe in them convinces Americans that you have core beliefs, which in the long term strengthens your brand. …

When Scott Brown won his Senate seat, he made Obama choose. On the one hand, he handed the White House an excuse to abandon comprehensive reform and return to the incremental, small-bore approach that Clinton pursued after 1994. The Brown victory, in fact, seemed to illustrate the “don’t scare the bear” theory perfectly. Obama had passed the stimulus and bailed out the banks and taken over part of the auto industry and for the American people, it was too much liberal activism too fast. Polls not only showed Americans turning against Obama’s health care bill, they showed them turning against big government more generally. Continuing to pursue comprehensive reform in this inhospitable environment, warned former Carter pollster Patrick Caddell and former Clinton pollster Douglas Schoen, in language that echoed “the Politics of Evasion,” would bring political calamity. “Wishing, praying or pretending” that the American people support health care reform more than they do, they insisted, “will not change these outcomes.”

Superjumbo Democrats, by contrast, argued that the public wasn’t so much anti-reform as they were anti-the legislative process that had produced reform. But more fundamentally, they argued that the American people would respect Democrats for not backing down in the face of adversity. The party might still lose seats this fall, but over time health care reform would prove popular, and the party’s willingness to fight for it would strengthen the Democratic brand.

Why exactly Obama—advised by David Axelrod, Rahm Emmanuel and Valerie Jarrett—decided to double down on health care remains unclear. But it’s a good bet that President Hillary Clinton—advised by Mark Penn—would have acted differently. And in acting the way he did, Obama has turned himself into a superjumbo Democrat. For the foreseeable future, he has forfeited any chance of bridging the red-blue divide. Prominent Republicans have already announced that if Democrats try to pass health care via reconciliation, they will not work across the aisle to pass anything major this year. Conversely, Obama has cemented his bond with the netroots. It doesn’t really matter that the health care reform bill he is fighting for isn’t particularly left-wing. For the netroots, a politicians’ ideological purity has always been less important than his willingness to resist pressure from the other side, which is exactly what Obama has just done.

Whether health care reform passes or not, Obama has embraced polarization over triangulation. He has chosen Karl Rove’s politics of base mobilization over Dick Morris’s politics of crossover appeal, with consequences not merely for how he campaigns for Democrats in 2010, but for he campaigns for himself in 2012. And that’s a disaster for “don’t scare the bear” Democrats whether Obamacare passes or not. The reason is that the DLC wing of the party is much more top-down than the MoveOn wing. It has always wielded influence primarily through elected leaders rather than grassroots activists. But today, Obama is the only leader in the Democratic Party who really matters. As the retirement of Evan Bayh illustrates, there are few nationally prominent DLC-aligned politicians left. (The one person who could have rallied that faction of the party against Obama is now his secretary of state). The DLC wing’s best hope for relevance, therefore, was that Obama himself would restrain the party’s base, that his White House would nurture a new generation of centrist candidates.

That hope is now gone. From top to bottom, Democrats have decided to bet the party’s future on the belief that Americans prefer bold liberals to cautious ones. Now it’s up to the bear.

Neal Katyal celebrates the decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld

Andrew C. McCarthy rebuts misleading editorial claims that certain attorneys now employed by the Department of Justice were “only doing their job” and following the conventional ethical obligations of the Bar in pursuing various kinds of innovative litigation on behalf of War on Terror detainees.

The fictional premise of these wayward complaints is that the Justice Department’s al Qaeda lawyers stand in the same shoes as criminal-defense lawyers. The latter must represent even unsavory characters because the Constitution guarantees counsel to those charged with crimes.

To the contrary, the Justice Department’s al Qaeda lawyers were volunteers, just as Mr. Holder volunteered in the Heller case. Unlike the British soldiers represented by John Adams, the Gitmo detainees are not entitled to counsel. They are not criminal defendants. They are plaintiffs in offensive lawsuits, filed under the rubric of habeas corpus, challenging their detention as war prisoners. The nation is at war, and the detainees are unprivileged alien enemy combatants. By contrast, the United States was not at war with England at the time of the Boston Massacre, and the British soldiers were lawful police, not nonuniformed terrorists.

There is no right to counsel in habeas corpus cases. Thousands of American inmates must represent themselves in such suits—there is no parade of white-shoe law firms at their beck and call. Until 2004, moreover, enemy prisoners were not permitted to challenge their detention at all. The Supreme Court rejected such claims in the 1950 Eisentrager case, precisely because they damage the national war effort. Yes, left-leaning lawyers have convinced the Supreme Court’s liberal bloc to ignore precedent and permit Gitmo habeas petitions. That neither makes these suits less damaging, nor endows the enemy with a right to counsel.

Advocating for the enemy is a modern anomaly, not a proud tradition. Defense lawyers representing accused criminals perform a constitutionally required function. Not so the Department of Justice’s Gitmo volunteers. They represented al Qaeda operatives because they wanted to, not because they had to. The suggestion that they served a vital constitutional function is self-adulating myth. Their motive was to move the law in a particular direction.

Ironically, a number of Republican and conservative lawyers have written editorials and signed letters expressing the same specious analysis that equates the proactive defense of the enemy by the members of the treasonous community of fashion with the conventional acceptance of an assigned duty to provide representation to an unpopular or controversial client. You do not find Mr. Katyal, Mr. Holder, or certain representatives of Shearman & Sterling volunteering to defend the marines charged with murder or the Navy seals who gave the leader of a mob that murdered and mutilated Americans a fat lip.

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and former Solicitor General Theodore Olson, I suppose, deserve some special appreciation for their highmindedness and inclination to bend over backward in order to refrain from pointing fingers at members of their own profession in the opposing camp, but their insistence on placing the best interpretation on the motives of opponents seems more than a little naive in a world in which the democrat party left endeavors to criminalize policy differences as frequently as possible.

There is the difference between Republicans and democrats, between the American right and the American left in a nutshell. Mukasey and Olson are found hastening to defend Neal Katyal’s efforts to utilize American law for the benefit of those making war against it and the Geneva Convention to protect illegal combatants who routinely flout it, while the left is enthusiastically trying to claim that Bush Administration attorneys deserve prosecution for violations of international law as well as sanctions for professional misconduct.

What we have here is the successful application by the left of Saul Alinsky’s radical technique of “making your opponent obey his own rules” on two levels. Leftwing attorneys have successfully compelled the United States government to accord constitutional protections and the privileges of domestic legal process to armed enemies captured overseas and effectively contrived to have the Supreme Court enforce Article 75 of Protocol I (1977) of the Geneva Convention which the United States never signed. Meanwhile, the left accuses and makes strong efforts to punish Republican attorneys for legal and ethical violations on the basis of ultra-partisan and highly strained interpretations. Yet, prominent Republican legal figures shrink from criticizing, even from accurately identifying, enthusiastic advocacy on behalf of the enemy in time of war as what it really is.

Michael Ledeen (who does not know how to spell Yalie) contemplates the impact of sympathy for the underdog, what Nietszche referred to as ressentiment, on the perspective of the media and the elite in the conflict with militant Islam.

I think the first time I grappled with this question was in an undergraduate philosophy course. The professor was a Yaley (sic), very very smart, and loved to provoke us. His job, after all. So one day, when a famous person had died, he said in his flippant way, “obviously this man was much more important than Joe Schmoe down the block, and the society should value him more, and try harder to protect him and tend to him if he’s sick, etc etc.”

And so we debated, in the way of young students. Who is to say that one man’s life is worth more than another’s? Maybe Mr Schmoe was a better husband/father than Einstein, where does that go in the balance scales of life? Yes, we will long remember Einstein, and no one remembers Schmoe except maybe his dear ones, but still…

In a way, there’s nothing to debate, because Einstein had a far greater effect on far more people than Schmoe did. But one of the great achievements of Western civilization is our conviction that every human life is precious, and that belief underlies the entire Judeo-Christian enterprise. So, while Einstein will live forever, as they say, Schmoe was endowed with the same fundamental rights, and in that sense Schmoe was as important as Einstein. …

Back in that southern California classroom, plenty of us developed a real affection for Schmoe, and resented Einstein’s importance. It somehow felt wrong to say that, if you could only save one of them, it had to be the great genius. What’s wrong with rooting for the underdog? And so terrorists get a sympathy vote, just like Schmoe.

A lot of ideology rests on the love of Schmoe, even if he turns out to be a very nasty piece of work and wants us dead. At about the same time we were debating in our philosophy class, Norman Mailer was extolling the virtues of criminals, which had long been a staple of anti-bourgeois literature, especially in France, where the Marquis de Sade somehow became a culture hero. The nihilists couldn’t care less about Einstein; they wanted to blow up the entire society that made him possible. The Communists wanted Schmoe to become part of a new proletarian dictatorship, where Einstein could work, to be sure, but his work wouldn’t be any more important than Schmoe’s. The Nazis wanted Einstein dead because he was a filthy Jew, while if Schmoe had a few generations of Aryans to his record he’d be hailed as a member of the Master Race. In many corners of the Islamic world today, Schmoe’s in good shape if he’s a Muslim, while Einstein gets blown up or beheaded.

You see where I’m going, don’t you? After all these years, it seems more and more that my prof was right, most evidently in those cases when Schmoe, as he does so often, is trying to destroy a society that’s clearly better than his own. Do the lives of Daniel Pearl and his executioner, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, have the same value? I don’t think so.

Yet it’s notable how often Schmoe wins popular sympathy. All those “anti-war” people, for example, end up supporting killer Schmoes against our best, indeed the world’s best: the men and women of the American military. And while the anti-warriors are usually careful to tell us how much they “respect the troops” (which they don’t), it’s pretty clear that they consider a terrorist to be worth at least the same as a U.S. Marine.

Which is nuts.

In the “great debate” over Iran, you hardly ever hear any great concern over the fact that Iranian killers and their proxies are murdering and maiming American soldiers most every day. As if nobody really cared about our guys, who are defending a superior society and a superior culture against the depredations of terrorists from a tyrannical and fanatical regime that glorifies misogyny, stones adultresses to death, kills its critics, and rapes its prisoners as a matter of course.

Nuts again.

A lot of the talk about the “Arab street” (which does not even exist), for example, is a reprise of the glorification of the weak, downtrodden working class (which does not exist either, although perhaps it did, once upon a time). They shouldn’t be glorified. They should be freed.

Joseph Finlay, at American Thinker, discusses why the left has it wrong.

With the Orwellian definition now in play, at once the great liberal issues of our day become moral imperatives — and not mere political talking points subject to honest discussion. Nationalized health care, even if unworkable or bankrupting in practical application, becomes a noble obligation for you and me to subsidize — while Congress keeps its own sweetheart plan with no thought of sacrifice by the “more equal animals.” Or global warming crusaders can jet all over the world to useless summits and live in mansions while with a straight face urging the average citizen to turn his thermostat down. “Do as I say and not as I do” becomes an acceptable premise because, after all, the beautiful people really do know what’s best for the rest of us. It is no longer God nudging the heart toward a higher plane of concern based on love and empathy, but rather the state ramming its religion down one’s throat with a cold and heartless inefficiency.

I’d say that charity, from the perspective of the leftwing elite, represents a demand that the world be tidied up so that no unseemliness or unhappiness might mar our haute bourgeois elite’s enjoyment of its pleasures. Their uniformly desired methodology invariably consists of government mandates, i.e. of making George do it.

The impulse toward charitable coercion serves a second function, of course, for liberals. It would be unseemly for a class composed of the most privileged and affluent elements of society to make demands for further allotments of power and prestige on its own behalf. The left is seeking power, trying to redistribute everyone else’s income and liberties, not for themselves, but only for the poor and disenfranchised, you see.

Hat tip to the Barrister.