Patriot Update - A Free Press for the Conservative Revolution

President Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel infamously said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

But this is hardly unusual. Exploiting supposed crises has always been a favourite tactic of the Left. This has been thoroughly documented in Thomas Sowell's book The Vision of the Anointed, which should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the left's mindset (see some good quotes from The Vision Of The Anointed and a Review). But first, Sowell contrasts two ‘visions’:

The Anointed vision, held by the Left, sees man as basically perfectible, providing that the Right People were to run society tightly, and remake people in their image. Such people talk loftily about goals and intentions, and tend to ignore the results as long as the intentions are good (forgetting what a certain road is paved with).

This is contrasted with what Sowell calls the ‘Tragic vision’, which is basically conservative libertarianism, which recognizes that the world is not perfectible, and that man is flawed. That is, greed, selfishness and limited knowledge are the lot of all humans (compare my previous column The Greed Myth).

Any vision that recognizes that all humans are flawed would distrust concentrated power in any one person or institution. Thus it prefers to reduce power by dividing it with checks and balances. The tragic vision also tries to study policies in terms of their incentives and constraints on people as they actually are. That is, they are concerned with what is punished and what is rewarded, because there will be less of the former and more of the latter.

Sowell shows how liberals exploit alleged crises in four stages, discussing a number of different examples:

1. Assert that the issue is a Crisis, so the Anointed decree that Something must be Done, by which they really mean what the Anointed want done. See again the logical fallacy involved:

   Whether there is a crisis is actually irrelevant. Take three areas Sowell discusses: STDs and teen pregnancies; poverty and crime. While the 1960s were a decade of manufactured crises, justifying more government meddling, all of these areas had improved from in the decade before all this activism.

   For example, teen pregnancy was less in 1960 than 1950, and syphilis and gonorrhoea infections had dropped by a half. Poverty had declined by 30% from 1950 to 1965. The absolute number of murders committed in the U.S. in 1960 was less than in 1930, 1940 or 1950, even though the population was larger (murder is a particularly clear indicator of lower crime, since liberals can’t simply dismiss this with “there was just less reported crime back then”).
   
   

2. Something is a Solution of the Anointed. The Anointed predict an improvement, since after all, they mean so well. But those with the Tragic Vision predict problems, based on what is rewarded and what is punished. But the Anointed dismiss these criticisms, declaring that the critics don’t care about the people that their policies are ostensibly designed to help.

   For instance, in the 1960s, Planned Parenthood and other groups exploited the “crisis” in teen pregnancy and venereal disease. This was most lucrative, as they bullied a spineless Congress to give them our money to sponsor ‘sex education’ programs, i.e. promiscuity indoctrination. The Tragic Vision predicted that when kids are indoctrinated with sex apart from morality, then they will practise what they learn.

   Similarly, LBJ began the huge expansion of the government welfare bureaucracies in his “War on Poverty”. Opponents warned that it would reward precisely the sorts of behavior that causes poverty, such as non-working and having kids out of wedlock, while punishing the productive (see The Left vs the Poor).

   With criminals, the Anointed Left rejected the tried and true method of punishing thugs—thus deterring this behaviour. Instead they pushed “root causes” nonsense, proclaiming that the criminals were “victims of society” such as poverty and racism. Yet these factors were much higher in the 1950s when there was lower crime. And the Left advocate unproven “rehabilitation” without regard for the harm on the public (who deserve it anyway), but the elite Lefties are safe behind their gated communities.
   
   

3. The results come in. For example, teen pregnancy rose from 68 per thousand in 1970 to 96 per thousand by 1980. Venereal disease rate skyrocketed 350 % between 1965 and 1978. And remember they were on the decline before sex ed was introduced.

   We know the results of the “War on Poverty”—poverty won! Similarly, crime rates skyrocketed just as the Tragic Visionaries predicted: increase the chance that a criminal’s sentence will be light, or that a judge will release him altogether on a technicality, and it should also be not surprising that crime increases. And as this becomes known, witnesses become less willing to testify because of fear that the thug will be out of prison soon to take revenge, so the criminals know there is even less chance of conviction.

   That is, the results were the opposite to the lofty goals of the Anointed and just what those with the Tragic Vision predicted.
   
   

4. The Anointed explain away the results. Sometimes there is revisionist history on what their goals were. Other times the very failure is used as proof that things would have even been worse without their ‘solution’. And they have the chutzpah to demand even more money for more of the same! Another excuse is ‘correlation is not causation’, which is true, but liberals apply this only when their ‘solution’ fails in just the way that those of the Tragic Vision said it would.

   Understanding this typical method of the liberal Anointed might have immunized us against the current crisis mongering that got us the huge Spendulus debt and Obamacare. And if we are not vigilant, a huge carbon tax to avert the global warm-mongering “crisis”.

Obama Zombies