Put more water in the soup, there's better times a'comin...

I admit it, I’ve been in a mood for the past week. For one thing, getting the farm ready for winter is a chore, one that gets more annoying every year that I get older, which seems to be escalating. But those tasks are well underway now, and that’s not really the underlying issue. That comes from the sameness of the daily news, the constant downhill “progress” that the country is undergoing, the incessant beratings and cursings from the Left. And there’s David Brooks assuring the world that he is the centroid of the political universe, Republican flavored, and that Rush and Beck and the tea partiers are merely niche, unimportant little people.

Disgusting, predictable, and boring. The one bright spot is a book I am reading by Thomas Sowell. This book proves that there is a time machine somewhere, because Sowell obviously used it to crib my posts of the past two years and then publish all that stuff clear back in 1993. Only he did a bang-up job on the data and evidence.

The book is “The Vision of the Anointed”. Sowell does the legwork that is necessary to completely illuminate the conditions surrounding the crises that have been defined by the Left, and wars declared on them. He says,

“Despite the great variety of issues in a series of crusading movements among the intelligentsia in the 20th century, several key elements have been common to most of them:

1. Assertions of a great danger to the whole society, a danger to which the masses of people are oblivious.

2. An urgent need for action to avert impending catastrophe.

3. A need for government to drastically curtail the dangerous behavior of the many, in response to the prescient conclusions of the few.

4. A disdainful dismissal of arguments to the contrary as either uninformed, irresponsible, or motivated by unworthy purposes."

And there are stages to each of the Leftist “wars”:

1. The Crisis: manufactured and promoted with emotional and moral stridency; as Sowell demonstrates with real data, there is no actual crisis.[1]

2. The Solution: always interventionism and restrictions on the masses.[1]

3. The Results: always takes the situation to its negative perigee.[1]

4. The Response: measurement is based on false initial conditions, so that a positive – though false – result is reported. (Example: instead of discussing the absolute value of unemployed, the administration promotes the “decrease in the rate of unemployment” and declares success: "stepping back from the brink".)[1]

Sowell analyzes the initial conditions, the purported threat, and the actual results of several Leftist “crusades”, including the infamous “war on poverty”, “demanding sex education to solve teen pregnancy”, “criminal rights”, “health care: infant mortality”, “discrimination in education”, “mortgage discrimination”, and so on. And finally, the response of the Left to the luminous failure of each crusade is shown.

I particularly remember both the “war on poverty” and the “homeless crisis”. The war on poverty spent cash like Obama would - volcanically, building nice new high-rises for the poor… who immediately destroyed them. As Sowell points out, both poverty and crime are epiphenomena of an underlying attitude that didn’t change. In fact, the attitude was reinforced into concrete entitlement, an attitude that was not attacked until Reagan.

The homeless panic was fueled by guilt-ridden claims of millions of homeless people freezing or boiling, depending on the season. This caused local news reporters to go out and count the street people and the “jungle dwellers”, and report that the problem must surely be somewhere else. After a year or so, the crisis disappeared on its own due to lack of homeless people, and the discovery that the small number that did exist didn’t want housing. Mostly they wanted to be left alone.

And of course education is always a panic due to the continual sorry test scores, and drop-out rates of ~50% in big cities. This always requires more taxpayer large$$, despite the negative correlation between government interference and education quality. Homeschooling is proven to far out-produce the government schools at a fraction of the cost per student.

I haven’t finished Sowell’s book yet, and still I recommend it based on the first 80 pages. The analysis that he did over a decade and a half ago fits the ObamaCare crisis like a hand-stitched glove.

There. I feel better now.


[1] Italicized comments here are mine, not Sowell's.