House of Eratosthenes

The government is under conservative leadership for roughly six years out of every ten. Liberals, therefore, want more of life’s decisions to be made by an organization they consider malicious, wrong-headed, treacherous and evil sixty percent of the time.

I’m not just whacking a wasps’ nest (although that certainly is part of what I’m doing…never claimed to be above that stuff, it’s not like anybody else is). This is one of the prime, or should I say central, reasons why I don’t trust liberals. They seem to count on the idea of me, and other people whom they address, lacking any semblance of a long-term memory. A Republican is in charge, and — oh goodness! Abu Ghraib! Selling crack to inner-city kids through the CIA! Renditions! Waterboarding! Look at all this awful, terrible stuff we’re doing! And then a lefty becomes President and suddenly…you know what we need, we need to find a way to get the government into more stuff, we need to set things up so the government makes more decisions.

One of my former colleagues didn’t like the observation, so he did what lefties do: Drag the whole thing off-topic. Last night he ran out of steam, dissolving into a puddle of incomprehensible gibberish as everybody else politely went along with him to see where he was going…something to do with George W. Bush and Clarence Thomas being bad people, or something. So since he wasn’t going anywhere, I went back in and appended/expounded:

Back to the subject at hand: I have a reader who likes to say “all institutions, save for the ones that are by definition right wing, ultimately become left wing.” He’s right, of course, but my question is, are left-wingers counting on this? One example of what they want that I find puzzling, is for the FCC to start revoking broadcasting licenses if stations & networks don’t meet their definition of fair-and-balanced. If I were a lefty I would look at how the government is in the hands of right-wingers three fifths of the time, and I’d say “Yeah, maybe limited government is something we should want FCC should not be getting into this…it could bite us in the butt.”

They don’t even seem to have a whiff of a concern about it. Their credo seems to be, if it can be managed, the government is where it should be managed.

Is it just a primal instinct/impulse? Or are they counting on the law of decrepit institutions leaning left?

I’m going to go with “mixed,” tentatively. Lefties tend to be divided into rudders and propellers — those who decide where the ship is going to go, and then the rank-and-file who provide the propulsion. It’s hard to keep this in mind, but I notice whenever I ask questions of the nature “what is the plan, here?” — the answer seems to come back that the rudders have a plan, and the propellers are just falling into line.

It certainly isn’t natural to be talking up a big ol’ shitstorm about what an evil, awful, sub-human hive of scum and villainy all these government agencies are with that village idiot in charge at the top…and then, just six months later, insisting that the government should be in charge of our health care just because the new guy says it should be. What’s the vision here? Once democrats take over the government, they’ll be in charge forever? Or that time doesn’t exist?

[…] Freeberg makes the point with his usual pith (and vinegar): The government is under conservative leadership for roughly six […]
- A Moment of Minarchism | Professor Mondo | 01/04/2011 @ 09:13
I think they count on Margaret Thatcher’s “ratchet effect” most of the time: when the left is in power they pass as much sweeping legislation as they can; when the right’s in power, the left consolidate their gains. The end game is simply to expand the bureaucracy as much as possible — once you create a government program it’s there forever, and then Conquest’s Law takes over.

[All the right can really do, Thatcher says, is jam down on the ratchet for all they’re worth when they’re in power].
- Severian | 01/04/2011 @ 10:57
Also: cognitive dissonance. I think this is an overrated phenomenon, but it applies here — history must begin anew every morning for the leftist, since the past is pretty much one continuous chronicle of them being wrong.
- Severian | 01/04/2011 @ 11:05
I need some clarification here. If you meant to say that government has been in the hands of “Republicans” approximately sixty percent of the time, I might be able to go along with that. I haven’t seen an actual conservative in the White House since Ronald Reagan. The few real conservatives in either house of congress really aren’t in control.

Other than that, I like the point you have to make about leftists not really thinking carefully about this stuff.
- Moshe Ben-David | 01/06/2011 @ 08:25
I’m going by who’s got the White House; because that’s how they do it. If the President is a Republican, every single agency in the executive branch is rotten to the core.

And they’ll believe anything, too. Karl Rove outed Valerie Plame, the CIA was selling crack cocaine to kids, George H. W. Bush flew to Tehran to work out a deal where the hostages would be kept locked up until 1/20/81. It’s all pure evil, but then as soon as the new guy is sworn in we have to give the government — those same evil agencies — all kinds of new functions to perform.
- mkfreeberg | 01/06/2011 @ 08:35

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The Sixty Percent ConundrumTuesday, January 4th, 2011

The Sixty Percent Conundrum
Tuesday, January 4th, 2011