House of Eratosthenes

They have become the party of false-problem-solving. It’s been a good long time, like six years or so since I came up with the acronym C.A.L.W.W.N.T.Y. to describe this fake dance of make-work, this endless merry-go-round litany of “Come A Long Way, We’re Not There Yet.” It usually describes a long, hard process of bringing up one class to enjoy status and privileges on par with another class. But you’ll notice that’s really the lefty approach to everything. “Oh, this is gonna take a long time, we’d better be prepared for a long, hard road.” Translation: You get to sit on your butt and watch me and I’ll make sure I’m fun to watch. Through the years and decades, you get to act like you’re giving up something to help other people when you’re really not. So it appeals to lazy people who want to be given credit. That’s the truth.

I hear a lot of liberals trying to sell others on the “Reagan democrat” thing. Something like “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties, and actually I haven’t seen a real leader since Ronald Reagan.” Heard that one?

Well you know how I remember Ronald Reagan, first & foremost? Was a time we had an “energy crisis” that would take a good long time to solve, and it plagued us without an end in sight. We remember the 1970’s and automatically the first thing we remember is this energy crisis. But we do not recall such a crisis from the 1980’s. Nor do we remember President Reagan sponsoring any kind of national tournament to see who could come up with the most ingenious alternative fuel or perpetual-motion device; he simply put an end to hare-brained policies. And, in the end, it turned out we had been told things that were not true; namely, that this problem would take forever-and-a-day to fix. It just wasn’t true.

The picture that you need all these pieces of information to get fully painted, is one in which regulation turns out to not be the cure-all that a lot of people somehow imagine it to be. Some of us have some experience seeing regulation work up-close, and from that we’ve been able to see: If this process ever does manage to fix a problem, it will be like the stopped clock telling the correct time. But it is a political device, working on human perception. To understand the difference between regulating a problem and solving it, you have to notice the details of what’s going on, and a lot of liberals go through life nursing a hostility against details. As has often been pointed out around here, if they had a tolerance for details they wouldn’t be liberals.

The other thing to be learned is, when the regulators actually make new problems by way of their regulating, first thing out of their mouths is “we didn’t make this problem, it was those other guys.” But again, details. You look at what was happening, what was being sold, who was trying to do what, and it turns out the regulators do cause problems.

There is nothing to stop them from doing so. It’s an inherently thoughtless process. The regulators do, whatever, and it’s just assumed that it must be good because it’s “regulating” and that sounds good. Furthermore, if you try to stop them then you must be in favor of the problem continuing.

A dog puts a lot more thought into what it’s doing when it begs for scraps from your dinner table. That is not a personal insult toward regulators, mind you. They spend a lot of their time operating according to written rules that tell them they can’t think about what they’re doing.

I learned a long time ago that part of the price you pay when you go through unique, personal experiences to learn a little something extra about a subject is, you separate yourself from what the big-everybody-else thinks about it. Thus it is with regulation. And this is a source of continuing frustration to me, I have to say…people say “regulate it!” — they do not know what they’re talking about. And I do. And if I try to explain it to them, they aren’t going to understand. I haven’t found a way to get the point across and perhaps there isn’t one.

But it is good that we have the Internet to capture things like Congressman Frank’s falsehoods and duplicity and blame-the-other-guy nonsense. Two hundred thirty-six years, we’re still learning about what kind of government will help matters and what kind of government won’t. But we’ll get there eventually.

Great post.
- tracycoyle | 10/21/2012 @ 18:04

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Who, Exactly, Made This Mess in the First Place?Saturday, October 20th, 2012

Who, Exactly, Made This Mess in the First Place?
Saturday, October 20th, 2012