House of Eratosthenes

“We have stopped creating wealth.” An observation that fits these times. This point goes over liberals’ heads, I’ve noticed. They react with indignation and some measure of rancor to the idea that the Obama Stimulus has failed, accuse the critics of being fact-challenge, and start duly reciting their “facts.” Jobs created or saved. It doesn’t seem to register with them that their examples are almost entirely concerned with overhead, with teaching and construction jobs making up the bulk of what they have to discuss here.

To make their ideas look good, I’ve said many times before, it is necessary to make similar things look entirely different, and different things look identical to one another. This is a distinction they are not allowed to recognize nor will they allow anyone else to recognize it: There is creating wealth that did not exist before, and there is creating some kind of resource or conduit that will enable the wealth to be created. The latter counts, but only if the former clocks in. If the road is built but nobody uses it for anything, save to buy some more malt liquor and smokes and tattoos and lottery tickets, the economy isn’t going to be helped much.

Ed Driscoll, who headlines it as “And now, a Few Words from Margaret Thatcher on the Failure of Obamanomics.” By way of Instapundit.

Two of my very favorite people. Here’s one of my favorite Thatcher stories, as related by Christopher Hitchens:

From “Hitch 22,” his recent memoir:

“Care to meet the new Leader?” Who could refuse?

Within moments, Margaret Thatcher and I were face to face. Within moments, too, I had turned away and was showing her my buttocks. I suppose that I must give some sort of explanation for this. Almost as soon as we shook hands on immediate introduction, I felt that she knew my name and had perhaps connected it to the socialist weekly that had recently called her rather sexy. While she struggled adorably with this moment of pretty confusion, I felt obliged to seek controversy and picked a fight with her on a detail of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe policy.

She took me up on it. I was (as it chances) right on the small point of fact, and she was wrong. But she maintained her wrongness with such adamantine strength that I eventually conceded the point and even bowed slightly to emphasize my acknowledgment.

“No,” she said. “Bow lower!” Smiling agreeably, I bent forward a bit farther. “No, no,” she trilled. “Much lower!” By this time, a little group of interested bystanders was gathering. I again bent forward, this time much more self-consciously. Stepping around behind me, she unmasked her batteries and smote me on the rear with the parliamentary order-paper that she had been rolling into a cylinder behind her back. I regained the vertical with some awkwardness. As she walked away, she looked back over her shoulder and gave an almost imperceptibly slight roll of the hip while mouthing the words: “Naughty boy!”

I had and have eyewitnesses to this. At the time, though, I hardly believed it myself. It is only from a later perspective, looking back on the manner in which she slaughtered and cowed all the former male leadership of her party and replaced them with pliant tools, that I appreciate the premonitory glimpse—of what someone in another context once called “the smack of firm government”—that I had been afforded.

Even at the time, as I left that party, I knew I had met someone rather impressive. And the worst of “Thatcherism,” as I was beginning by degrees to discover, was the rodent slowly stirring in my viscera: the uneasy but unbanishable feeling that on some essential matters she might be right.

Dame Thatcher out-Reaganed Reagan in many, many ways.
- bpenni | 08/30/2012 @ 10:48
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- Learned failure | Ahthionline | 09/01/2012 @ 00:40

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“What Have We Learned from the Failure of Socialism?”Thursday, August 30th, 2012

“What Have We Learned from the Failure of Socialism?”
Thursday, August 30th, 2012