We all know the motives of liberal Democrats are pure, their hearts true, their lives guiltless of the favoritism and nepotism and self-interest and ideological blindness of Republicans and conservatives. Harry Reid is willing to go the extra step. He did nothing wrong in handing $31,000 of his donors’ money to his granddaughter, he told reporters, but he plans to reimburse his campaign anyway. What a saint.
“I must study politics and war,” John Adams said, “that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.” In Harry Reid’s America a man must win political office so that his sons may have the liberty to practice law and register as lobbyists, engage in rent-seeking and government relations and crisis management and communications, in order to give their children a right to live in Brooklyn, to enroll in the New School, to visit the Vermont Studio Center, to have cronies finance their off-off-off-Broadway shows, to enjoy their allowance from grandpa. This is the arrangement put before the voters this coming Election Day; this is the “system” rigged to benefit the family Reid; this is the configuration of power that Charles and David Koch want to disrupt. How awful of them. How “un-American.”
We had a choice of frying pan or fire in 2008, except for the fact that Palin was on the ticket. My hope was that McCain would win, then die of joy upon taking the oath of office.
Adam Smith’s formula for prosperity — “peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice” — is the very modest ambition that conservatives aim for. Limited government is the tool by which government can be made to do good without necessarily being good, or being composed of good men.
The progressive state, on the other hand, is a state infused with moral purpose. If politics is to be a jihad, then the state must be invested with extraordinary power to achieve its moral mission. There is no way to invest the state with extraordinary power without also investing those powers in the men who hold its offices and staff its bureaucracies, which hold ever more nearly absolute power over our property and our lives. (And given that the Obama administration has made a policy of assassinating U.S. citizens without legal process, we might as well call that power “absolute.”) But if those elective offices and regulatory fortresses are to be staffed with men who are corrupt and corruptible, then the progressive vision of the morality-infused state must falter.
And they — we — are all corruptible.
Lord Acton was right, once again, about the power of power to corrupt.
We can’t rely on them for commercial spaceflight. It’s truly appalling that we’re going to have a multi-week delay at the Cape because the infrastructure lacks robustness. Unfortunately, the incentive structure for government expenditures allows this to happen.
It’s foolish, even devastating, to put yourself deep into undischargeable debt to get a worthless degree. In a sane world, the people promoting this would be jailed for fraud.
I think that we have indeed reached a point where we should legitimately ask if he’s suffering from dementia. I wouldn’t wish it on any one, but if it’s true, he should step aside, for the sake of his party, and country. I wonder if there is anything happening behind the scenes? Certainly Schumer must see an opportunity there.