A Feature, not a Bug

posted at 1:36 pm on June 16, 2010 by Steven Den Beste

Just some comments on a bunch of things I saw yesterday. A number of people see Obama and the left acting in curious ways and don’t seem to understand them.

Let’s get the groundwork out of the way. To the left, it’s an article of faith that America is too powerful. America is too influential. America is too rich. America consumes too much. Americans as a group are too independent, too rowdy, not controlled enough. Americans are too nationalistic, too unwilling to give up part or all of their sovereignty to “emerging world governance”.

America needs to be humbled. Americans need to have their confidence shattered, to become introspective, to consider (finally, at long last) “why they hate us”. America needs to bow to world opinion.

All of this is necessary in order to advance the single paramount social good: equality (of outcome). Equality is more important than anything else. In particulaar, equality is more important than freedom. Creating a state of equality, and maintaining it, will require government control and if individual liberty opposes that, then liberty shall have to give way.

With Obama, the left finally has a president who is in tune with this philosophy.

Investor’s Business Daily writes about “Losing ‘The War That Has To Be Won’“.

So the military solution the president was so confident of in Afghanistan — the “smart war,” the “good war,” as Democrats portrayed in the 2006 and 2008 elections that brought them to power — could slip through America’s fingers.

And Michael Cohen asks, “Why has the Left been so silent on Afghanistan?” He then talks about how it was a lefty talking point that we should cut-and-run from Iraq so that we could concentrate on and win the war in Afghanistan, which they always claimed was the most important one. Yet now we’ve largely won in Iraq, and things are going badly in Afghanistan, the left hasn’t been making any sound.

He lists some explanations, but I think misses the most important reason: the American left deeply wants America to lose a war. They wanted it to be Iraq, but that doesn’t seem to be possible any longer. The damnable Bush managed to win it before leaving office. So it’ll have to be Afghanistan.

Losing a war will (it is hoped) chasten Americans, take them down a notch, cause them to lose self confidence, make them introspective. All that would be to the good.

John Hinderaker asks,

If the federal government artificially inflates the price of fossil fuels through taxation and thereby forces Americans to use less desirable sources of energy, while at the same time other countries continue to use more efficient fossil fuels, it will raise the relative price of all American products and devastate our economy. Is it possible that Barack Obama does not know this? I’m not sure; his grasp of even the most basic economic principles seems shaky at best.

Devastating our economy and making us economically uncompetitive is a feature, not a bug. The whole “global warming” scam has been about throttling the industrialized world, especially the US, by restricting use of energy. It was never really about saving the world climate, it was always about trying to bring about international equality. You could tell that because the Kyoto accord restricted use of energy by rich nations, but permitted poor ones to increase their use of energy.

Imposing taxes on fossil fuels will make them more expensive, and it’s a basic economic principle that when things cost more, people use less. To the left, this is a good thing. (And as an added benefit it will bring more money into government coffers which can be used to Do Good Works.)

And if the American economy gets devastated, then necessarily Americans will consume less, which is something deeply to be desired.

Ramesh Ponnuru and Michael Cannon talk about current Republican efforts to repeal the “individual mandate”, a deeply unpopular aspect of the Health Care bill. Cannon seems to assume that the Democrats won’t let that one part be repealed, but I’m not so sure.

Remember the story, “The Tar Baby“? The real lefty goal when it comes to health care is “single payer”, full government control over medicine. If the individual mandate gets repealed, then the private business of health insurance will become economically impossible. Insurance companies will get out of the business, or they’ll go out of business. And in the end, the only solution will be for the government to step in and take the whole thing over — leading to “single payer”.

Born and bred in the briar patch, Republicans, born and bred in the briar patch…

Finally, Carol Platt Liebau asks, about Obama:

He has more power than anyone in the world. He could have used it to waive the Jones Act quickly (though it would upset the unions), or to order barrier walls to be built to guard the Louisiana shore (now, Gov. Jindal has done the latter — at least someone’s acting like a Chief Executive around here!).

But he’s got no experience in acting . . . just in talking, visioning, and legislating. In other words, we’ve got a Chief Executive who’s not . . . an executive.

The American Left is thinks teleologically. To a Teleologist, “visioning” is how you make things happen. If Obama can only care enough, then the problem will solve itself.

That’s how it works for community organizers, you know.

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