Perhaps it may seem like referring to political proposals as insane is a sort of metaphorical use of language or that it is just hyperbole. But I mean it literally, and I know of what I speak. When I was growing up, it was rather routine for people I cared about to declare suddenly that they could control others’ minds or were Jesus Christ or that a shadowy cabal of villains was coming after them.

Truth be told, my mother was never thrilled for me and my brother to spend so much time growing up around mental patients. But our father, her ex-husband, was an earthy social worker, head of a local nonprofit organization called “The Self Help Center” that gave tenuously stabilized clients a place to congregate. And he was too damn cheap to hire a babysitter. So, many an afternoon and evening were spent playing cards, board games, and Nintendo with slightly disheveled adults on heavy psychotropic medication — and occasionally off of it. …

Today, lunatics increasingly dominate the asylums of America’s elite institutions — the federal bureaucracies, the media, and most especially the universities. I want to be perfectly clear: I mean no insult, as there goes any of us but for a few bad incentives and a social milieu with the wrong rewards tipping us over the fence. And it’s not that the truest of true believers are all that numerous but that they’re the most obsessively focused and have gobs of money behind them. The wackiest of excesses are just in the water now, part of the obligatory ambiance. Ambitious folks tend to figure out where their bread is buttered.

[That’s how incentives work. This isn’t an accident. — Ed]