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All The Feels
There’s an interesting quote embedded in this interview with the leader of Canada’s Conservative party.
“I believe the problem with Liberals is that they don’t care about the results of their policies, they just care about the intentions that they show. They wrap themselves up in emotion and sending a signal about what they care about. The effects of their policies are usually terrible but they try to gloss over that.
“Conservatives have the inverse problem — we don’t do enough to show that we are engaged on these issues and care about them, we go right to results.”
I will leave it to the Ricochetti to debate the veracity of that last sentence, but the first paragraph rings true: The standard response from progressives after the inevitable failure of their attempts to modify reality is “Yes, it didn’t work, but our heart was in the right place.”
The damage inflicted on the victims of their folly means little to the liberal, because as long as their heart is in the right place and they felt good while doing it, what actually happened is of little concern. They don’t mind breaking a few eggs to make an omelet, as long as none of the eggs that are broken are theirs.
Published in Politics
And then they double-down with: “This failure just shows that we need to spend more money on the issue!”
I think it’s Andrew Klavan who so often talks about how Republican politicians focus too much on the charts and graphs and numbers, and forget that people connect much better with a narrative. Democrats often win by giving people a narrative, even if it’s a very misleading one.
Personally, I think statists have an easier time of it because they’re pushing easy answers. “These people have no money. Let’s give them some.” “This thing is bad. Let’s ban it.” “This thing is good. Let’s make everybody do it.”
A liberty-oriented solution can be a simple answer, but it’s not usually an easy one. Liberty’s simple answer sounds uncaring, so we must explain the complicated reasons that justify it. A flat tax is less complicated than what we have now, but we have to explain why moving to a flat tax gives the wealthy a bigger tax cut. And so on.
Thinking through the consequences of an action in advance is a lot of brain work. You can’t expect progressives to be capable of that, can you?
“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.” – GK Chesterton
Our weakness could be a strength if we looked at it that way.
This sounds completely unrelated, but: When my oldest child, a daughter, got married, we hired a wedding planner even though we had a relatively small budget to work with. What an education that experience was for me. I learned so much, and we didn’t need a professional planner for my second child, also a daughter. I knew how to organize the project, how to find the resources we needed, how construct a timetable, and how to stay within our budget. Without having had the planner the first time, I would never have known those resources existed.
What I see when I look at poverty is an intense need in this country for people with life-planning skills. I think people often fall into poverty because they don’t see how to connect the dots of their life, they don’t know what’s out there, and they aren’t assertive.
Every Republican I have ever worked with in my volunteer life was a thousand times better at conceiving and implementing solutions to problems than any Democrat I have worked with.
It’s our strength–our analytical abilities and positive attitude. Democrats encase poverty in cement. Republicans have no patience with poverty. They see it as unnecessary suffering. They hate it so much that they find solutions that actually work.
Of course, they don’t actually end up with an omelet, because the gas isn’t reliable, and the stove manufactured by their “just” system doesn’t work (except for the models that are known to be delivered to the bosses). But since they intended to make an omelet, the broken eggs are fine, as long as they aren’t the ones broken.
I just read Sheriff David Clarke’s book; he talks about running a jail. He eliminated all the oogy-boogy “job skills” programs because they didn’t work. Instead, he instituted a routine; inmates had to be out of bed by 8 a.m. and in bed (lights out) by 10. They had to be dressed and functioning. They had to be polite. They had to be on time for their assignments. Etc.
These are, actually, job skills—desperately needed ones. Many of those who end up in prison have never developed them. It doesn’t matter if you can solder or weld or re-wire a house if you can’t get out of bed, get dressed and show up at the job when you said you were going to. I thought it was brilliant. It sounded Mean but it was actually deeply humane.
My wife and I have close friends (I went to college and grad school with the husband) who we know to be very liberal. I was talking with them about something or other a few days ago and used the term “virtue signaling.” They both looked at me in a way that told me they had never heard the term, despite both of them seemingly being “well informed” (although I know that they only watch network news and PBS, so how informed can they be?) Virtue signaling is the perfect term for the affliction of the left, in my opinion. You can tell them Head Start and other programs don’t work until you’re blue in the face and it will make not one iota of difference because that’s irrelevant.
That’s interesting to me for another reason. When Cape Cod Hospital opened a psych unit for adolescents some twenty years ago (I don’t know its status at the moment), what impressed me was that they adopted a similar up-at-eight regimen that you describe.
So many people whose lives are screwed up are on sleep-wake schedules that are screwed up as well. (I say that as someone who works at two in the morning!)
The process of supporting the development of those skills in children (or adults) does not always feel good. It is not easy. But it is critical.
I’m a bit from the wrong side of the tracks, but the reason I, and all my siblings, have moved away from financial insecurity and poverty, is because our family, by the grace of G-d, worked through the challenges of the small but critical skills.
It’s starting to sound like cannibalism.
I don’t care about those problems. That’s not what government is for. I don’t care about drug addicts and others that have made bad decisions throughout their lives. I don’t care about people who are so worthless that they won’t keep a job and have exhausted the charity of their friends and family. I don’t care.
And I think we need to change the dynamic so that we admire rugged individualism again and to hell with with worthless people.
The role of government is to secure our liberty. Period. That’s it. Anything else is power grabbing and enslavement.
I’ve noticed that the residential treatment centers (and other lowest bidder euphemisms for orphanages) put their teen aged children to bed at 6:30 or 7:00. It costs them less if they make the kids be in bed, they don’t need as many people supervising them. I am sure it has little to do with behavior.
I first heard this thought in the 1970’s from Thomas Sowell, who was a professor at UCLA when I was a student there. It made no sense to me at the time. How could anyone possibly not know how to get up in time to get to their job? How could they possibly not know to treat a customer, much less their boss, with respect? What the hell was the professor talking about – saying that these were job skills? These points were obvious beyond the telling of it.
Of course, I learned better once I got out into the real world. In some sense I still can’t believe it. But I know it is true.
“The art of economics,” writes Henry Hazlitt in his book, Economics in One Easy Lesson “consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any action or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”
But as he goes on to say, this is difficult to do and even more difficult to explain. Bad economists often present their errors (shortsightedness) more effectively than good economists present their truths. By the time an economist has gotten through the “long, complicated, and dull chain of reasoning” necessary to explain the long-term consequences of a particular policy, the audience is bored or asleep. Therefore, many economists – and their very vocal cheering sections – have resorted to half-truths, and arguments against even considering the longer view are reduced to mere quips. “It’s only laissez faire,” “greed,” “capitalist apologetics,” “extremism,” (and worse terms these days when rhetoric has reached a fever pitch).
There is so much truth here in what you say. As a teacher, I have some experience with people who come from generational poverty. There is no Plan for the Future in most of their lives. There has only been the concept that they must figure out how to deal with today. There is no tomorrow. If today feels good, then great. Don’t even think about the next day. Life planning is a really, really critical need. Also, sometimes, when a child is succeeding in their own life, it feels like a put-down to the rest of the family, and that can be an obstacle.
Teaching these life skills is the main job of parenting. It is work, both for the parent and child. It has too often been replaced by too much sports involvement and other ‘planned’ activities that suck up all the time available. Sports are fine but they don’t, can’t replace parenting, even though good coaches try. Often that first job at McDonald’s consists of repairing the damage done by a lack of good parenting. “Most of success consists of just showing up.” someone famous once said. And I’d add, On time. Ready to work.