Cross-posted from the other site

Yesterday saw 200,000 people or more attend Jon Stewart’s and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity.

I don’t think there’s any deep meaning to it — Allahpundit called it Irony-Stock, which seems as good a name as any. I find it disconcerting that they invited Cat Stevens, who supported that Fatwah against Salman Rushdie. I’m sure it was fun — certainly a lot more fun than listening to one of Rush’s or Hannity’s latest (and increasingly boring) rants about Obama destroying America. But let’s not confuse with it substance.

I did have a few scattered thoughts, however. Not so much on the rally itself but on the whole idea of “restoring sanity” to our politics.

Continue reading Restoring Sanity? Or Restoring Liberalism? →

Out in Arizona, Ruth McClung is the Republican nominee for Congress. She’s literally a rocket scientist and, from what I see, seems a reasonable conservative. But you won’t hear about her on the news or in the science blogs that regularly tout any Democrat with a scientific background. Is that because she’s a conservative woman who isn’t batshit insane? One has to wonder, doesn’t one?

Incidentally, while I oppose the Fair Tax, I more bitterly oppose unfair political bullshit. The Republican candidate in my local election is being attacked for supporting the Fair Tax. The ads say he wants to impose a 23% sales tax and eliminate corporate taxes. As I noted on the other site, this in an absolute lie, a calculated deception to frighten voters. The Fair Tax replaced the existing income tax system; it doesn’t ad to it. The ad’s disgusting, but probably what one should expect from one of Murtha’s former operatives.

McClung is being attacked for the Fair Tax as well. There’s only one problem: she doesn’t support it. So the Democrats, in their desperation, are resorting to a lie within a lie.

And people wonder why, while I hate the Republicans, I really fricking hate the Democrats.

If you want to see political correctness run amuck, look no further than Fair Housing laws. When we were selling our home, there were selling points we literally couldn’t put in ads because they would “discriminate” against people. Saying a home was “good for a family” discriminated against single people, for example.

I never saw the logic of this. “Good for a family” tells people what kind of home it is. It’s information, not prejudice. And I don’t think any single or childless person would be driven off by those words.

In this case, are people not entitled to limit those with whom they want to live? Yes, it is discriminatory against non-Christians. So what? There shouldn’t be anything in the law that forces me to cohabit with someone I don’t want to, for whatever reason.

It’s one thing to bar discrimination; it’s another to prevent free association and free speech. At what point do you draw the line? According to authorities in Michigan, you draw it as far against freedom as you possibly can.

We’ve heard a lot recently about “epistemic closure” — the tendency of people to get closed off into informational cocoons of people who think exactly like them. This has particularly (and deservedly) said about the Right, specifically on the subject of global warming. It’s astonishing to constantly encounter talking points — “global cooling”, Climategate, the supposed lack of recent warming, etc. — about which conservatives have yet to hear any contrary opinion. And that’s just one subject. Anchor babies, torture, spending cuts — these also tend to get discussed in an echo chamber into which contrary ideas or facts are not injected or are quickly ejected.

But it’s not unique to the Right Wing by any means. Earlier this year, the Left was atwitter because the AG of California “exonerated” ACORN of any wrong-doing. Of course, he did nothing of the kind, as even a cursory reading of his report would have revealed. But it is still claimed in Left-Wing circles that ACORN was the victim of a Right Wing smear.

I bring this up because three articles from the last week in particular illustrate how the Left is ensconced in its own echo chamber on the subject of economics.

First, there’s Tabarrok’s description of the macroeconomic ignorance of students:

Bill Goffe recently (2009) surveyed one of his macro principles classes and found, for example, that the median student believes that 35% of workers earn the minimum wage and a substantial fraction think that a majority of workers earn the minimum wage (Actual rate in 2007: 2.3% of hourly-paid workers and a smaller share of all workers earn the minimum wage, rates are probably somewhat higher today since the min. wage has risen and wages have not).

When asked about profits as a percentage of sales the median student guessed 30% (actual rate, closer to 4%).

When asked about the inflation rate over the last year (survey was in 2009) the median student guessed 11%. Actual rate: much closer to 0%. Note, how important such misconceptions could be to policy.

When asked by how much has income per person in the United States changed since 1950 (after adjusting for inflation) the median student said an increase of 25%. Actual rate an increase of about 248%, thus the median student was off by a factor of 10.

OK, it’s college students. But these are students who have an interest in economics. And it was students who were riding the wave of Obama’s 2008 victory. Their opinions are highly reflective of what the Left part of our country really thinks.

Moreover, politicians and political commentators are just as ignorant as the students. Besides believing some of the above (e.g., the “obscene” profits of Big Oil or Big Pharma), there are even more dangerous memes afloat among the intelligentsia. Gregg Easterbrook recently tackled the common myth that the recession is hitting seniors hardest:

A year ago, when the Social Security Administration said there would be no COLA for 2010, President Obama backed a second “one-time” bonus check, saying, “We must act on behalf of those hardest hit by this recession.”

As a group, seniors are the least hardest hit. Most are retired, so unemployment, the biggest economic problem associated with the recession, does not impact them. Many consumer prices have fallen, which increases seniors’ buying power.

Two kinds of prices are rising — college education and health care. The former has no impact on seniors, while the latter has limited impact because seniors don’t pay most of their health care costs. Young workers pay those costs via Medicare taxes.

Of course there are individual seniors in need — but for senior-citizen lobbies to depict seniors overall as hard-hit by the recession is political selfishness in the extreme.

To be fair, this isn’t so much ignorance as political pandering — seniors may be the wealthiest demographic in America but they are numerous and they vote like hell. But our supposedly objective media never calls them on this, never points out the reality of the situation. Hell, even the Daily Show hasn’t done a bit on it.

And that’s not the only subject on which there is epistemic closure. The Democrats are still flogging the myth that “every economist” agreed that we needed an economic stimulus.

Epistemic closure is not just epistemic, it’s endemic — to all of politics. That’s why the subject frustrates me so. It’s an arena in which the combatants used facts and data the way a drunk uses a lamp post — for support, not illumination.

Liberals often scoff at the conservative idea that the mainstream media is “leftist” or partisan. I think that’s a blinkered view — coming from thinking that leftist views are inherently reasonable and rational. The media doesn’t seem biased because “everyone” agrees on the sensible point of view.

A perfect example of how bias is missed? The NYT today ran a story on the recent spate of conservatives excoriating Woodrow Wilson as a terrible President. The NYT’s “debate” consists of five scholars defending Wilson and mocking his detractors in condescending tones. And they have one guy who sort of explains the connection, but doesn’t add anything.

That’s “balance” to the New York Times: six people not really addressing the criticisms made of Wilson. That’s why, if you want real balance, you have to go elsewhere. Somewhere like Radley Balko:

He dishonestly led us into a pointless, costly, destructive war, and assumed control over huge sectors of the economy to wage it. He seized railroads, food and energy production, and implemented price controls.

He suppressed dissent and imprisoned war critics. Said Wilson, “Conformity will be the only virtue. And every man who refuses to conform will have to pay the penalty.” He signed the Espionage and Sedition Acts, the latter of which made it a criminal offense to “oppose the cause of the United States.” He retaliated against critical newspapers, and directed the U.S. Postal Service to stop delivering mail determined to be critical of the war effort.

Wilson not only continued existing racial segregation of federal government workers, he extended it.

He instituted the first military draft since the Civil War.

He signed the first federal drug prohibition.

He reinstituted the federal income tax.

A few more, from Gene Healy’s book, The Cult of the Presidency:

Wilson believed in an activist, imperialist presidency. In his 1909 book Constitutional Government, he made the case against checks and balances and the separation of powers. The government, Wilson argued, is a living organism, and “no living thing can have its organs offset against each other as checks, and live.”

He ordered unconstitutional, unilateral military interventions into Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico. (He also oversaw military interventions in Panama and Cuba, and instituted American-favored dictators throughout Latin America.)

Wilson believed God ordained him to be president, and acted accordingly, boasting to one friend in 1913 that “I have been smashing precedents almost daily every since I got here.” Every president since Jefferson had given the State of the Union in writing. Wilson reinstituted what Jefferson derided as the “speech from the Throne,” and ordered Congress assembled to hear him speak, giving rise to the embarrassing spectacle the SOTU has become today.

He oversaw a massive domestic spying program, and encouraged American citizens to report one another for subversion.

My biggest problem with what remains of “conservatism” is their tendency to ignore all the dreadful stuff George Bush did because of the stuff they liked: cutting taxes, fighting terrorism and saying what they wanted to hear. The same is true of Wilson: people ignore the terrible stuff he did because of the stuff they liked: the income tax, some worker protections, farm subsidies, the Federal Reserve. (This is assuming you think the income tax and farm subsidies are wonderful things, which I don’t.)

Time to take off the blinders, guys. Presidents have to be judged by their entire record. And Wilson’s record, as a whole, is awful.