Yesterday, clicking through an Instapundit post, you would find here the source for their “quote of the day,”
A couple of years ago, [socialist Venezuela’s] then-minister of education admitted that the aim of the regime’s policies was ‘not to take the people out of poverty so they become middle class and then turn into escuálidos’ (a derogatory term to denote opposition members). In other words, the government wanted grateful, dependent voters, not prosperous Venezuelans.”
Not surprisingly this was followed by the ever useful Reynolds’ reference to the Rainmakers: “They’ll turn us all into beggars ’cause they’re easier to please.
Anyone who listens to Sanders arguing medical service is a right hasn’t thought twice about Perry’s argument – that access is far more important than insurance and far more likely to produce good medicine. And Hillary’s arguments are more of the same, of course, but she’s already in the doddering, grasping, authoritarian stage of the Castros. Sanders hasn’t had the power before – we just suspect what he will do with it; we know what she will.
While I find Trump unattractive in many ways (some of the worst of prosperity theology delivered like Andy Griffith in “A Face in the Crowd”), he isn’t treasonous like Hillary and if crony capitalism destroys capitalism, Hillary & Sanders don’t even pretend true capitalism is good. We know where Sanders’ theories go: it is a sign of the rot at the core of America’s educational system that one college kid can look at her boyfriend at a Sanders’ rally and say, “Isn’t he adorable?”
On the optimistic side – the solid conservatives, the ones Rubio listed today, are young. It probably isn’t an accident that Trump was always one of the oldest (or was he the oldest?) on that stage. I’m not saying we need to get rid of the baby boomers – but I think we probably shouldn’t have trusted anyone our own age – or anyone trusted us. (Say anyone born before 1950? That includes me, so I know.)
I have a daughter who is 35 and a Bernie supporter. It is interesting to talk to her about what she thinks. I have two other kids who are leftists but they won’t talk to me about politics.
The 35 year old has always been kind of artsy. She speaks and reads four languages and one of them is Arabic. She was working on a PhD on the Andalusian period in Spain and lived a year in Spain. She has spent some time in Morocco to work on her Arabic and lived with a family for a short time. She has an Honors BS in Anthropology and an MS in Library Science, Both from UCLA.
Now she works in an art gallery in Venice CA which has astonishingly expensive art that I don’t like at all. The lower range of their pieces is around $850,000. Now, she has decided she wants to make money. Her sister who is a lawyer and FBI agent, has tried to recruit her for the FBI for years but she is not interested.
She is vague about how Bernie will help her make money but I’ll bet it has something to do with student loans. I paid for the BS for all my kids and she was on a grant for the PhD so the MLS is all she would have a loan for.
Her conservative brother is annoyed she is still depending on me for stuff like a car I bought her last fall.
I suspect Bernie is a parent figure.
What Ginny’s link is describing is the Curley Effect:
I have a daughter who is 35 and a Bernie supporter.
No offense intended Mike, but I’m going to use what you’ve written about your daughter as a springboard to rant about general trends.
One of the reasons that I despise the general liberal order of society is because the quest for freedom and individuality seems to benefit only a few and it waylays so many. Look at the fates of the underclass, most of whom are where they are because social mores have been loosened to such a degree that these people take advantage of their freedom and can’t exercise self restraint and the upper classes are the most vocal in supporting such freedoms and least likely to take advantage of them. A social order which imposes more expectations on people, thus decreasing individual liberty, I believe produces better overall results for society. Smart women, wasting years in higher education, not getting married, no children, no stability, not being able to figure out what they want to do with their lives, loaded with debt, looking for relief, looking for security. I’ve known quite a few women like this. Sure, this is the antithesis of the “quiet desperation” of marrying young and starting a family and focusing on that family, but I’m not certain that flying free is producing the best outcomes for most women.
Women marrying the government (Bernie) instead of marrying men, doesn’t make these women strong and independent. They need to have this dependency shoved in their face and have their illusions of independence crushed. There’s nothing independent about marrying Big Government and then depending on your “husband” to provide for you by taking the income of others and redistributing the proceeds to you, nor having your “husband” use the threat of violence against companies in order to compel them to create jobs for women.
I saw that quote and thought immediately how well it fits the Progressive outlook, at least to the cynical leadership. I’m sure young Progressives are idealistic and think they’re helping. That they have no educational foundation in the history of the 20th century or the performance of economic systems and how that correlates to higher standards of living and freedom, well, that’s no accident. We have more in common right now with Venezuela than we’d like to admit, we’re just not as far gone.
One of the many ill effects of the utterly failed educational model we have been pretending was teaching our children something useful for citizens in a republic is the almost complete ignorance so many young people suffer from when it comes to both world and American history.
It is actually painful to page through what passes for history texts in our schools, as I have done several times over the years my children were in various levels of school, and read the insipid attempts to render all of history into a few strands of race/sex/gender theorizing, all written in either comic book style and language, or gruesomely unintelligible “academic speech”.
I have assigned books to my kids over the years, to be read as supplements to the propaganda tracts they were assigned in class. Since reading well is one of my primary values, endlessly preached to each child as they advanced through the grades, none had any difficulty reading a few extra things, and I received positive feedback several times over the years, because a really well written history of the civil war, or Tuchman’s “The Guns Of August”, is engrossing in its own way to a curious mind, and young people who have not had their intellectual curiosity crushed out of them by the deadening effects of the modern factory school can be introduced to an actual love of learning.
I am afraid my generation, the boomers, have not had a very positive effect on our country, and the coming generations will have many serious problems to deal with as we move into our sunset years, and our children attempt to unravel the huge mess we have made of our culture. While I am sure there will be many missteps along the way, I firmly believe that the lure of living as a free person will overcome the endless indoctrination in collective ideology our schools engage in, and that true educational reform will occur as the powerful unions and public school structures unravel in the face of ever more obvious obsolescence, and increasing individualist choices offered by online material which can be accessed without the need for any intervening state operatives.
There is a screaming need for an educational “reformation” every bit as broad and deep as the religious process that gave birth to the underlying concepts of western culture. I can only hope that it is already under way, and will become ever more powerful and widespread in the future.
Thanks, Ginny.
Veryretired is directly on point here. If we don’t do something, something serious, and soon, about the state of the US educational system what happens in this election isn’t going to matter much. There are huge numbers of entitled little liberals being pumped out by that system very year….young people who know little or nothing about the underpinnings of this country. In another two generations, there will be nothing left but revisionist BS.
I could go on, but I know I’m preaching to the choir.
I suspect Bernie is a parent figure.
I suspect Bernie, like Hillary and all other democrats is a mommy. Because they are the party that cares for you, understands your problems and feels for you. The Republicans have mostly been the daddy party who teach you to survive in the world after they can no longer provide for you. They teach you to think and act in a world that won’t care for you and doesn’t care about your feelings.
The reason you have a predatory medical system is because it’s so profitable for a few people. As your country is built on this principal it’s always a problem for poor people.
The only first world country that extends the for profit system into it’s medical system is America, the richest country in the world. You are happy to beggar the sick and profit the wealthy by this system.
It’s not surprising well educated young people understand this fact, and that they are not pleased, gives some hope for your country.
Rationing care, spending money on a bureaucracy instead of having direct relations with your doctor – yes, that’s the way to go. The rich going outside the system: to other countries or to a privatized system within? Yes, pengun, we’ve seen that future – the young haven’t seen, perhaps, beyond the walls of the auditorium or the time frame of their limited experience with health care.
Mrs. Davis
I think you are right about the feelings rather than the thinking, but one of the more alarming now multi-generation beliefs in this country is that the government is the husband – providing the paycheck and doing the thinking for the dependent. Look at the difference between the way unmarried mothers vote and married ones do.
I think the Democrats as mommy is a good analogy.
Pengun, as usual, is so far off that he lives on another planet. It is so easy to find stories of NHS screw ups on a daily basis, that I know he doesn’t read British newspapers.
My daughter is now taking classes in project management at UCLA (which I pay for, of course) and wants to get into IT os invent an “App” so she can get out of the rut.
I love her but she is having trouble getting to adulthood. I have three daughters, none with children. My two sons are married with children.
Well, Mike K, at least your family has reversed the gender trend. Good for you and your sons.
Does anyone see a future problem with access to medical care – Mike K, would you become a doctor today?
Ginny, I saw that story today. Obamacare is basically Medicaid for all. Medicaid is terrible about paying and it takes two years to get paid at all. That’s why so many doctors refused to take it.
What is new and unmentioned as I scanned through it, is that Obamacare has caused a vast vertical integration of medicine. The hospital where I used to practice has bought all the medical groups so that doctors are now all on salary. Nobody goes out and “opens an office” anymore.
Therefore, that medical corporation, (mostly they are non-profit), is on the hook for all those billions. What will happen? I have no idea but I’m glad I’m out of it.
I interviewed another young man who is applying for an Army scholarship for medical school yesterday. He is 30. The school is not one I ever heard of. The kids at USC are all on loans that will exceed $200,000 by the time they finish. I have asked them why they don’t apply to the military for the programs. Nobody does.
I’ve talked to several young primary care physicians lately, including the one I now see. None of them enjoy practice. This will trickle down, I suspect, but it will take a while. It’s a bit like bankruptcy according to Hemingway. “Gradually, then suddenly” when he was asked how you go broke. Law schools are seeing it now.