I tried to suppress my conservative tendencies at first. I convinced myself that they would eventually pass, like adolescent hot flashes. … I behaved like a 40-year-old married father who suddenly realizes that he’s gay, and doesn’t know what to do.
There were early signs of my tendency, and in retrospect they were clearly recognizable. [A] friend of mine from school, even claims that she has always known about it. When we talked about our younger days at a class reunion three years ago and I mentioned switching sides politically, she looked at me with pity in her eyes and said: “[Y]ou were never truly liberal. It was always just a pose for you.” I felt as if I’d been caught in the act, and yet she didn’t mean it in a bad way.
The hardest part about being a late conservative is coming out. It’s a moment you postpone for as long as possible. You worry about the way colleagues will react, and you don’t want to humiliate your parents. My mother will be 73 this year, an age at which she is increasingly unlikely to ever shed her prejudices against conservatives. She tries to be polite in conversation and not let anyone see how she really feels, but sometimes her prejudices emerge with a clarity that even I find shocking.
Leftism
How Sex Sells the Loss of Freedom
Classical Values [h/t Instapundit] asks:
Sometimes I wonder whether “getting the government out of our bedrooms” (supposedly accomplished by Lawrence v. Texas) wasn’t just a ruse so people could imagine they were more free.
Oh, that’s exactly what leftists are doing. It’s quite clear that they use the lure of sexual freedom to disguise their removal of personal freedom in every other area of life.
Let’s look at a little table that compares the degree to which the Left or the Right ideologically grants more freedom in a particular area. Blue indicates one side ideologically and consistently grants more freedom to the individual in that area. Red indicates the opposite. Grey or green indicates an area in which neither side is consistent. (For these purposes, libertarians are grouped with the Right. Although, there are so few libertarians it doesn’t alter the balance much.)
| Freedom | Left | Right |
|---|---|---|
| Speech | ||
| Work | ||
| Business | ||
| Food | ||
| Housing | ||
| Consumer Goods | ||
| Transportation | ||
| Medical Care | ||
| Education | ||
| Free Trade | ||
| Self-Defense | ||
| Property Rights | ||
| Parental Rights | ||
| National Security | ||
| Police Powers | ||
| Recreational Drugs | ||
| Sexuality |
Kinda shocking to see it laid out like that, isn’t?
Monkeywrenching Socialism – Ratchet Smashing II
On reading this article on unsustainable public/private compensation gaps I wondered whether I had any pension funds drawing on my tax dollars that were grossly underfunded and would inevitably be coming after my budgeted retirement savings to save their pensions. There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to get that information but it’s vital for financial planning for the long haul to a dignified retirement where one can reliably live on your own money.
The cycle of negotiating generous government employee contracts, underfunding pension contributions, and then jacking up taxes to make up shortfalls at the last moment is another way the socialist ratchet effect works. Since so many of these pension funding sources are location based, the real estate industry offers us a way out.
When you buy a house the quality of the local public school district is a large factor influencing prices. Childless couples buying a house with no prospect of children will still take an interest in their local schools because of the influence school quality has on house prices. Most who have gone house hunting knows this.
If I know that taxes will have to double to pay for some lavish government promises within the timeframe of my likely ownership term, I’m going to not be so enthused about buying in that jurisdiction. I certainly would not pay the same price as a neighboring town or county that set up their pension payments as the actuaries say they should be funded.
Were there to be an unfunded liability index attached to every house in the US comprising of a basket of future expenditures traditionally paid by property or other municipal, county, or state taxes, housing prices would react relatively quickly to poor governance and the drop in housing values prior to the future crisis where the pension fund simply ran out of money would lead to a secular trend of homeowners increasing pressure for responsible government and likely smaller government.
Right now such an index doesn’t exist but all the information needed to make such an index are already public record. Any large real estate agent system that created such an index would have a competitive advantage over its rivals, even after those rivals replicated the work. The reputation benefits of being the guys who did it first are likely to last much longer than the exclusivity of the index.
Sowell On Obama
From the Reason interview:
I mean, to fire the chairman of General Motors, to tell credit card companies how they should run their business, tell GM what kind of cars it should be making, and there’s no sign of an end in sight yet.
The presumption that Obama knows how all these industries ought to be operating better than people who have spent lives in those industries, and a general cockiness going back till before he was president, and the fact that he has no experience whatever in managing anything. Only someone who has never had the responsibility for managing anything could believe he could manage just about everything.
Leftism is defined by its hubris. Specifically, the idea that any particular leftist understands how to run any randomly selected industry or economic activity in the entire world.
You Can’t Have it Both Ways
A left-wing guest on “Hannity” tonight said we should stop enriching OPEC. He also said oil drilling off of the US coast is unacceptable because drilling platforms spoil the view. So which is it? Either energy production is most important or the esthetic values of people like him are most important. He can’t have it both ways. (The Left’s third alternative — forcing automobile companies to sell more small cars, hybrids and plug-in electric vehicles — is a false one, because Americans prefer larger vehicles and because increased vehicle efficiency leads to more driving.)
So much of leftist thought comes down to a childish unwillingness to acknowledge real-world tradeoffs.