Leftism

Politics and Education

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According to this, voters with postgraduate educations supported Obama by 58% versus 40% for McCain.

This article suggests that the election results can be characterized as “the triumph of the creative class,” with “creative class” drawn from “Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the younger, go-go set in the financial world.”

For discussion: what, if anything, should Republicans/conservatives/libertarians do to increase their appeal to these categories of voters?

Let me get things off to a contentious start by suggesting that the “creative class” tag is more than a little presumptuous. Is a stock trader really more creative than a production control specialist in a factory, or a platoon commander in the Marines? (Indeed, I’ve seen research suggesting that the cognitive skills of a good trader and a good combat commander have a lot of similarities.) Is a computer programmer automatically more creative than a mechanical engineer? Is it really true that spreadsheet mavens on Wall Street are more creative than small businesspeople? Is a professor of electrical engineering inherently more creative than a practitioner of the same field who works for a defense contractor?

Maybe “credentialed class” would be a more realistic descriptor than “creative class.”

What say you?

Rehabilitating Bush

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Let the  rehabilitation  of Bush begin! For the past 8 years, the most strident and hysterical leftist  criticism  of Bush has centered on his  intelligence  policies which leftists assured us arose purely out of a callous disregard for civil liberties and human rights, if not outright evil.  

Now we read this from the WSJ [h/t Instapundit]:

President-elect Barack Obama is unlikely to radically overhaul controversial Bush administration intelligence policies, advisers say…They say he is likely to fill key intelligence posts with pragmatists.

Whoa, whoa whoa! Pragmatic? Bush’s polices are suddenly pragmatic? What about the  incessant  ranting for years that Bush had gone far beyond any practical  necessity?  

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Please, Please Stick to the Teleprompter

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Wow, only a few days being the president elect and Obama already lost Indiana (and maybe a few other states) for the next election for bashing on one of his most vehement, politically active,  supercharged frothing at the mouth opponents of this day…Nancy Reagan.

Geez, I figured they would have to raise taxes or introduce some sort of silly gun ban FIRST to get the conservatives riled up.

I would assume that Obama’s handlers are asking him to stick to the prepared scripts for a while here.   I heard that Obama did call Nancy Reagan to apologize.   I am sure she was extremely nice to him and made time for the President elect even though she is recovering from a broken pelvis suffered in a recent fall.

Dan Quayle indeed.

“Buying Fire Insurance From An Arsonist”

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In a recent Chicagoboyz post by David Foster we discussed whether the Democrats really understand the importance of small businesses to the economy.

There’s a great comment by Carl Pham in a discussion on Rand Simberg’s blog that puts the issue into broader perspective:

…The government should do whatever it is that makes new jobs more plentiful, whatever increases the salaries offered to new hires, whatever makes people running companies (or about to start companies) decide to take on more people and pay out more salaries.
 
And what do you suppose is the exact opposite of that policy? You guessed it, raising taxes, particularly raising taxes on higher income people (those with capital to invest in paying salaries) or on businesses (duh). We’ve known this since FDR fucked up the economy and prolonged the Depression by (modern economists estimate) nearly seven long years.
 
Obama and his party are not stupid, of course. They know this very well. So why go down that path? Because they’re not interested in a recovered economy. They’re not interested in a booming private sector, with lots of great high-paying jobs. That doesn’t help Democrats keep power, does it? That doesn’t make people want to vote the Federal government more and more control over the economy, let the Democrat civil servants hire more and more assistants for a bigger and bigger “helping” bureaucracy, does it? What brings Democrats to power, and keeps them in power, is an anemic economy, despair everywhere, no jobs, and people so desperate they’ll swallow their pride and take a government hand-out to survive. So that’s what they’d like to see. They’re not economic idiots. They just have different goals than most of us, and those goals do not include having us not need them.
 
You’re buying fire insurance from an arsonist, my friend.

Read the whole discussion.

Political Will and Technology

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So, Obama plans to implement an auction-based carbon cap-and-trade system so onerous that it would bankrupt anybody that tried to build a coal fired plant. Not to worry, however, he will use the proceeds of the auction to fund alternative energy sources. [video, transcript] [h/t Instapundit]

Obama’s plan drives home a trait of leftists that I have noticed for several years: They do not seem to  distinguish  between altering human behavior (which requires nothing but the willingness to use force) and creating new viable technology (which depends on the laws of nature). In other words, they believe that if you have the will to create something, then can force people to create it.  

In this case, this trait leads Obama to set policy based on the assumption that he can order the creation of new, non-carbon-emitting power sources as easily as he can order the shutting down of coal plants.

We’ll, he can’t. It’s easy to destroy and threaten but it is very difficult to create.

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