Why Modern Liberalism is Idiotic... Maybe

Because it claims a government job and a private sector job are the same thing.

Because it considers taxation as an investment with guaranteed returns, or indeed non-negative returns.

Because it holds employing people digging out holes and filling them in again - or just paying people to stand around doing nothing, or even paying five people to do what one person and a machine could do, or employing people to replace perfectly good infrastructure long before it needs replacing - creates demand and thus expands the economy.

Because it says rich people just get richer through economic osmosis, contributing nothing and spending nothing, just absorbing everything.

Because it claims regulation curbs the excesses of big business, rather than being used as a club by big business to keep smaller competitors down.

Because it claims taxing the rich more will improve the economy, or even simply not damage it.

Because it claims that people with a television, internet service, and air conditioning live in poverty.

Because it refuses to tell the difference between a $90,000 salary struggling family in New York City and a $90,000 salary wealthy businessman in Texas.

Because it suggests lowering the prices solves cost of living problems.

Because it suggests raising wages solves cost of living problems.

Because it represents a failure to understand the concept of currency more broadly.

Because it says government programs achieve what they set out to achieve.

Because it says level of funding is directly correlated with level of success.

Because it says justice involves scrutinizing the wealth and success of individuals to determine what they should get.

Because it would insist Republicans are racist while they push many of the same policies liberals have pushed since the Civil War.


But I'm always suspicious that they're not idiots after all, and the misdirection is deliberate.  I've had one too many arguments with bright people from the left where somebody slipped up.

Is it all an elaborate and clever sham?  Or just plain old idiocy?

-Somehow- the Democratic party, which once ran amuck in the South disenfranchising the poor and the minorities, has come to be seen - at least by people who aren't particularly poor and a few minorities - as the party of the poor and the minorities in the north, where the party which spent more than a century half suddenly came to be seen as the party which had -really- done all those things.  [Ed: Mushmouth much?  Rephrase: The Democrats have coopted the legacy of the civil rights party (The Republicans) while making the civil rights party (again: The Republicans) out to be the racist hillbillies which the Democrats actually once were.]  It's hard to believe THAT was accidental.