Delusions of the well-educated and intelligent on the Left and Right leave us nowhere to hide

Larry Kummer, Editor

10 years ago

Summary: We’ve mined the comments on the FM website for evidence of delusionality on the Left, as evidence of a deeper ill affecting America. We’ve not done so recently for comments from the Right. Today we have a volunteer, one especially well qualified to show the nature of our problem.

“I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”
— attributed to William F. Buckley, Jr

Contents

Introduction to delusions
A Right-wing libertarian sees the world
Other posts with contributions from M. Simon
For More Information
How Left & Right see themselves

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(1) Introduction to delusions

Scores of posts document the problem America has seeing reality. Both Left and Right are increasingly lost in delusions, each clearly seeing the others’ delusions. Worse, these are not the traditional “uneducated lower classes” gripped by superstition. These are well-educated people enmeshed by interlocking systems of exaggerated or outright false information.

In many posts I’ve posted comments that clearly show this problem: brief candid expressions by smart people. At the end are links to posts about comments from climate alarmists.

Today we look at comments from the Right displaying almost identical pathology, from M. Simon of the popular long-lived Classical Values website (“End the culture wars by restoring classical values”). See the posts at the end with material by M Simon. They show Simon to be both knowledgeable and brilliant. That’s what makes these comments so fascinating.

(2) A Right-wing libertarian sees the world

Some of these are too good to believe. My favorites are marked in red. These are part of a series of 18 comments to these posts:

Wow! (a) “The reason management pays so well is that it is incredibly hard. If it wasn’t companies on the average would be paying less for it.”

There is a large body of research that shows that the massive increase in pay of senior managers (both profit and non-profits) since 1980 is unrelated to any measure of background or performance. Especially unrelated to performance. This is obvious to anyone who reads the newspapers without ideological blinders.

Ditto if one thinks about this. Have senior jobs become more difficult during the past few decades to justify a massive increase in compensation vs other workers in the organization?

Even better! (b) “Women are socialists. … I have more to say on that here – with lots of links: Nature, Men, And Women.”

Simon has a future career as a speaker at meetings of the Republican Women’s clubs, explaining that women are socialists: “Yes, I mean YOU” he will announce firmly. And at Tea Party movement meetings: “Yes, these socialists in skirts are among you even now. Beware their honeyed words.” Let’s hope he reports back to us on his experiences.

(c) “What do {the rich} do with the rest of their money? Invest.”

This is wrong on multiple levels. To mention just one factor, private investment as a share of GDP has been falling as inequality rises.

(d) “Overtaxing the rich is eating the seed corn of future advances.”

Taxes on the rich are near multi-generational lows. Neither historical data on changes of investment levels vs taxation over time nor cross-national data supports that theory.

(e) “People invest MORE wisely than governments (Solyndra).”

Pointing to a single example as evidence is quite daft. More representative are the Hoover Dam, the Transcontinental railroad, the interstate highway system, and the many breakthroughs of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

(f) “If government wanted to do something useful it could shrink”

There is no correlation among western nations — now or historical — between size of government and economic growth. Northern European nations, for example, are doing quite well.

(g) “The freer the market system the better it works.”

Say bon voyage to M Simon as he moves to the libertarian paradise of Somalia! Perhaps he will report back to us. He will learn that blind ideology is a poor guide to life.

(h) “Why are wages stagnating? Because we can replace people with machines.”

Wages grew during the rapid tech advances after WW2 (despite rapid advances in tech), and for most Americans have stagnated since aprox 1980 (even in fields little affected by new tech). It obviously has deeper causes than just technology.

(i) “The only way you can turn people into slaves is at the point of a gun. A government gun.”

False. Slaves were taken in Africa and brought to America by merchants. Private sector guns. Government guns ended slavery.

(j) “Eventually people will find work that machines can not do.”

Such over-confident statements about the future should end with “amen”. The future might not be like the past as tech advances. For a discussion of automation see these posts.

(k) “I don’t know if you remember the dot com bubble. For a couple of years the economy was growing at around 7% or 8% a year. Wages exploded. At all levels. If you want to get more for those at the bottom get the economy growing at high rates. “

The operative word is “bubble”. Few people consider blowing over-investment bubbles a sane method of achieving economic growth. Also, the economy did not grow that fast. Annual change in US real GDP, per the Bureau of Economic Analysis:

1996: 3.8%
1997: 4.5%
1998: 4.4%
1999: 4.8%
2000: 4.1%
2001: 1.0%

Amazing! (l) “Democrats practice crony capitalism – what used to be called fascism in a different age.”

“Fascism” is a political ideology with specific characteristics {see Wikipedia}, not a generic slur to throw at foes.

(m) “This leaves out the fact that wealth diffuses. Takes about 3 generations.”

Things are not simple, as they depend on larger political factors. Look at Latin America. Wealthy in 1915, income concentrated resulting in massive social unrest after WW2.

(n) “Your error is in thinking the money is put in a mattress. It is not. It is invested.”

Private investment rates in the US have fallen while income has concentrated.

Remarkable! (o) “SEIU is just another criminal organization. They have figured out how to use government guns as a means of extraction.”

The Service Employees International Union (see Wikipedia) is a labor union representing about 1.9 million workers in over 100 occupations in the United States and Canada.

(p) “The TEAs {Tea Party Movement} are trying to keep government from collapsing so they can get back some of the money government stole from them.”

Taxes are a legitimate excise of government power, and have been considered such for millennia. Under the Constitution, they are legitimate when approved by elected officials in the proper form.

Here Simon asserts that this process is illegitimate, and the these taxes are stolen from people. This is the clearest anti-democratic statement I have read in years. He doesn’t statement what system he would prefer to the Constitution.

(3) Other posts with contributions from M. Simon