Tuesday, June 29, 2004

The other week, I was listening to my guy

Dave Thompson on the radio doing the usual conservative rant about the liberal media and academe, when some chowderhead called up to ask a couple of rhetorical questions followed by a zinger. He asked, "Don't you suppose that reporters and university professors are highly educated people?"
Dave attempted to consider this novel proposition, but the guy interrupted with "They're liberal because their smarter than you stupid conservatives." Unfortunately I didn't get to hear Dave's answer. Dave is a practicing attorney, and hence has a doctorate in Law, and he probably answered adequately.
Now, I'm a libertarian, really, which means that I believe in being conservative with the taxpayers' money and conserving The Power of the People to individual citizens as much as possible. I especially dislike paying for the consequences of other people's laziness (e.g. welfare fraud) and stupidity (e.g. frivolous lawsuits), However, I don't care what anybody tries once, provided they alone experience the consequences of their actions and learn from them. They're welcome to share the happiness, but not the pain.
That's all to say that I felt the sting of The Guy's comment. So as a way to slap back here is a passage from a Rantingprofs post on a NY Times article by Edward Wong:
Of course, what Wong doesn't point out is that while everyone is hoping that the insurgents will suddenly decide the new government is legitimate, the Iraqi people, by wild majorities, already do view it as legitimate. So you can cloak the insurgents with some kind of romanticism if you like, what they are is anti-democratic killers, going against the will of the majority whether that will has been formally expressed through the ballot box yet or not. The fact that they may have started down this path because they had legitimate gripes about unemployment and electricity hardly justifies what they're doing.

Especially since, another point Wong doesn't bother to point out, its their attacks, on the infrastructure and the foreign workers fixing the infrastructure, and the general security environment that blocks foreign investment, that keeps unemployment high and the electricity off. These idiots with the RPGs are apparently too damn stupid to figure that out but one would hope a reporter for the New York Times might make the connection.


It's tough to get an education when you won't listen. Here's something from an educated guy, Frederick Hayek, Nobel Prize-winning economist:

All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest.

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