Saying the Unthinkable

Even those of us who bitterly resent the collectivist nanny state -- the Federal Motherment, as it were -- are often unwilling to recommend to our political champions that they advocate to the electorate what is needed to restore our economic vitality.  We fear the political reaction by the inattentive and muddleheaded middle.  The left uses that concern against us, presuming to the mantle of the Washington wise men, of the elite managers of the economy.   Lately, though, they have shown a sort of group insanity in reaction to the writing on the wall.


Last Sunday, you could see that committed craziness in action on NBC's Meet the Press.  No matter how often Alan Greenspan explained every aspect of the situation in measured tones and short, well reasoned sentences, Rachel Maddow and Austan Goolsbee ignored all reason and repeated the Democrat talking point of the weekend: the Standard and Poors derating of US debt was a "Tea Party Downgrade."

Whenever the lone conservative Alex Castellanos spoke -- always softly and reasonably -- the producer cut to Maddow's eye rolling or Goolsbee's mugging incredulity.  This from people who claim reason as their right to rule us!

Last week, we had the Vice President of the United States agreeing with a congressman's radical charge that those who subscribed to tea party sentiments were all terrorists.

We -- who cling bitterly to our notion that economic liberty is the only way to a better future for all -- fear that if our champions say what needs to be said that we will forfeit the opportunity to... to what?  Cut non-entitlement, non-military programs and not even chip at the edges of the middle class middle-age-to-grave welfare programs that inflate our borrowing past bankruptcy.  What we have accomplished in this round is a pale not-even-half measure of what needs to be done.   But what is that?

Here is Janet Daley writing for the conservative UK Daily Telegraph saying what needs to be said: that Obama and his Democrat progressivist corps in the media and Congress have accelerated the United States' movement toward the European social democrat economic model, the foundering of which is the cause of our current financial crisis; that that movement must be stopped if the United States is to retain its essential national identity that creates its economic vitality; and that middle class entitlement programs are the problem.

She concludes that the Tea Party sentiment and the movement that embodies that sentiment that stood up to oppose that disaster is not only rational and intelligent, but worthy of respect for saying "Hey.  Wait a minute.  Is that really where we want to go?"  And closes with this:

The hardest obstacle to overcome will be the idea that anyone who challenges the prevailing consensus of the past 50 years is irrational and irresponsible. That is what is being said about the Tea Partiers. In fact, what is irrational and irresponsible is the assumption that we can go on as we are.

That certainly is where the left has gone: off the rails of sane public discussion of a real threat to our national identity.

More than that, though, she says the unthinkable.  First, that we cannot afford those middle-class welfare programs in their current form, and that we cannot expect our productive capacity to continue to grow to meet all our desires if we continue to hamper it with ridiculous regulations and to tax unfairly its creative abilities.

Second, echoing Friedrich von Hayek's Road to Serfdom -- which explained Italy and Germany's descent into tyranny as the natural consequence of socialism -- she predicts that the left will turn next to more rigid control of all the means of production.

History proves that there is nothing of which progressivists are incapable.  Terrorists, indeed.