“Well, I just think that in a lot of countries, like maybe Sweden or England, the healthcare is all free and that’s the way it should be. Poor people should be able to get free medical services they need from the government is all; isn’t that fair?”

Sofia does not know me well yet.

So, what kind of an answer would you offer her? About a hundred potential fact-driven replies sprang to mind as I listened and nodded in sympathy with the poor. I could have described how healthcare is never free. I could have described how very much more expensive it all becomes when we’re all forced to maintain the medical compliance bureaucracy. I could have described how much less effective doctors have become with layers of insurance, HMO and pure government technicalities between themselves and patients. I could have made the case that it all results in inflexibility and stagnation within a system that should be exceedingly dynamic. I could have described how the simple mandates for insurance, and the insurances themselves change the market incentive structure, guaranteeing ballooning costs forever. I could have growled all this in my angry voice, making sure she didn’t get another word in!

Yet, none of this seemed appropriate in the moment, speaking to someone still rolling with medical training wheels, not to mention American government training wheels. And whatever Sofia’s level of understanding (she is a pretty smart cookie) there’s just a better place to start when confronted by people who begin sentences with, “I just think the government should do more to…”

I’d like to make the case that the right place to begin, in this and so many instances, might be with a succinct question:

“Why do you trust the government?”

I’ve never heard a straight answer to this counter-question. People normally begin to flounder or ramble in reply. It is a fine “gotcha” question if you want one but it’s ramifications are also profound and fundamental. It’s a question I would like to help lodge in people’s brains, forcing them to take it home and wrestle with it a bit.

Once someone seriously considers this question they have to start re-winding all the footage and documentation mentally available to them of government at work and, if their memory is good, this is usually a record of government in the act of failing. Alternatively, and you will encounter this, people will give you an answer pertaining to their fantasies about a Utopian government – one that achieves solutions without costs, downsides or unforeseeable consequences, one staffed by disinterested and benevolent philosopher kings.

By “failure” I mean three things at once. First, I mean something like the processes of government itself impeding good outcomes. This would come into play in the annual non-passing of a federal budget. Another form of failure is partisanship-related failures – those times the people are failed because congressmen were too busy fighting each other to get their limited jobs done. Then there are the more malevolent failings – useless but murderous wars, kickbacks of all kinds, harming children through your programs to protect children, lying to keep your humanity-ending bioweapons programs running – those types of things. And it’s possible there are other species of failure to be discovered; governments lead in innovation within this evolving field.

And, again, the history of our government at work is a litany of wide-ranging failings, though only in reference to all the things they’ve ever promised us. Here’s the starter kit to help friends and neighbors suffering from infectious Public Sector Credulity Syndrome – It’ll hold ya’ over till the PSCS vaccine…

• Government is just now wrapping up the bombing of Iran, having killed thousands of civilians, largely against the will of the American people.
  Governments not only failed to contain the spread of COVID-19, they also engaged in vigorous misdirection and defamation in defense of their roles and, incidentally, also created COVID in a lab.
• In 1935, the government instituted its own pension program we know as social security, ostensibly the holding of money from all paychecks in a pool to dispense to the elderly – an altruistic and simple proposition. This is now the largest item in our federal budget requiring about 1.6 trillion stolen, invented or borrowed dollars annually.
• Among the most fundamental real duties of our (or any) federal government is to maintain the national borders. During the Biden administration about 6.7 million (Heritage figures) people entered the country illegally, though this number is really impossible to pin down.

These are some pretty heavy-duty failings, however you define failure. If it were possible to obviate these and still cling to trust in the big brother you love, you’d still have to contend with a glut of findings emerging from the murky realm of what used to be “conspiracy theories!” For example, rational people would have a hard time ever trusting the government again if they knew that:

• First, government hides documents on its own activities constantly, at home and abroad, and when forced to release files, redacts so heavily that they are useless. The most recent large-scale instance is the Epstein files. Do they have something to hide?
• Due to disclosures long ago through the Pentagon Papers, Fletcher Prouty’s The Secret Team, etc., we know that our CIA was responsible for the Vietnam War or at least making sure American young men got sent to fight it.
• The coincidences surrounding the emergence of Lyme disease, probably around 1970, are too striking to discount easily. There was a U.S. bioweapons research station operating in the neighborhood of Lyme, Connecticut at that time, definitely working with tick-borne illnesses. Start educating yourself with Chris Newby’s Bitten (2019) if you’re among the skeptics.
• Through the Snowden disclosures, we learned that our intelligence agencies had (have?) the potential to spy on everyone all the time.

Of course, I could keep going, and going. But back to the point: There’s a fairly iron-clad case to be made, rooted in history, that government should not be trusted. To this, I would add the caveats, “ever” and “with anything,” for the sake of fairness.

About a decade ago Dr. James Payne, a liberty “influencer” from before “influencers” were a thing, coined a still very relevant word to describe the condition all too many Americans find themselves in when thinking about government. That word is “failurism”, elaborated on in Dr. Payne’s The Big Government We Love to Hate (2021). Loosely defined, failurism means that government fails fairly reliably but people still clamor for more government to solve their problems. My own follow-on thought is that people 1) like the immediacy of mandates which can magically impart solutions and 2) don’t think in terms of alternatives to government – it’s habitually a panacea for almost everything. And so, people extend their trust to government time and again though, with a little thought, they’d realize that the credibility of this institution has long since been exhausted. Dr. Payne made a career of demonstrating this.

I would say that trusting the government is like handing the keys to your home to a neighbor with questionable ethics. But it’s more like inviting into your home, to babysit your kids, a neighbor who’s tried to poison you on several occasions, peers over your hedge constantly, tinkers with your cars and appliances until they barely run, who you have personally seen kill hundreds of people with bombs, and who, when the police arrive, always lies his way out of his crimes successfully and buries evidence. But what can you say? The neighbors all around seem to love the guy.

So, yeah, it’s probably best that I didn’t shoot from the hip when Sofia suggested that maybe government should… So what did I say?

Well, I complimented her on her humility. She had ended her short speech with the phrase: “I don’t know. I’m just young still and starting school. I will learn more about your government.”

She certainly will. There’s time to work on this.

The post Failure: A Great Place to Start appeared first on Free the People.

“As dissatisfaction with democracy grows, an appreciable number of Americans are open to autocracy, which the author defines as a form of government ruled by a person or group with no checks or balances on that authority,” said Michael Souzan, writing for American Progress.

Such affirmation for democracy itself has become commonplace throughout the periodicals of the left and their blogosphere. And, admittedly, it’s a good position to take, it’s the high ground, when you stake out a position against those impugning democracy. But is it the truth?

Buried in the New York Times of November 12 was a piece by reporter Lisa Friedman on the measures now being taken and the plans now being made to give permanence to the Biden climate policies, effectively Trump-proofing them. Among these is a rush to actually spend the funds allocated by the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate legislation and doublespeak defined. Is borrowing more from China and taking more from the pockets of ordinary Americans really the best way to bring down inflation? Only if you torture the numbers with Stalinite vigor.

Friedman’s piece opens as follows:

“Biden’s aides are rushing to award hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and finalize environmental regulations in an effort to lock in President Biden’s climate agenda before Donald J. Trump enters the White House, said John Podesta, the president’s senior advisor on clean energy.”

“‘There’s still more to be awarded, and we want to allocate as much of that money as possible, making it harder for the next administration to undo that,’ Mr. Podesta said.”

This is the gist of the piece, though the writer goes on to discuss the risk of waning international support for climate measures, deeds to soon be done by the dastardly President elect, and the politics of repealing the Inflation Reduction Act. The role of private organizations like Sierra and NRDC is discussed in reference to upcoming legal challenges to any pullback Trump may initiate from IRA or other climate directives.

So, here’s what’s striking in light of the events of November 5: It seems that the people, the demos, the ones democracy is putatively all about, told the left, unambiguously, what it thought of ideas like sending more hundreds of billions to climate mitigation. The commonsense folk of the American heartland just asserted themselves and spoke with one voice in rebuttal of the colossal designs of our globalist oligarchs. They at least knew that they each had better uses for their own money. But what would those simpleton corn farmers know about big picture stuff like this anyway?

Well, if nothing else, they know that the energy to run their farms and move their crops and cows now costs more than ever before, even while wind and solar farms now cover the Midwestern landscape. They know that they’re passing along produce costs that turn beef and watermelons into luxuries, due to those energy costs as well as to environmental mandates. The corn farmers of places like the Dakotas realize that there’s hundreds of years worth of fossil fuels locked in shale formations below their feet and they scratch their heads over why we’re not simply using that. They also scratch their heads over how people in cities, far removed from nature as they are, could ever be duped by a paradigm so self-evidently ridiculous as the current global warming mitigation efforts. They wonder why the desperation for action now over something that truly menaces no-one. They find it curious that dangerous natural gas pipelines must be stopped while dangerous carbon transmission pipelines must be run through their backyards. If nothing else, they’re often not sure that the men and women who make up their government are truly capable of or even interested in advancing the goals they proclaim, goals such as reducing greenhouse gases or advancing democracy. And if the literati of Washington were so truly committed to democracy, they might realize that the Midwestern farmers aren’t really such simpletons after all.

So, the election we all just watched play out should be read as one of the great populist uprisings—the turning-the-tables events that throw out incumbents along with their misbegotten and self-serving ideas. The people have spoken but the left still can’t hear them.

The post Democracy at its Best appeared first on Free the People.

“Arbitrary governance” doesn’t rank high in polling on America’s leading problems. It’s one of those specters looming always in the background, pushed to the vanishing point by the inattention of our schools and media. “Arbitrary governance,” however, is such a fundamental concept that it serves as the antithesis of “The Rule of Law,” one of the most foundational concepts of our Western tradition. Why would The Rule of Law ever need to be enshrined as a foundation of society if there were not an alternative to it, an antagonistic condition?

The Rule of Law is what keeps our doors from being kicked in overnight by police harboring vague suspicions. It’s what guarantees we can say what we want and what we mean. It guarantees that all are treated as equals before the law, holding our leaders to the same standards imposed on the lowest of us. Fundamental stuff, yet useless to an arbitrary regime.

Arbitrary governance means that none of the rules you must follow are codified.

It means that the autocrat, the sovereign, or simply the bureaucracy or the state make up policy as they go along, and it’s up to you the citizen to stay abreast of changes and fall in line. So instrumental and recurring has this condition and the fight against it been that all of history, certainly of Western history, may be viewed through the lens of the struggle between the sovereign’s prerogative of arbitrary governance and an establishment of common law, often characterized simply as the struggle for freedom itself.

The Greeks, having found some stability if not peace by the fifth century BC, got this ball rolling for the Europeans to come, establishing an assembly in which senators would serve in their turns, following precedents, demonstrating an alternative to autocracy, and safeguarding a continent against the absolutist theocratic regimes of the east. The Romans advanced the cause of liberty, albeit falteringly, through the slow acceptance of plebiscites, which restrained the arbitrary will of the sovereign. This took a leap forward during Constantine’s reign in the fourth century, only to be largely lost during the time of his heirs.

Similar egalitarian stirrings were afoot among the Saxons, Mercians, and Danes during the early Medieval period. These early legal codes have been mostly lost in physical form, but even to the people governed by them, they existed more as tradition than codex, known to some as the folcright. By the time of Alfred the Great just prior to 900 AD, rigorous adherence to time-honored precedents was seen as the bedrock upon which the civilizations of the British Isles rested. Indeed, Alfred’s lasting contribution to the Western tradition—and ultimately the advancement of liberty—was to codify the disparate legal traditions of those within his dominion and to make his autocratic prerogative subservient also to this law. Edward the First and Saint Edward the Confessor distilled this further into the English Common Law, precursor to Magna Carta.

This is to say that the stirrings some of us feel as we watch the rise of discretionary, untouchable, and a more absolutist regime stretch back to antiquity rather than to last night’s news commentary.

America’s Founding Fathers, subjects of the Crown prior to revolution, were well aware of this history. They began to have misgivings as they watched their long-established rights as English citizens eroded and often replaced by the arbitrary diktats of appointed governors, unaccountable magistrates, and courts of admiralty. A tax on tea or a Stamp Act may have been flashpoints, but the roots of revolution ran far deeper, back to the Anglo-Saxon folcright, one could posit. Law now would be imposed on people who had nothing to do with its formulation or enactment, in contradiction to longstanding common law tradition.

The sentiments that instigated revolution and motivated its sometimes hopeless campaigns reappeared in the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia. Participatory and democratic governance subservient to a common law had preserved the English peoples through a millennium. Arbitrary governance was anathema to the signers, who wagered blood and treasure to start a new iteration of the age-old struggle against it.

As long as there has been common law, there has been at least the most necessary level of freedom and people have enjoyed the predictability of governance that lays the groundwork for societal flourishing.

Today, we suffer from a revival of innovation and experimentation in governance and a lack of resistance to it. We’re told that this is a new day: a time in which the knowledge imparted by big data and from the realm of sociology may be harnessed to compute away the problems of man, if only we’ll stand aside for the enlightened technocrats. They fail to realize how closely their promises of automated utopia parallel those of Henri de Saint-Simon in the early 1800s, or the Jacobins just a little earlier, or the Soviet modelers. We’ve been here before.

What’s operative in such recurring scenarios is not whether the newest scheme of governance brings about its utopian goals, but rather the shifting of the balance of power out of the hands of the people and into the hands of their wise and beneficent leaders. The constancy of a common law is exchanged for a grand new experiment in arbitrary governance. If the original plan doesn’t happen to bring about exactly the forecast results, corrective—and coercive—edicts may be immediately issued to get it right.

In today’s America, we’ve slowly come to accept the intrusions of government in all manner of places meant by the nation’s framers to remain within the private domain. The government takes responsibility for and issues mandates concerning the education of our children. Incompetent bureaucrats who would likely have trouble applying bandages dabble in medical management. They own the world of finance and manipulate our mortgages behind the scenes through the tertiary marketplace they’ve designed. The ubiquity of bureaucracy makes legal variability seem not unnatural to American citizens today. Of course the government runs everything and makes alterations at will—why wouldn’t they?

The increasingly complex legal code and compliance burden are the gifts of arbitrary “law.”

We’ve watched as “bailouts” have become the norm: redistributions from everyday citizens to favored mismanaged corporations, as well as to some businesses destroyed directly by government over the last year. At our lowest levels of government, we’ve come to accept vehicles of arbitrary compliance such as zoning laws that intrude on private property rights in ways our founders would have found unconscionable, and that remain always malleable enough to fit the will of any particularly domineering zoning board member.

We became more and more isolated from history, and more and more comfortable thinking of government as shepherd rather than steward. Then COVID-19 arrived.

For those of us who tend to think in terms of the big picture and the long term, this set off alarm bells like nothing else in our lifetimes. Not because we sensed an unprecedented pestilence, but because this was instantly the vehicle of choice to move forward the train of arbitrary rule, having decoupled almost simultaneously from the engine of global warming. We were told to do things that no level of American government has been empowered to broadly impose. We were told to do these things on an emergency basis because we faced an existential threat, though anyone watching the data soon realized how severely the threat was exaggerated. Even Imperial College career doomsayer Neil Ferguson backed off his much-cited early projections of death, settling on a far lower figure; a figure that likely also hasn’t been met, that is, unless you accept the also novel technique of conflating “death with” and “death from.” The simple truth was not allowed to be spoken: that this sickness was a killer of people about to die anyway in the vast majority of cases. Most contracting it would never realize they’d had it.

Breathless newscasters spoke of the emerging threat in terms commensurate with the return of the bubonic plague. The same media darlings who had always preached an environmental message of human overpopulation now seemed oddly concerned with the very survival of our species. No projection was too dark or dystopian to make the nightly news.

Almost no one seemed to recognize that if this were an emergency, then there were few times in our nation’s history without an emergency and there probably never would be a time of non-emergency again. Portentous precedents were set as we largely stood by, masked up, and fell in line, exactly six feet apart.

But governments and the sycophants of authority have long played this game in a thousand guises. Here is a new emergency—novel, unlike anything seen before—that only a powerful government loosed from the inhibitions of its Constitution may deliver us from. Let us all unite! Banish the heterodox voices of suspicion and discord. And build back better. Onward to utopia.

In the COVID context, suddenly protective facewear was mandated. With no precedent, some businesses were deemed essential while others were not, in some locales subject to an often opaque appeals process. We were told precise numbers of people that might gather. These mandates were altered from time to time on the whims of governors and the federal health bureaucracy. In an instant, we were rendered subjects and supplicants.

History suggests that those in power like it this way and that this condition is not easily reversed.

After the slow multi-generational acceptance of authority where none had been authorized, we found ourselves in the land of naked arbitrary rule. As we failed to defy this on any large scale, the resolve of our newly minted overlords hardened even as their protocols were broadly habituated. With gusto and self-righteousness, we leapt headlong into our Orwellian future, ostracizing our few neighbors who were slow to get on board or even reporting them to the police.

The pre-revolutionary and revolutionary-era writings of our American Founding Fathers reveal deep concern for ideas, as opposed to simply having their own new currency, army, and flag. Perhaps chief among these ideas was aversion to arbitrary governance. The Constitution was meant to be a near-ironclad bulwark against this most persistent of human foibles. Viewed in this light, one quickly comes to see that our forefathers went to war not so much to rectify their list of British annoyances as to start again in this new world with the noble aspiration of liberty from arbitrary dictates. Do we today hold their great pains worthless? How quickly would they have gone to war if the British Parliament had ordered them to mask up and limit their congregation?

We, as Americans, stand against those who see the world as a commons—as their commons and their people to teach and fix and guide and corral. Today, our “progressives” lure us once again with promises of future equality and equity, not to mention an unpolluted world and a benevolent new economy. Death by disease will become a thing of history books, so don’t get caught on the wrong side of history! But those who do read history already realize the regressive progression they offer and have offered for time immemorial. We call them “progressives,” but what could be a grander misnomer for those again standing athwart The Long March of Liberty yelling, “Stop!”

The post Rise of the Arbiters appeared first on Free the People.

Do you recall the twenty years prior to this March, in which the idea of catastrophic global warming was ratcheted up to the level of a dire “existential” emergency requiring a unified response from humanity? This occurred even while it became more and more obvious to the American public that 1) climate change is very natural, 2) it’s unclear that the planet is warming at anything more than a natural interglacial rate and 3) a warmer planet isn’t necessarily a detriment to humans or the biome anyway. And yet, the tenor of activists became ever more shrill, decrying the western way of life, it seemed, more than pointing to matters of physics or ecology. Why? Because it was politically useful—the fear, not the truth. 2019 may have been a crescendo for this widely echoed chorus; let us hope.

On the extreme ends of the climate change spectrum of concern are those who think that the abatement of warming by even a single degree is worth any price we may pay. Indeed, it often seems that the higher a price the industrialized West pays, the better. On the other end of the spectrum are a few people like me, unlikely to get upset about things we cannot control, such as the changing climate of the Earth. Loosely, these two positions adhere to the political left and political right. But note a serious distinction between the two sides represented here: The left demands compliance, now! They want all cars to be electric, they want the end of fossil fuel energy sources, and they want you to have to eat a vegetarian diet. Implicit is the idea that they actually know better than you do what’s good for you and what’s good for the environment. The left has no time for debate, no time for the deliberative processes inherent in American governance or the western tradition. Yet another deadline to save the planet looms!

On the right we see a desire to persuade. We want to make our case. We think it would be a wonderful thing if we were suddenly given an equal opportunity to do so in the television news and newspaper media. We wish to appeal to free-thinking people as equals, willing to listen to counterpoints. Much of our communication is directed toward simply countering the dire messaging of the left—a full-time job for thousands.

The notable need in climate rhetoric for conformity and compliance gives rise to the notion that this all may only be pretext for the power that authoritarians have attempted to seize all along. Authoritarians are known for not letting emergencies go to waste, whether real or imagined.

Authoritarians are recognizable on both the macro (United Nations and federal government) and micro scales. There’s nothing monstrous about these individuals—they’re all around us. These are the people who peer over hedgerows to assess the shagginess of their neighbor’s grass. These are the people who shake their heads at children who are allowed to run free too much, the people who want to form a homeowners’ association, the people who think it’s time to institute a curfew, the people who wonder how government can best curtail industry to save the planet and the people who scheme about abrogation of freedom to stop the spread of disease.

There are unguarded moments in which the mask of concern falls away and true authoritarian ambitions are revealed. Among these was the 2014 publication of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything (Capitalism vs. the Climate) in which this noted paragon of socialistic virtue and atmospheric acumen attempted to demonstrate the necessity of demolishing our current capitalistic system in favor of something more regulated by experts. When faced with destructive forces this monumental, we can’t simply rely on market forces anymore; those same forces that got us into this intractable climate nightmare!

Far from the only example of socialism showing around the edges of green literature, this work makes a fine example if only because of its near-universal acclaim from the left. The Simon and Schuster paperback opens with 19 blurbs of praise from all manner of left-wing academics and literati. Allow me to share some choice excerpts as I may be the only man of libertarian persuasion with this volume right here in the living room:

From the introduction:

I’d like to go on, but you get the idea.

From the time of its pronouncement by comrade Gore, American people have, overall, distrusted the climate narrative, intuitively. This may have been the case for at least two notable reasons: 1) Al Gore pronounced it and 2) we noticed that the solutions which were somehow instantly available, sounded much like the things the left had wanted for America since time immemorial.

These solutions included, generally:

• Massive public investment (and hence, control) in aspects of health care, education, public works projects, green technology, food production and energy
• More direction from bureaus of experts, less from elected public officials
• The public sector supplanting certain traditional roles of the private
• More intrusive regulatory measures
• Coupling climate change with social justice

Common threads entwine the Green New Deal, the New Deal, and the Great Society.

The aforementioned expansionist programs, however, represented slow-track solutions to slow-building “emergencies.” We now know what the fast track looks like. In the last month we’ve witnessed big wins for authoritarianism the world over and it’s hit home in America in particular.

We’ve established a precedent that big government is in control and can, upon questionable pretext, exert its will.

This needs to be challenged by states and by individuals. We’ve largely accepted that the government can shut down the private sector at will, which does much to establish an undue subservience of private to public, of liberty to safety. The idea that government can pick essential businesses has seen little challenge. It’s alright with all too many of us that earned wages are replaced with government checks. Private businesses are being conscripted into government service if they can provide supplies the government demands, and not the market but the government directs acquisition and dispersal. The left is moving rapidly at the current time to couple economic and medical mitigation to social justice. And not least of all, one of the most historic triumphs of unbridled capitalism, the Trump economy, has been lain low by those looters conjured from the dystopian future America of Ayn Rand.

This was the fast track for the ambitions of the left. The only question now relates to the degree of permanence. It’s certain that they’d like to hold onto as many of these gains as they can and hence it’s certain that they’d like to prolong the state of emergency as much as can be tolerated. From the outset, we saw the split emerge: The right was the party of “resume normalcy and get back to work as soon as possible” while the left spoke of at least months of compulsory austerity.

We should all at least realize, as we look around at our current dire situation, that our pain is not the result of a virus; it’s the result of unchecked government run amok in broad fields once fenced off to politicians by our Constitution. And as some of us are coming to sense, it’s just more global warming.

The post COVID-19 and Global Warming: “Emergencies” That Fast Track Authoritarianism appeared first on Free the People.

This is when our young protagonist makes his fatal error: he sits down with Socrates for a bit, a man who has long pursued him but who he has fled from successfully until now. Young Al imagines he’s in for a speech but Socrates addresses him with just a set of simple questions.

In the ensuing dialectic, Alcibiades is shown first that his motivations proceed from ambition and pride rather than a selfless desire to serve his nation-state. Socrates, at great length, uses his own words to then show him that he knows exactly nothing about morality, war, peace, or “anything else which is the business of the city.” Through this quintessential demonstration of the understated power of the Socratic method, the mentor disabuses young Alcibiades of the notion that he grasps even the difference between the just and the unjust until Socrates arrives at this observation, only a little more than a third of the way through the dialogue:

“Well then, you tell me that you’re wavering about what is just and unjust, admirable and contemptible, good and bad, and advantageous and disadvantageous. Isn’t it obvious that the reason you waver about them is that you don’t know about them?”

Alcibiades: Yes, it is.

The distinguished Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has had no Socrates in her life or else she, like Alcibiades, has decided that she simply knows best. Indeed, it’s likely that at Boston University, Socrates was treated surficially during a single lecture that took time away from social justice curricula. (And I’d like to be a fly on the wall if Ol’ Socrates were to sit down and talk justice with the purveyors of ‘social justice’ for a bit.) We all watched one of her life’s great crises play out over the last week or so—we saw what happened to her plan to right all wrongs.

So, my reason for writing today isn’t to heap any more shame on the young Congresswoman or to demean her. To do so would be to miss the point. Yes, Ocasio-Cortez has a problem but only in the same sense that the body we collectively know as “the Left” has a problem. That problem is hubris and we don’t have nearly enough barefoot Socratics wandering the halls of academia to mitigate it. Our symposia have got the drinking and carousing part right but have forgotten the dispensation of wisdom part.

We see this hubris on every side today. Notably:

The Left must maintain control of K-12 schools for it is only they who know how to teach children properly and with equality of outcome. Though it strikes some of us as odd that there is still no equality of outcome.

Only the wise administrators can wade the morass of urban blight and again, inequality issues. Of course, they are imbued with not only the wisdom but the empathy required. How much better off are minorities and the communities they inhabit since becoming, in many senses, wards of the state?

Only those who hold the reins of power can bring economic justice, as they did during the ’90’s with home ownership incentives which helped those who really couldn’t afford homes to buy homes. We remember the crash of 2008, but we forget the prelude.

And this, perhaps, is why it remains vital for the Left to control the schools and the media: If you control the narrative, even the most historically self-evident truths can be twisted.

But Ocasio-Cortez does bear further responsibility. The grand-daddy of all hubristic schemes is the climate change “emergency.” The conservative right is ridiculed for its reliance on faith but what level of faith is required to believe, even before considerations of the evidence, that the climate-advocacy politicians are working for the good of the environment rather than for political ends? How much faith to believe it’s rooted in altruism? How much faith to believe anyone knows what the temperature of the earth is supposed to be today? How much faith to believe that there’s a model that takes into account, with proper weighting and compensation for thousands of feedbacks, the complexities of the earth’s atmosphere, the earth itself, the oceans and the biome? What about when we extend those models to the economic realm? How much faith to believe that either scientists or climate advocates work disinterestedly? How much faith in our media to believe we’re getting the whole story?

In wedding herself to climate dogma the young representative has wedded herself to hubris defined and it will be her downfall; little effort is needed on our part.

Is it really mysterious that the Left attempts to make public enemies of both our storied western tradition and the Judeo-Christian culture? These are the traditions that have shaped the United States in ways utterly inestimable. But among the great gifts imparted by the millennia of learning is the emplacement of humility as primary among virtues. No learning happens if we start by knowing it all and we don’t improve if we’re uncritical of our own beliefs. Many a nation has been overturned by losing sight of this maxim—there’s no need for the United States to join their number.

Beginning before university, our young people are taught to first reject the antiquated precepts of what our forefathers knew to be wise governance, knowing nothing of the ages of history that gave rise to them. They’re taught to proceed with superiority and entitlement into the infinite tangle of social and wealth disparity and they’re encouraged to believe that it is indeed possible to not only find the right climate but to make it so.

When we pillory Occasio-Cortez, we’re treating only a symptom. Until academic hubris can be subdued, we will continue to produce such ideological clones in bulk. Seeing the problem for what it is seems a good first step.

Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.
—Proverbs 16:18

The post Humility is Still the Beginning of Wisdom appeared first on Free the People.