Jonah hits it out of the park today:
What I don’t think we hear enough about is intellectual hypocrisy. What’s that? Well, if moral hypocrisy is saying what values people should live by while failing to follow them yourself, intellectual hypocrisy is believing you are smart enough to run other peoples’ lives when you can barely run your own…
Or consider Rep. Charles Rangel (D., N.Y.), currently subject of a House ethics investigation. Rangel heads the Ways and Means Committee
, which writes the tax code. He backs the imposition of an income-tax surcharge on high earners to pay for health care, calling it “the moral thing to do.” Yet he can’t seem to figure out how to file his own taxes properly or, perhaps, legally.
Now, I also know lots of conservatives who are basket cases at everything other than reading and writing books and articles, giving speeches, and thinking Big Thoughts (likewise, I know liberals who despise conservative moralizing about sex and religion who nonetheless live chaste, pious lives themselves). The point is that conservatives don’t presume to be smart enough to run everything, because conservative dogma takes it as an article of faith that no one can be that smart.
This is exactly right. One of the basic tenets of libertarianism and capitalist economics – the principles that this country were founded upon – is that the only person qualified to make decisions for a person is that person himself and I’ve been meaning to blog on this for some time. I have a nice long post in my head on this topic for someday in the future if I can ever get around to it.
On the other hand, the actual hypocrisy that Jonah is talking about here might be that these guys -Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, Obama, and the rest of them – don’t actually think they can run things better or that they can accomplish the things they claim, and they know they can’t, rather, their actual reasons for doing what they do are different than what they claim. Anyone with half a brain can see that expanding government entitlements isn’t going to save money in the long run, nor is forbidding malpractice reform going to lower costs incurred by healthcare providers, but if the goal is simply to expand the size and power of the federal government in pursuit of craven political purposes and majority building, then they’re doing a bang up job and are clearly up to the task.
Maybe that’s not hypocrisy, but it is dishonesty.
Like I said, more on libertarian theory later.
“…government entitlements isn’t going to save money in the long run, nor is forbidding malpractice reform going to lower costs incurred by healthcare providers” I often read that tort reform will lead to a reduction in the cost of medical care and wonder why people consider it to be a given. Texas tort reform has not lowered the cost of medical care for the consumer but it has had positive effects for physicians. We no longer have the problem of doctors leaving the state and have had an increase in practitioners. Unfortunately, the cost savings have not made any difference to the public. Our premiums have increased and according to “Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that Texas ranked third among the states in health insurance premium increases — 40 percent — from 2001 to 2005. Small wonder that Texas continues to lead the nation in the percentage of residents — about one-fourth — without health insurance” I don’t think the belief of tort reform = lower cost is dishonest but the reality is that it does not work.