The discussion started with the new credit card rules and soon moved to things that the administration has been doing that have raised or will raise prices on the average person, thanks to taxes, inflation, and/or changed business practices. One person doubted my take on the situation and basically suggested that I believed everything was Obama's fault because he and the "Demon-crats" had an agenda to bring the American traveler (the last subject was a Democrat-floated proposal to use tax to keep the gas price at $4) to his knees, because that "makes SO much sense *eyeroll smiley*". This was my response:
No, it doesn't, because that's not his plan. It's hard to say exactly what his plan is, but I think I've got the gist of it...it springs from a genuine desire to 'set things right' for the people he believes have been disenfranchised by capitalism.
I don't know if he personally endorses the $4/gallon plan. It springs, however, from a belief that Americans use "too much oil", thereby ruining the environment, and the only way to keep them from doing it is to raise the price until they start cutting back of their own accord. The idea itself follows logically... it just doesn't start with reality. The reality is that though a swatch of middle-class Americans may be able to slim out a small percentage of their driving, the working poor have already gotten it as far down as they can and now have to cut down on food and medical care, and the rich have enough money to continue paying for the increased prices and won't be affected much.
His actual ideas, as well, follow logically from their premise. The only problem is that the premise is not grounded in reality. The car fiasco springs from a belief that hybrids are utterly affordable and easily makeable and the only reason why they aren't all over the place is because the auto companies want bigger profits and the oil companies have it in for us. The truth is that hybrids are losses. They're significantly more expensive as new cars. you can't find them as used cars, and they STILL present a loss between manufacturing costs and selling price.
Obama and most of the Democratic majority are not businessmen, and they're not working poor families, and they're not farmers. They don't understand how you can make more without taking it away from someone else, something any six-year-old with a (supervised) vegetable garden learns by August. They don't realize that you can't make something happen just by saying it'll happen, because they've been steeped in the notion of "positive thinking" (which has its uses, but ordering the sun to shine isn't one of them). They've all gone to these huge famous colleges where the ivory tower notion of the way the world works is passed around and around and around like a cow chewing its cud, and then they have lived lives of privilege (compared to most of the rest of us) surrounded by people who have merely reinforced their beliefs.
This, by the way, is why the percentage of people who approve of Obama as a person, the much-quoted 55-60% depending on which day it is, is much higher (twice as high, last I heard) than the percentage of people who approve of his policies. Lots of people like his charisma, but polls keep showing that Americans don't want the government running banks and companies and such and Obama and his crowd just keep doing it, because they believe they can do a better job. And they can't, because their beliefs are based on a perceived notion of justice and injustice and equality and discrimination, instead of the kind of understanding about profit and loss that any business major already has.
But they won't hear it from businessmen, because they believe that businessmen are all collective Scrooges strip-mining the populace because they like to see people suffer as long as it makes them money money money hahahahaha, like any Saturday Morning villain from the '80's and '90's... at least, the ones whose goals weren't destroying the environment Just Because.
Yeah, that's sort of funny... my younger brother recently passed on an observation from his roommate at college about debating with many people of a liberal viewpoint. The guy observed that it was extremely difficult to hold a debate because they often do not seem to inhabit the same reality you do. I refer to this as living on the other side of the looking glass where the reality does not square with how things are in the real world. An example of this was when I was discussing the Supreme Court with someone and they explained that consevatives needed to be replaced because they were advocates of selectively applying foreign law. And this person was serious! They accused conservatives of doing something that liberal justices are famous for doing and publicly defending. Essentially, this person inhabits the other side of the looking glass where reality is the opposite of the real world.
ReplyDeleteI think that, more or less, Obama and his acolytes inhabit a world in which their policies are rational given the facts because the facts bear no resemblance to the ones that a dispassionate observer of the real world would ascertain. In their world, the rich people are all greedy and take money that would normally flow to a poor person. In their world, driving the government into debt so deep that it can't see the light is the best way to help an economy in a tailspin. In their world, the only people who don't buy into anthropogenic climate change are paid stooges of Big Business. The problem is... their world isn't real but they apply policy to the real world as if it was their private world.
I have often wondered how many of them have had a vegetable garden or raised any sort of livestock, as the concepts of wealth creation without theft from the poor ("making the pie higher", so to speak) are very easily grasped when you see what you can do with a pair of rabbits or a tomato plant grown from one seed.
ReplyDeleteLikewise, I wonder how many of them have shopped at Salvation Army or Goodwill, or waited until the Next Greatest Thing drove down the price of the Previous Greatest Thing before buying the latter, as that would give them a very clear and useful definition/proof of "trickle down".