Sunday, November 14, 2004

Why I Am Not A Liberal

Surely you didn't need much help with this one. It ought to be clear to you that I'm not exactly a liberal. But here are a few bullet points:

1. I am deeply skeptical of the government's ability to do most of the things that real liberals want it to do.

...like eliminate poverty, or educate the young, or manage the economy, or you name it.

2. I am against liberal attacks on our religious and moral traditions.

...not that I actually ascribe to them myself, or even follow a lot of them, but I disapprove of liberal efforts to do things like redefine marriage and define deviancy down.

I'm especially hostile to liberals who style themselves as atheists or "secularists", because those people are just creepy and misguided, having morphed their political persuasion into a quasi-religion. This gives rise to all kinds of nonsense having to do with the narcissistic desire to define whatever warped disposition in which a person finds himself or herself as being normal regardless of how obviously maladaptive that disposition is.

3. I think it ought to be obvious even to the brain dead academics that haunt our institutions that centralized economies and economies that don't uphold property rights and a more or less free market have been abysmal failures. We've kicked that old, dead, rotten rodent around the yard quite enough. Time to move on.

4. I'm absolutely in agreement with the idea that one hundred people chosen at random out of a phone book would do much better at running things that a million of the bureaucrats who style themselves as the educated elite experts would ever do and have ever, obviously, done.