Peter Berkowitz had an excellent analysis in Saturday’s WSJ. Read his piece here.
One of his main targets is Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, who looks down his nose at tea partiers because he thinks they exhibit a deranged mistrust of government power.
Now, I do not recall Dionne ranting against mistrust of government power when the left was skeptical about Bush administration arguments for the war against Iraq. That skepticism was entirely reasonable. But when people turn skeptical about the supposed good of having the government run the health care industry, about having it “stimulate” the economy through politically-directed “shovel ready projects,” about federal favors for supportive interest groups such as labor unions, and many other parts of the costly, authoritarian Obama agenda, well, they’re just being foolish.
Berkowitz argues that the reason why supposed intellectuals like Dionne can’t understand the rising opposition to the mega-state is that they’re lacking some key educational components. He’s right, but doesn’t quite put his finger on the gaping hole: they’re unfamiliar with public choice theory. Public choice is the antidote for the mystical, childish, ideas about democracy that kids usually get in school. Once you grasp public choice, you give up the notion that democracy works for the common good because, among other defects, politicians are short-sighted (focusing mainly on winning the next election), they’re subject to special interest group pressures, and they rarely suffer adverse consequences when they make bad decisions.
Dionne dismisses the Tea Party, claiming that its supporters don’t rely on “facts.” What baloney. How about the fact, Mr. Dionne, that federal policy engineered the housing bubble? How about the fact that ObamaCare is already causing health insurance costs to rise? Or the fact that government schools do a poor job of educating students, but do so at very high cost?
There are lots and lots of facts to justify mistrust of government.
