H. L. Mencken was an absolute wizard at divining self-serving humbug, especially when it came to politicians. One of his most penetrating observations was that “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” Nothing has changed in the roughly 80 years since he wrote that.
Consider the annual duel over taxation. Organizations such as the Tax Foundation attempt to get people to realize that the government is making everyone poorer with its constant drain on productive resources, while the big spenders in Congress and their allies among the federal trough-feeding interest groups try to get the upper hand by menacing the people with the idea that they should be mad because “the rich” are not paying enough.
In his column today, Bruce Bartlett shows how Big Spender Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota has played that deceptive trick once again.
