Weighing all the platitudes, pandering, and what-ifs among the promises of politicians, I realized that Liberal Democrats deal completely in imaginary numbers. In a previous post, I spoke about how Obama’s economic plan, while creating a quarter million green jobs and the like will result in a net job loss. These Democrats do not live in the real world.
Of late, in discussions with a friend reading The Screwtape Letters as part of a philosophy/religion course, I reread lots of Clive Staples Lewis. In that same volume, Lewis argues that many people feel tempted to live in the future and dabble in eventualities. Although it is well and good to plan for the future, to live there defies all reason, for the real world is the one we have, not the one we want to have. If you do not know where you really are, how can you possibly chart a clear course to where you want to be?
Liberals, like the Patient in Lewis’ allegory, live in a world they imagine up unto themselves. For the Patient, Wormwood enflamed his rage against a neighbor for slights and offenses while encouraging a benign accommodation towards the Nazis. Thus, his magnanimity towards the Nazis whom he never met becomes largely imaginary while his disdain for his neighbor remains wholly real. By the same rhetoric, Liberals want us to reach out to people in Botswana, Darfur, and the Belgian Congo (do you even know where those places are?), who are not real people to us while they ignore the plight of coal miners, auto assembly line workers, military support personnel, etc., who as a result of their policies find themselves less able to care for their families, either through confiscatory taxes or through loss of livelihood and hearth. They villainize people who are wholly real and extend gestures of good will towards people largely imaginary.
Regardless of what we do, Adam Smith writes in Moral Sentiments, the way to best change the world remains to focus on our sphere of influence. The further your efforts and money must travel to affect the life of someone distal, the less of it arrives at its destination (think about power lost in electric transmission lines over great distance or icebergs melting as they move south). It has been said that through six degrees of separation, we know everyone on the planet. If that’s the case, through a mere six iterations, we can reach the people who need our help by touching people who touch other people who are in a direct position to touch the people we want to help. We help people who need it most by encouraging a system that pays it forward. Jesus taught that we will always have the poor among us, and poverty is not simply a matter of economics, as he also taught.
Policies of the Liberal mindset ignore two basic phenomenon associated with risk. Whenever you reach out, you risk the chance that people will either refuse the offering or waste it. As such, it makes sense to invest where you can maximize the returns of an investment and in such a fashion that provides the best management of limited resources towards arriving at aims. General contractors generally work on site because they cannot effectively and efficiently manage activity on a job site from an office distal in space and time.
Liberals also misunderstand two basic mathematical principles in investment. First, the Law of Probability teaches that the odds remain the same regardless of the frequency of an event. For example, on a six-sided die, there is always a 1/6 chance that a particular number will come up, one chance for each face. That someone rolls a “3” ten times in a row does not mean that the odds are higher (or lower) that it will come up as a “3” on the next roll. Each event occurs independently of the others. Liberals continue to try the same projects, the same solutions as a means to fix problems. Someone once said that insanity defined means trying the same thig twice and expecting different results. Secondly, the Law of Diminishing Returns teaches that continuing the same thing does not increase the return on your investment. People mistakenly believe that buying more lottery tickets increases their chances of winning. If only one ticket is drawn, they still have the same chance of winning- only one ticket will win, regardless of how many you bought. The only thing you guarantee by buying more tickets is the total amount vested in a risky venture. Liberals expand the number of people working on problems and the amount of money spent on them. Throwing more money and personnel into a faulty program will not make the program more effective, only more expensive.
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