On approximately the same level as these, “Water Is Wet, Studies Show,” headlines we’re occasionally bombarded with is the news that government employees sit on their asses surfing Internet porn all day.  Now, sure, there are plenty of competent, earnest federal workers who would never do anything like this — but as endemic as this kind of thing is in the private sector, did anybody really imagine that it would be better in the more accountability-free environment of government employment?

Will Collier has an absolutely fantastic blog post describing what he calls the Washington Delusion.  It’s hard to just quote one little bit:

I don’t care how brilliant or learned The One and his various minions might be, they are not smart enough to “grasp the intricacies of the health-care system.” It does not stand to reason that “any three humans” could actually “write a law to make it far more efficient.” They simply don’t posses anything close to enough data, and they aren’t blessed with the Godlike intelligence that would be required to actually comprehend a system that large and complex.

It’s much more likely that any law they could write to reorganize such a vast apparatus, one that involves hundreds of millions of individuals, not one of whom will act according to theory in any given particular, would result in unintended consequences far beyond the ken of Barack Obama, Peter Orszag, Nancy-Ann DePearle, or even (gasp) David Broder.

This reliance on “we’ll just get the smartest kids from [insert favored Ivy League school of the moment] in the room and figure all this out” Washington-think got us into a great many messes in our recent history, not least including the alleged “Maestro” of the national economy building up an unsustainable real estate bubble, the popping of which led to the current unpleasantness.

The delusion that any small group of “planners” can “manage” much of anything in a vast, continental nation is perhaps the defining characteristic of the Washington class. Having been assured for decades that they are the Best And The Brightest, they simply do not understand–much less accept–their own limitations.

Precisely so.  This is the basic Hayekian argument against economic central planning, writ large: there is no repository of all the information that would be necessary for the central planners to make economically optimal decisions for hundreds of millions of irrational humans.  Never mind that history is littered with terrible, malicious, blood-soaked ideas that have bubbled up from the intelligentsia: no matter how well-intentioned and well-conceived the plan, there will always — always — be a non-trivial human remainder that will necessarily be ground under the wheels of “progress.”  It is unbelievable hubris to imagine otherwise; that if we only turn over the levers of power to the right set of smartypantses, everything will work out smashingly.

is that, more often than not, you’re also right.

Toward the end of July I wrote a letter to the editor of the San Jose Mercury News, making a point that should be familiar to my regular readers (all four of you): that one of the principal problems with socialized medicine is the way in which it empowers self-righteous wellness busybodies.  Once you coercively collectivize healthcare costs, then almost any meddling in individual consumer choices can be justified on the thin reed of cost control.  Smoking, drinking, eating fatty foods, and so on cease to be private decisions, possibly unhealthy but legitimate; instead they become burdens on the treasury, and the taxpayer, which must be coercively discouraged or eradicated.

Predictably, this argument was denounced as irresponsible fearmongering by the Merc’s readership.

Fast-forward two months.  The idea of a “soda tax” is now being bounced around as a way to help fund ObamaCare, and the following two letters appear on the Merc’s editorial page:

Our country is battling rapidly rising medical costs that are increasing far faster than incomes. Because all Americans pay for the health care of senior citizens via Medicare, we all have a financial interest in helping our fellow Americans take better care of themselves. Poor nutrition and resulting obesity add significantly to our collective financial burden. Encouraging healthy behaviors — whether through seat belt laws or tobacco taxes — are not “nanny state” burdens, but rather sound public policy that can help individual Americans adopt healthy behaviors and can help curb skyrocketing medical costs. A simple soda tax is not only consistent with U.S. policies, but it would help both raise funds and make Americans healthier. Bring it on.

Kate Grant

Santa Clara

And:

Ferd Kretz (Letters, Sept. 19) worries that soda taxes will lead to a “nanny” government that searches our cupboards and decides what’s good for us. As a libertarian, I encourage government to tax activities or products that impose costs on the public. The consumption of high fructose laden soft drinks is inextricably linked to obesity and, more importantly to me, increased dental rates in children. When indigent children must have the state pay for repairing teeth that soda decays, then the soda consumers should pay for that cost. This is equivalent to using tobacco taxes to help pay for the medical treatment of smokers. It is only fair to levy a small fee to relieve the state of this burden.

John M Pisacane

Willow Glen Dentistry San Jose

Set aside the hilarity of a self-professed libertarian defending a regressive sin tax (methinks some remedial courses in political philosophy are necessary): I could not have asked for a more perfect illustration of my point.  Yesterday the social engineers went after tobacco; today, soda.  Think your favorite indulgence won’t be a tax and regulatory target tomorrow?  Think again.

Quick, someone call Eric Holder:

In an obvious reference to the Ku Klux Klan, Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., said Tuesday that people will be putting on “white hoods and white uniforms again and riding through the countryside” if emerging racist attitudes, which he says were subtly supported by Wilson, are not rebuked. He said Wilson must be disciplined as an example. 

My contempt for race-baiting jackasses like Hank Johnson knows no bounds.  The only people inciting racial divisions here are these pieces of human garbage who claim to detect a racist dog whistle in virtually any criticism of an African-American president.  Have a free clue, Hank Johnson: Joe Wilson called the President a liar because he was lying, shamelessly, to the point of having to tacitly admit as much the very day after the speech.

When you’re right, you’re right: Kanye West is indeed a jackass, Mr. President.

This eighth anniversary of that horrible day is going to be marked by a lot of solemn and sorrowful symbolism — flags at half mast, wearing red, and the mouthing of phrases like, “Never forget.”

This day doesn’t make me sad or solemn.  This day enrages me, as white-hot an anger as when I woke up that morning and learned what had happened.

For all the urine-stained hysterics in the media and among the left-wing commentariat about how the townhall meeting rowdiness amounted to the mainstreaming of hate:

That’s the full list of documented violence from the August meetings. In more than 400 events: one slap, one shove, three punches, two signs grabbed, one self-inflicted vandalism incident by a liberal, one unsolved vandalism incident, and one serious assault. Despite the left’s insistence on the essentially barbaric nature of Obamacare critics, the video, photographic, and police report evidence is fairly clear in showing that 7 of the 10 incidents were perpetrated by Obama supporters and union members on Obama critics. If you add a phoned death threat to Democrat representative Brad Miller of N.C., from an Obama-care critic, the tally is 7 of 11.

Read the whole thing.

Two things about Mr. Obama’s speech last night that I want to touch on:

1.  The Heckling

For those unaware, at one point during the speech a Republican congresscritter from South Carolina who nobody had ever heard of before yesterday stood up and shouted, “You lie!” at the president (video and context here).  The media and much of the port side of the political spectrum came down with a collective case of the vapors and dragged itself over to the fainting couch to bemoan the lack of civility and the coursening of the discourse, et cetera et cetera.

Well, screw that.

For one thing (and I say this fully appreciating that it’s a rhetorical two-by-four to the backs of the heads of Mr. Obama’s many, many personality cultists), the United States has a president, not a king.  Calling a politician — any politician — on his weapons-grade BS isn’t “classless”; it’s the absolute birthright of every American.  We owe public servants the raucous skepticism of a free people, not the polite fealty of cowed subjects.

For another, let us note that the folks currently soiling themselves over this supposed breach of Congressional decorum — you know, the same deep thinkers who spent the entire month of August calling opponents of ObamaCare “teabaggers”, “evil-mongers”, an angry mob, and so forth — are, shall we say, poorly positioned to be casting stones.  If you want respect, try giving it occasionally.

For a third, and perhaps most importantly, truth is a higher-order value than civility.  The mendacity of politicians corrupts the public discourse far more gravely than mere incivility ever could.  When a president brazenly lies his ass off, as Mr. Obama did last night vís-a-vís coverage for illegal aliens (among other things), he deserves to be called on it, ideally while dodging the rotten fruit and dead wombats being hurled in his direction by an outraged citizenry.

And that brings me to my second point:

2.  The Lies

Matt Welch at Reason does yoeman’s work cataloguing the president’s fusillade of whoppers.  A taste:

The lies last night began in Obama’s opening paragraph. “When I spoke here last winter,” he began, “credit was frozen. And our financial system was on the verge of collapse.” In fact, Obama spoke on Feb. 24, at least six weeks after credit markets began to thaw, and one week after he proclaimed that the passage of his $787 billion stimulus marked “the beginning of the end, the beginning of what we need to do to create jobs for Americans.” Obama’s speech that day wasn’t about staving off a collapse, it was about cleaning up the mess and tackling long-ignored issues. Such as health care.

It’s never encouraging when a politician who desperately needs to convince skeptical Americans of his fiscal sobriety starts off by slurring his words. As you might then infer, Obama was just warming up. “Insurance companies,” the president announced, “will be required to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care, like mammograms and colonoscopies,” in part because such prevention “saves money.” Looks like someone forgot to tell the Congressional Budget Office, or other non-White House sources that have analyzed the cost-benefit of prevention.

Welch, hunting in a target-rich environment, manages to miss the illegal alien lie.  But he does capture the latest episode of what Rich Lowry described, a while back, as President Above-It-All.  Lowry (writing about Obama’s vicious murder of straw men in the war on terror/enhanced interrogation debate):

Put Barack Obama in front of a teleprompter and one thing is certain — he’ll make himself appear the most reasonable person in the room.

Rhetorically, he is in the middle of any debate, perpetually surrounded by finger-pointing extremists who can’t get over their reflexive combativeness and ideological fixations to acknowledge his surpassing thoughtfulness and grace…

Obama bracingly politicized these very issues on the stump, staking out unsustainably purist positions because they suited his momentary political interest. Now that’s he’s president, he wants the debate to end. He’s above the grubbily disputatious culture of partisans and journalists. And he’s above contradiction because, as ever, he occupies the middle ground, one “obscured by two opposite and absolutist” sides: those who recognize no terrorist threat and those who recognize no limits to executive power.

And there Obama stands, bravely holding his flanks against straw men on all sides.

Welch:

Again last night, Obama invoked the boogeyman of “special interests” who “lie” in order “to keep things exactly the way they are,” despite the fact that the special interests in this case are lining up to support the president, and that the critics of his plan tend to bemoan, not defend, the status quo. Opponents of his plan, he said, were “ideological”; Ted Kennedy’s support for health care reform, meanwhile, “was born not of some rigid ideology, but of his own experience.” Obama said his door was “always open” to those bringing “a serious set of proposals,” and he slammed that door shut on any attempts to break the almost universally unloved link between employment and insurance. He yearned to “replace acrimony with civility,” then got Democrats stomping on their feet with attacks against the Iraq War and “tax breaks for the wealthy.” The center of the debate, as always, was wherever he chose to stand.

By far the most offensive bit is that which I’ve bolded — as if the Democratic healthcare reform proposals are not themselves ideological in nature, insofar as they evidence an unshakeable faith in the munificence and competence of government, “the leavening hand of wise policy” without which we’d be in as much peril as if government were too big.

What a load of unmitigated crap.  Anybody who looks upon the federal Leviathan and comes away thinking that we’re confronted by a crisis of too little government is hopelessly blinkered by ideology.  Anybody who looks at the American healthcare system and comes away thinking that the principal problem is the sliver of market freedom remaining rather than the hash that previous government interventions have made of things is similarly not dealing with reality.

2006:

“Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren,” Obama said in a 2006 floor speech that preceded a Senate vote to extend the debt limit. “America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership.”

Obama later joined his Democratic colleagues in voting en bloc against raising the debt increase.

2009:

Now Obama is asking Congress to raise the debt ceiling, something lawmakers are almost certain to do despite misgivings about the federal debt. The ceiling already has been hiked three times in the past two years, and the House took action earlier this year to raise the ceiling to $13 trillion.

When I refer to this president as a shameless demagogue, this kind of thing is precisely why.

Jay Cost, at RealClearPolitics, has Mr. Obama’s speech tonight pretty much nailed:

What exactly is this speech supposed to do? Let’s ditch the metaphors – “game changer,” “ninth inning” – and use words that point to actual things: health care reform is in trouble because of differences among factions of the Democratic Party. The compromises that moderates like Ben Nelson require are apparently too much for liberals like Anthony Weiner to accept. How is a speech supposed to overcome this? It would either have to: (a) propose a third-way solution that both sides can agree to, or (b) convince one side or the other that it needs to adjust its stance.

Should we really expect a speech to do that, considering all the other things the President intends to do in it?

I’d say no. I think this will be little more than a change in tone – perhaps from cool/slightly mocking Obama to angry/forceful Obama. From the looks of it, the President is still planning to make all the same points he’s been hammering for months. He’ll ask for bipartisan cooperation while remaining cagey on the public option (a deal breaker for 99% of the Republican caucus). He will again insist the time for debate is over and the time for action is now. He’ll make a not-terribly-compelling case about how this somehow relates to the current economic morass, even though the benefits do not kick in for years. He’ll fearlessly stand up to Republican straw men, who never offer anything except disingenuous attacks.

I have a post percolating about Mr. Obama’s rhetorical tics, but suffice it to say that we’re also likely to hear his signature “let me be clear” and “as I have always consistently said” and “the time for debate is over” lines quite a lot.