Who could not have foreseen that result? ( Milton Friedman certainly would have.) We have just pumped trillions of dollars into the economy, with the result that inflation is the worst it has been in nearly half a century. Just as our mastery of the techniques of scientific inquiry enables us to make reliable progress in plumbing the secrets of nature, so our understanding of how markets work gives us the tools to manage the economy effectively. On the other hand, the situation Heinlein describes is not an unavoidable fate. The former must be managed, directed, uplifted. So they divide people who disagree with them as either ignorant or evil. They conclude, wrongly, that it must be because people are insufficiently enlightened by the progressive creed.Įither that, or it must be because of people who perversely reject that creed. They cannot understand why, since they have identified and castigated it, it still exists. On the one hand, it’s an illustration of what the great philosopher Michael Oakeshott had in mind when he observed that “The evanescence of imperfection may be said to be the first item of the creed of the Rationalist.”īy “Rationalist,” I should add, Oakeshott meant more or less what we mean when we speak of “Progressives.”Īll are utopians of one stripe or another. Very soon now, they will look around at the wreckage their good intentions have wrought and wonder who is to blame for the poverty, the chaos, the ruins that lay strewn where once, not so long ago, a vibrant civilization stood, supported by a mighty economy. The issue was not “bad luck” but virtue-fired stupidity.Īll those “right-thinking people”-the people with the socially certified ideas, the kinder, gentler, mask-wearing, anti-fossil-fuel types-are on the ramparts, proudly toppling the atavistic instruments of their prosperity. Of course, Heinlein was speaking ironically with that last bit. “This,” Heinlein added, “is known as ‘bad luck.’” Then comes the kicker: “Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.” “Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded-here and there, now and then-are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people.” “Throughout history,” Heinlein wrote in 1973, “poverty is the normal condition of man.” This colloquy of gloom reminded me of a famous observation from the writer Robert Heinlein.
“ Corporate Number Crunching Games Signal a Deteriorating Economy,” “ Meta to Lay Off People for 1st Time,” “ Fed’s Preferred Inflation Gauge Shows Price Surge Again Last Month,” and “ Dow Ends Month Down Nearly 9%.” Under the rubric “Biden Administration,” for example, we find “ Biden Says ‘We Can Afford’ Student Debt Forgiveness After GOP Lawsuit,” and “ Fed-Backed Censorship Machine Targeted 20 News Sites,” a story about the Election Integrity Partnership, a consortium of four private companies that, under the aegis of the government, are surveilling, reporting on, and censoring conservative social media sites that publish stories displeasing to the administration. In just 30 seconds, you can glance at those headlines and come away with a sense of the national mood. Those stories tend to be hard hitting and meticulously researched.Įvery election season, they scour the polls and sift through the dross in order to supply readers not only with the results of a representative sampling of individual polls-which, as I note in a forthcoming column elsewhere, are often little more than a form of fan fiction-but also with the valuable “RCP average,” a kind of polling gold standard that pundits and prognosticators eagerly anticipate.įinally, RealClear provides a constantly evolving digest of the news of the day arranged according to a handful of topics and printed in a single column down the left side of its home page. Over the past several years, under the rubric RealClearInvestigations, the site has also been publishing its own incisive and independent investigative reporting on a wide range of issues. I do so in part because of the range of its links-the editors cull many of the best columns from all sides of the political debate, so it’s a handy way to stay au courant-and in part for its expanding subsections on books, science, religion, defense, and other cultural topics. One of the few websites I check in on almost every day is RealClearPolitics.
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