May 18, 2016, 4:15 am
http://spectator.org/dont-put-these-people-in-charge-of-anything/Five recent examples showing no matter where, no matter how, giving the Left political power is a comically stupid idea.
The problem is, the Left — whether manifested by the Democratic Party in the United States or by other variants of the socialist movement elsewhere — has figured out how to weaponize its own failure of governance.
Typically, governments which fail catastrophically will invariably fold. The universal understanding that in order to maintain power a government will have to provide the necessary functions of a public sector — national security and law enforcement, infrastructure, basic health and education services, courts and the rule of law.
What we know in the 21st century is that the failure to provide adequately for those necessities, and particularly in concert with substituting other functions that are not necessities like wealth redistribution, regulating the intake of soda drinks, and micromanaging the use of real estate, is no longer sufficient to produce the removal of an incompetent government. What we know now is that rather than turn out a poisonous, overreaching gang of troglodytes in charge of a particular jurisdiction, the people contributing the tax base said troglodytes misappropriate from will simply decamp for better locales — and the rulers happily preside over the ruin that results, free of any particular threat of a middle-class revolt.
It’s this dynamic, playing out across the globe, that shows us civilizational decline in an advancing state.
You disagree? Let’s look at just five contemporary examples, shall we?
Burlington College. That’s a fun one for starters, no? You might neither know nor care much about this tiny institution of higher learning tucked away in Vermont’s largest city, but we find it significant because Burlington College just made the decision to shut its doors due to the impact of “crushing” debt it has run up over the years.
And why should we care about that? Well, from 2004 to 2011, the president of Burlington College was one Jane Sanders, the wife of Democrat presidential hopeful and lifelong socialist huckster Bernie Sanders. It seems the Sanders better half was not a particularly miserly chief executive; she in fact thought it would be a good idea to buy up an entire new campus than the one the school had been situated on, with the concept that the brand new campus financed by debt would produce a sensational increase in enrollment and revenue. The pool of new college entrants being of stagnant size, that didn’t happen and the college is folding at the end of the month.
Just imagine what Jane’s husband, who has never held a private sector job, could do atop a larger institution.
Or actually, you don’t have to imagine it. Just travel south to Venezuela, and you can see socialism’s denouement in real time. You already know about the explosion in crime, the violent repression and the food riots, but we have a cherry to place on top of the dung-heap that country has become; namely, that its caudillo in charge Nicolas Maduro said over the weekend that any factories idled by that country’s economic collapse would now be nationalized.
Here’s a truly intellectual quote from a world leader: “Comrades, I am ready to hand over to communal power the factories that some conservative big wigs in this country stopped. An idled factory is a factory handed over to the people. But we’re going to do it, f*ck it! The time has come to do it and radicalize the revolution. The time has come without vacillation. To vacillate is to lose ourselves. We have no choice but to do it.”
One could make the case that Maduro, and the execrable Hugo Chavez who preceded him before dying with a fortune larger than Mitt Romney’s, has already f*cked it.
Speaking of, how about the coming swarm of transvestites, transsexuals, Tim Curry impersonators, and just general perverts ready to descend on public-school girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms? That comes courtesy of America’s own would-be caudillo Barack Obama, who has decided the plight of trannies with an urge to drain the main vein is the civil rights cause of our time. So urgent, he’s decided, that constitutional niceties like the separation of powers and federalism must go by the wayside.
His administration put out a letter to the nation’s 98,000 public schools, not a single one of which is run by the federal government, demanding they allow sexually confused boys into the girls’ rooms and vice versa. The letter went even further, resisting any attempt to define eligibility for such treatment — if a boy determines he “feels” like a girl on a given day and demands entry into a girls’ bathroom the school shouldn’t question his judgement.
The administration was soon walking back its outbreak of politically correct lunacy; after all, it had bigger fish to fry. It turns out the lines in the girls’ bathrooms aren’t all that long compared to the ones at the security gates at O’Hare Airport in Obama’s hometown of Chicago.
This, thanks to the unionized incompetence of Obama’s Transportation Security Agency, which has had some 400 of its own employees convicted of crimes but has yet to catch a single terrorist. What it has caught, however, is travelers; at O’Hare, there have been some 4,000 of them who have missed a flight due to the long security lines, and the traveling public is unsurprisingly furious. Travelers at O’Hare are told to arrive more than two hours ahead of their flight thanks to the slow-moving security lines, which is a sufficient irritant. But what’s worse, and more dangerous, is the obvious weakness the TSA’s traffic jams present; all it would take is a terrorist with a powerful bomb in a large rolling suitcase getting halfway through the security maze before lighting off the device, and you’ll have a Brussels or a Domodedovo writ large on our shores.
Slightly north and east of the Windy City is a final example of leftist perfidy and incompetence for our list, which we would caution is anything but exhaustive. You’ve undoubtedly heard about the Flint water crisis, which is a great example of how the Left is able to weaponized its failure in governance; somehow Flint is Republican governor Rick Snyder’s fault despite the fact every single individual responsible for subjecting the residents to a poisoned water supply is a Democrat.
But the latest news on the Flint front is… perfect. It seems that the political elite in that ruined city couldn’t pay for a cleanup of its water supply out of the city’s own revenues, and thus set up a charity called Safe Water/Safe Homes to solicit private donations. And just as Flint’s politicians misused the public funds supposedly dedicated to infrastructure and basic services, a recently-filed lawsuit alleges current mayor Karen Weaver had employees direct donors to her own campaign PAC rather than the charity.
Of course she did. Of course she did.
