JONATHAN CHAIT catches Mitt Romney not apologising for his inherited advantages. The Hill reports:
“I'm certainly not going to apologize for my dad and his success in life,” Romney said Thursday morning on "Fox and Friends." “He was born poor. He worked his way to become very successful despite the fact that he didn't have a college degree, and one of the things he wanted to do was provide for me and for my brother and sisters. I'm not going to apologize for my dad's success."
Mr Chait comments:
Since Romney couched his defense of his wealthy upbringing in the same terms he has used to defend his own business success, nobody seems to have noticed the difference. But if you take conservative rhetoric seriously, it's all the difference in the world. The conservative line, articulated by such figures as Arthur Brooks and Paul Ryan, makes a sharp distinction between equality of outcome, which is thoroughly evil, and equality of opportunity, which is the highest ideal. (Almost everybody opposes equality of outcome — what they oppose is virtually any steps by government to reduce inequality of outcome.) “Equal opportunity versus equal outcomes, very different political philosophy,” says Ryan.
In practice, the attempt to draw a distinction between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity collapses immediately. ...
Mr Chait is correct. The distinction between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity is mostly illusory.
Wealth is just distilled opportunity. Our opportunities are in no small part a function of our parents' level of economic achievement—of their economic "outcome". If opportunity is in fact so closely tied to outcome, then equalising opportunity would require constant coercive "correction" of the patterns of income and wealth that bubble up from economic activity. But that's the principal objection to the government attempting to maintain equality of outcome, or any particular pattern of goods, for that matter. So when Americans endorse "equality of opportunity", they probably aren't begging for the titanic interventions that would be required to literally equalise opportunity. I think what conservatives are groping for in their confused rhetoric about "equality of opportunity" is the idea that everyone should have access to a baseline level of opportunity. Everyone ought to have enough opportunity to participate in our society's institutions fully and well, enough to make a decent life.
Conservatives need to get this straight, because opportunity is a question on which they could conceivably have the advantage. Ensuring that everyone has a good enough start in life is largely a matter of upbringing and education. Kids who grow up poor in single-parent homes don't do well. But Democrats are allergic to discussion of the extent to which the reproduction of class is a matter of family structure, for victim-blaming this way lies. In a recent City Journal essay, Heather Mac Donald lays out the contrast savvy Republicans will seek to draw:
The Left's essential strategy when it comes to poverty is to assess need and desert only in the present moment. If someone shows up at a welfare office saying: “I have no means of support for myself and my children,” the proper role of the government bureaucrat is to ask: “How big a check do you require?” rather than: “What did you do to put yourself into this situation?”
Conservatives should respond to the Left's present-oriented framework for analyzing welfare and poverty by reintroducing the connection between past behavior and present need. Underclass poverty doesn't just happen to people, as the Left implies. It is almost always the consequence of poor decision-making—above all, having children out of wedlock. A single mother almost inevitably faces a life of stress and instability, even if she gets a job per TANF rules. More importantly, out-of-wedlock child-rearing is profoundly irresponsible. The evidence is incontrovertible: children raised in single-parent homes do worse on all measures of socialization than those raised by married parents.
I don't especially care for the way Ms Mac Donald puts this, but I suspect it's a message that resonates with most Americans. That said, Ms Mac Donald's recommendation, "a full-throated campaign in every government office, bully pulpit, and private agency to reassert the value of fatherhood and marriage" strikes me as almost entirely devoid of substance or promise, and quite likely to take on toxic racial overtones. Still, it might be effective politics. And then there's education reform. Insofar as the Democratic Party is perceived as a captive agent of teachers' unions, Republicans can make a compelling case that as long as Democrats govern, there is little hope of the sort of reform absolutely essential to ensuring everyone a good enough opportunity in life. Moreover, the Democrats' unrelenting focus on the unfair richness of the rich can be cast as an attempt to distract voters from the party's inability to seriously address the real problems at the heart of America's crisis of opportunity and upward mobility.
Anyway, it's not at all clear to me that the question of opportunity is a loser for Mr Romney or the right. It might help if they were to stop talking about equality of opportunity in a way that invites well-earned criticism from the like of Mr Chait.
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I'm a little confused by the author's response that a campaign in favor of fatherhood and marriage is "almost entirely devoid of substance or promise." If the research shows that "children raised in single-parent homes do worse on all measures of socialization than those raised by married parents," shouldn't such a campaign be welcomed? As a corollary, if research were to show that children of obese parents face worse outcomes than children of non-obese parents, wouldn't we favor a campaign to encourage weight loss? (I am assuming of course that a society would try to encourage better outcomes for the next generation.)
The quote from Heather McDonald outlines a major problem I have with the Republican Party: '“How big a check do you require?” rather than: “What did you do to put yourself into this situation?”'
The second question contains a rather huge assumption that everything that happens to you is your fault. This is akin to the magical thinking of "The Secret." Instead, we should ask, how do human beings get into such situations? For example, It is a plain fact that a significant number of US bankruptcies are a result of major health problems. I'm sure a handful of those are due to poor lifestyle choices, but aside from illness induced by substance abuse, these bankruptcies happen because health care is plainly unaffordable for the vast majority of Americans, unless they can get a job with health insurance. Sometimes even then, the "insurance" gets cancelled, denied, fails to cover the particular illness, etc. As a result, we see responsible, hard working, law-abiding adults with families wind up in bankruptcy court or even homeless shelters. How is this just? How is this good for society?
As the author mentions, we need to clearly define a level of opportunity from which a reasonable person would expect to be able to succeed, and then ensure those opportunities a provided to everyone. Public education isn't just about providing opportunity; it's an investment in the future, and I hate to say it but it's true: it's how we indoctrinate our children to be proper citizens of our respective countries. So, civic education is a must and public education is the best way to make sure it's provided. Merit-only hiring practices also ensure that minimum opportunity, and this requires not only education against bigotry, but the force of law. This is just the primary degree, the secondary degree is that we examine fiscal, social and legal policy and law to make sure they do not effectively prevent social mobility. To me this is the key, while I would agree that it's not the government's job to make sure everyone succeeds, it's definitely in the state/public interest to make sure people who merit advancement are not --prevented-- from that advancement through factors totally outside their control.
But the other side of that coin is, you have no control over the social situation and the parents you were born to. We deny how strong a factor our social environment is on the choices people make. The truth is most people are sheep, and I don't mean it as a pejorative. We're social creatures and we do tend to imitate the people around us. With that said, policies and laws need to take this into account. It's not about not holding people responsible, it's about accepting and accommodating for the fact that people's choices aren't always conscious or informed, and are reinforced by patterns of behavior around them as they are growing up.
Ba Yeng,
Do you know what those poor innocent little women can do to eliminate deadbeat dads? Stop having kids with them!
Our culture doesn't force any woman to have a child with a man she knows from the beginning is an irresponsible jerk. It's easy to blame the “deadbeat,” but who is the one and only person who ultimately controls whether a child will be conceived, brought to term, or left with its biological parents? That's right, the woman! That's why I don't want to hear women complaining about how the irresponsible jerks they were having intercourse with -without condoms or birth control - turned out to be irresponsible jerks. These women didn't want to get married to Poindexter and have a kid with him, they had to go and have a casual fling with the bad boy, hoping he'd stay in a relationship with her. Little do these women care about how good of a father their children will have! It's all about her and her need for excitement and sexual gratification. This is also why men are often right to be as suspicious as possible in this country of rampant paternity fraud. Any look at these male-bashing daytime television shows will illustrate that suspicion of infidelity is the primary reason a man would abandon their children.
What our culture does encourage through our welfare state is laziness, irresponsibility, and the merciless exploitation of taxpayers. If you really pay attention, you'll find that your character and judgment will determine more than anything else how much money you'll be worth. People who are poor in America typically are not studying up in school, living with their parents, driving modest vehicles (preferably bicycles), living within their means, staying out of debt, and getting their financial situations resolved before having children.
It's like with exercise. Everyone knows how to develop an athletic physique, but many people just can't seem to commit to dragging their obese rear-ends to the gym three times a week to get in shape. So the same excuses are made that it's impossible for them to look thin, when this is factually inaccurate in nearly all cases.
I'm a 26-year-old immigrant with a modest income, but am more frugal than most Americans I know. I'm not willing to work 100-hour weeks as Mitt Romney did (I'm not a supporter of his campaign for presidency, but respect him as a businessperson), so I accept that I cannot be as wealthy as he is, but I have saved and invested a very good amount of money, and can realistically retire with a fortune. Personally, I don't see why I should have to share a nickel of my hard-earned money with people who didn't want to suffer the inconvenience of being responsible adults.
"People who are poor in America typically are not studying up in school, living with their parents, driving modest vehicles (preferably bicycles), living within their means, staying out of debt, and getting their financial situations resolved before having children."
You're also remarkably ignorant about poverty in America and totally unrealistic about people's options. How many poor people do you actually know? I know a lot who are very well educated and can't find jobs. I know a few who have jobs and are way underpaid, or their employers are finding new and creative ways not to provide them with benefits or hours. Many of my friends are over 40, and their parents are either dead or in a rest home. Others may have parents who live in areas where there are no job opportunities. I also have known quite a few who, try as they might, they're really not very smart and never got very good grades. What are their options? Somebody needs to pick cabbage, clean floors, cut the grass, ring up the groceries, wait tables, wash dishes, etc, and if I did it it would drive me crazy. I mean thank God for them, I could not do those jobs. So, you think they don't deserve health care? They shouldn't have kids? They deserve to be poor? That's ridiculous.
And good luck staying out of debt if you want to go to college these days. I can't believe how much college costs now. I managed to work my way through college and graduate school with very little debt, but there's no way I could do that now, unless I wanted just undergraduate school to take 15 years. Then I'd be female and 32-36 (counting grad school), and you think I should wait to have kids until I'm well seated in a job??? Yea that makes all the sense in the world. If you expect people to make adjustments like that, you're part of the broken system.
I don't even want to go into the misogynistic slant of your first couple of paragraphs. You make it sound like you were the Poindexter that got rejected.
Squeedle,
You're not bringing anything new to the table. Every liberal in this country uses the same line: “I know great people who are poor! You're a misogynist who's been rejected too many times!”
Your friends who are “very well-educated” shouldn't find it too difficult to find work considering people with bachelor's degrees in business, engineering, medicine, or any of the hard sciences have very low rates of unemployment. Were your friends going into medicine, where the employment rate is almost 100 percent? I doubt it. They probably majored in English, Gender Studies, Philosophy, Interpretive Dance or whatever worthless fields they went into.
Most women aren't poor because they can't afford to go to graduate school. They're poor because they waste time in the Liberal Arts department where they'll not only never make money, they'll never even learn to be pleasant women who can attract rich men.
By the way, if you feel you're going to have such financial difficulty for the next several years, why are you thinking about having kids?!
There's nothing wrong with ringing up people's groceries or waiting tables for a living. You should find it very easy to afford a low-budget lifestyle with the kind of money they make. I have a business degree, but have chosen to continue working in retail for a while because it's easy and stable money which allows me save and invest in the growth of American businesses, and I'll probably retire with some serious cashola. By no means am I a perfect example of frugality, but the beauty of this country is you don't need to be perfect to succeed. So my answer to your question is yes – people who are still poor when they are in their 40s generally are people who worked very hard to become as poor as they are and deserve to be.
Speaking of retail, I can see exactly what sort of thing makes an economy fall apart: people who roll up in fancier cars than mine, buy $80 bottles of Patron and sometimes multiple televisions and/or computers, and pay for their food with EBT cards. Believe me, I no longer hesitate to call the Welfare Fraud Hotline and neither should you.
Wow!
thy who shall not work, neither shall he eat?
"Do you know what those poor innocent little women can do to eliminate deadbeat dads? Stop having kids with them!"
This is something you might tell these "little women" and start some reasonable conversation.
But if you tell this to their toddlers, you are saying to these children "In an ideal world, you do not exist". Is it a good start for them in life ?
This doesn't mention the major component of this whole problem : 1% of American's control 50% of the wealth, 40% of the income, and 99% are left with the rest to divide amongst themselves. The rich are the only ones with opportunity (ie available wealth) to put into education, child's education, investing, buying more resources etc. America had the least wealth gap when they also had the highest taxes on the rich (late 40's, 50's etc), 91 cents per dollar, and then the 80s changes that and you see the wealth gap skyrocket. Notice also how the US government quickly spends itself into a deficit upon losing those taxes and have an economic slow down. A deficit that people now argue stupidly about how to fix; it's simple, raise taxes on that 1% and cut defense and environmental spending. So what if that 1% takes off to China bc they won't pay their taxes like they should - shows their profit hungry aholes that don't care about the rest or their nation being a debt ridden dying giant. Rich people (in general) don't give their money to the poor, and definitely not to the lower middle class or middle class. Rich people (IG) invest it and put it away and grow it more for themselves. Economic opportunity really boils down to not just your outcome and parent's wealth, but also who you know. And with that 1% staying amongst themselves and 99% of people not having any real opportunity it's a ticking time bomb. Sadly the US will just implode one of these days.
The solution is to tax them as highly as the market will take.
Too low and there is general sense of unfairness and too high and your tax payers will emigrate and new entrepeneurs will refuse to operate in the US.
Much better to give the rich many more options to put their money into tax efficient charities and good works which generally give more bang for your buck than bureaucratic government schemes.
If in the long term the top 1% don't put sufficient money into these charities then raise their taxes.
You also have to bear in mind it's their money you are taking off them--not the governments.
Let the ones who extoll the value of fatherhood and marriage to various audiences be celebrities and admired figures drawn from the same demographic as the audience, and the message would carry less racial overtones.
For instance, Obama has, just by his quiet example, promoted the message. Nothing toxic about that.
The painful fact is that to be born without a father who stands by your mother and you is serious bad luck. Government programs cannot easily substitute for the way a father can teach courage, restraint, self control, and steadfastness in adversity, for instance. Kids are born with a tendency to model their behavior on that of their parents, and the father can teach all this by example.
Many fathers also abuse their children. And they abuse their wives. Physically, emotionally, and sexually. What's the latest statistic? One out of three women will be assaulted before she's 18? And most of those assaults will be husbands and fathers - sometimes grandfathers, uncles or brothers - who lose hope, succumb to the pressure of trying to provide for their families with inadequate resources, and end up drunk or drugged, taking their hopeless rage out on their families. And their children have no chance whatsoever of upward mobility, because they bear the shame and the feeling of worthlessness that comes with having been abused by the very person who was supposed to protect them. And yes, 8% of them model their behavior on that of their fathers, and abuse their children, too. And so it continues....
"the proper role of the government bureaucrat is to ask: 'How big a check do you require?” rather than: “What did you do to put yourself into this situation?'"
Where was this sentiment when evaluating the response to the financial crisis? Sure we now believe that we would have survived even if TARP hadn't been unleashed and if GM and the rest of the automakers hadn't been bailed out. But then we wrote checks and didn't even demand our pound of flesh.
Reading this has convinced me that the author doesn't understand the meaning of the word opportunity.
what is the meaning of opportunity?
Equal opportunity means giving the kids an equal education to start out in life. By and large this is what we have been doing since desegregation. The reason some schools are much worse than others has little to do with teachers' union, which is just an easy scapegoat, but the students themselves. Many children come to school not ready to learn. This happens even in good suburban schools, children from divorced families, single parents, sick parents/children.
Equal outcome means expecting every kid to come out of school having learned the same stuff at the same pace, regardless of true ability. The left's unwillingness to accept that people are all born with different academic abilities is what's causing all the problems. Of course all children can learn, but not at the same pace!
Thanks to the emphasis on equal outcome, we completely neglect the kids at the top, while spending all our $, time and attention on special ed to prop up the bottom quartile. Most gifted programs are a sorry mess and completely inadequate to keep our brightest young minds engaged and eager to learn at school, leaving them languishing and bored out of their minds K-12, while the losers who come to school to make trouble continue to drop out like flies. Let the losers be losers, expell them if they become bullies or discipline problems - if we keep these losers around they will rob other children of an education. Nurture and enrich the top quartile and hold them up as model students (rather than deride them as geeks and nerds as we do today) and the rest will follow.
I received an email about my CV being listed on www.hrblacklist.com. I am an engineer, but I also can’t find a job since 2009. Is this legal? Can anyone help me with an information, please?
REQUEST FOR CONSTRUCTIVE INPUT OF VIABLE IDEAS:
How do we "reassert the value of fatherhood and marriage" with "substance or promise"?
And/or, how do we perform "education reform"?
How do we ensure "everyone a good enough opportunity in life."?
I extracted these topics from the next to last paragraph of the blog article above. W.W.; thanks for your article.
In the last year, college graduates were more likely to be employed as waiters, waitresses, bartenders and food-service helpers than as engineers, physicists, chemists and mathematicians combined (100,000 versus 90,000).
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There were more working in office-related jobs such as receptionist or payroll clerk than in all computer professional jobs (163,000 versus 100,000).
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More also were employed as cashiers, retail clerks and customer representatives than engineers (125,000 versus 80,000).
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So the problem is not a free college education, but the lack of jobs. I wonder, what "opportunity equality" means when it comes to competition in the job market? Actually, it's either market, or equality.
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Would it be desirable if government created enough (inevitably bogus) jobs to dish out to every graduate immediately after the graduation ball's hangover was overcome? Wouldn't it lead to a much nastier hangover, since any economy would be doomed by such an experiment?
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The situation in the real job market could be somewhat repaired - by the creators of real jobs, i.e. entrepreneurs, not by Comrade Labor Czar Andy Stern and his likes. Certain conditions are required for that, and one of the most important is comrades to stop interfering.
" The situation in the real job market could be somewhat repaired - by the creators of real jobs, i.e. entrepreneurs, not by Comrade Labor Czar Andy Stern and his likes. Certain conditions are required for that, and one of the most important is comrades to stop interfering."
But, you see, Andy Stern and his likes are just doing their jobs, to wit, interfere with entrepreneurs ...;-)
It's amazing what the government would pay their honchos for, innit?
Liberals accuse conservatives of not caring about the poor because conservatives don't want to contribute more money to welfare programs designed to deal with the poverty. But just because a new government program is made to 'help the poor' (for example), it does not mean it is actually effective at reducing poverty. Liberals assume more money = effective outcomes; really that is only sometimes, even rarely the case. One need only look at our extremely high per-capita social welfare spending to understand that, as well as the ideological unwillingness of conservatives in this country to contribute another penny to any more government programs, regardless of its alleged intention.
I am no right-winger- the current crop of republicans in this country are unimaginative and incompetant (or have to at least pretend to be to stay elected). But repulicans do not have the monopoly on narrow-minded thinking. Obama and the democrats have proven to be remarkably predictable in dealing with problems in this country: more agencies and more spending. And when their programs don't work, instead of figuring out why and reforming them, they simply come back to the public asking for more.
It would be nice if at some point at least one of the Economist's blog authors could acknowledge as much. Republicans may have become callous, but they have become callous in the face of years of waste with little results to show for it.
I don't think the current crop of Republicans or Democrats really care about either reasserting "the value of fatherhood and marriage" or "education reform". And even if "good enough opportunity" were available, would there be any takers? I can only hope & pray...
Here is something interesting regarding equality, opportunity and meritocracy...
http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/blog/index.cfm/In_Essence/2012/4/17/merit...
Oh, and how anybody can read this particular blog as being anti-right and/or anti-Republican ... well now that's baffling. If you're going to quit because The Economist bloggers are selling the devil's work, you should do so in response to M.S.
Let's talk equality of opportunity.
1) The earnings gap between college graduates and non-grads is the largest in at least 50 years.
2) The cost of college in real terms is the largest in at least 50 years.
3) Due to #1 and #2, the children of upper class and upper middle-class families have a greater advantage of opportunity than at any time in the past 50 years.
4) The trend is getting stronger, not weaker.
Candidates who address those items are serious about equality of opportunity. Mitt Romney ... not. At all.
(President Obama isn't too much either, although more than Romney.)
There is also the complex question of whether Mr Romney's success owes more to his father's outcome (degrading equality of opportunity), or more to the values that created that outcome (using mainly the values that any parent might give their children). The children of those who do not think school important are unlikely to think it important themselves.
I think that when it comes to it, most Republicans would define equality of opportunity as something that spans across generations.
Hence all the self-serving talk about how hard they worked for the money to give their children good chances in life and how it would be unjust for the government to take some of that money away to ensure all children have a good education, health services and other basic requirements to enable innate qualities to flourish.
That's in the benefit of all, because these children are the future workforce (or not).
I can see that there could be an argument for not helping some adults who made wrong choices, but I honestly don't see how anyone could argue against offering children the best possible opportunities to grow into healthy, well-educated and productive adults. Even if it means some of that dreaded redistribution.
It looks you missed what the commenter Phaedrus wrote: "Adequate opportunity is the intellectually coherent goal and unqualified equality of opportunity ( presupposing identical genetic endowment throughout a population) is the nonsensical one".
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I'd add that material support given by a third party to children of parents who couldn't care less about their offspring's future is a futile exercise. Paying alimony to my ex, I knew only too well that she'll spend it on her own needs, and only some remnants (if any) will go for our daughter. So on top of the money due by law, I used to buy clothing, vacations and so on... not everybody can afford that.
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As to the main re-distributor, the government, they cannot thoroughly control every individual case, and without it the whole effort goes down the gurgle.
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And how about values, goals, life's priorities, aspirations? How do you redistribute these if parents don't provide them to their children? I mean, Romney father's example was surely one of the main factors for his own success, part of the opportunities he had in life. Have you got any ideas how to achieve equality in this regard?
Let not the perfect be the enemy of the good. I never claimed it is possible to achieve total equality of opportunity. We can only strive to make it as equal as possible.
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I also did not advocate giving cash handouts to parents. I was more thinking of ensuring good quality schools are available free of charge. A system with inadequately funded, less than mediocre public schools and good private schools for those who can afford it is clearly not achieving that goal.
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I was also thinking of health care. Health care for children should be accessible independent of parents' ability to pay. However, in 2009, approximately 7.5 million U.S. children under 18 years of age had no health insurance coverage, representing 10.0 percent of the population. (http://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa11/hsfu/pages/301hcf.html)
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I'd hope most people would be willing to give these children a chance, even if it means they have to pay a bit of tax for it. Blame the parents if you like, but surely you don't argue for penalising the children?
@ Sense Seeker: "Let not the perfect be the enemy of the good."
Why not? It has functioned and continues to function perfectly well as a means for us to shoot down solutions that we don't like by calling attention to their imperfections, so that we are no longer focused on the real problems that currently exist and the significant ways in which the proposed solution addresses them.
"I can see that there could be an argument for not helping some adults who made wrong choices, but I honestly don't see how anyone could argue against offering children the best possible opportunities to grow into healthy, well-educated and productive adults."
I am all for the notion of providing the best possible opportunities for children -- after all, I am a proponent of the Steven Jay Gould quote that "I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
However, I am adamantly against the notion of providing undeserved public largess to adults under the guise of benefitting children. I want children to get a top notch education; I don't want undeserving, incompetent, or lazy teachers and principals to get pay raises or bonuses simply for longevity. I want children to get healthy, nutritious food; I don't want the public dole to be an excuse for the parents not to work or provide for their kids. I want children to value higher education and take advantage of colleges and universities; I don't want children to be majoring in puppeteering, art history, or womens' studies and feel like they have an entitlement to a good job, or get confused when employers don't hire them after graduation.
Far too often, the excuse "we need to do it for the children" is a disengenuous ploy to funnel public money to the benefit of those who run childrens' programs (public sector unions, etc.), and not to the children themselves, or who use the government subsidies as an excuse to shirk their own parental responsibilities. If Democrats were to actually come up with proposals to curb these abuses, I think they would be pleasantly surprised to find more moderate Republicans who would be willing work with them to pony up more cash for childrens' programs.
"Far too often, the excuse "we need to do it for the children" is a disengenuous ploy to funnel public money to the benefit of those who run childrens' programs (public sector unions, etc.), and not to the children themselves, or who use the government subsidies as an excuse to shirk their own parental responsibilities."
I agree that mis-spending of money should be prevented where possible, but I really do wonder how large this problem is. Insisting on guarantees that not a cent is mis-spent is sure to prevent any action to be taken.
And why would the Democrats have to come up with your proposals? Why not those moderate Republicans? Equality of opportunities (or a standard of minimum opportunity) for children could well be a Republican cause.
Poor people have values, goals, and life priorities, too. But we have to work twice as hard because we earn half as much. My grandmother lived in a dirt-floor shack in the middle of the desert, with no running water and no electricity. My mother worked from the day she turned 16 until the day she retired at the age of 65. I got to go to college and earn a decent living, but we were by no means well-off or even 'comfortable.' My kids were fed, clothed, and sheltered, but they didn't have designer clothes and couldn't go to concerts. They only got to go to plays because they were acting in them. My kids are much better off than I ever was, and their kids will be better off then their parents are. THAT is the American dream: that our kids will have a better life than we had. That's what Romney's father worked for and achieved.
The articles tell facts and how the world is. More or less. The blogs tell lefty desires and how lefties want the world to be. More or less.
But W.W. is a libertarian blogger with an idiosyncratic mixed bag of conservative and liberal views.
He's catching more than his share of fire because every other "Democracy in America" blogger is a lefty. Same with Free Exchange. Overall, I know of only one conservative blogger: the center-right Buttonwood. The imbalance is the choice and responsibility of The Economist, not W.W.
If I can pick up on this a little, I think W.W. may not be all that idiosyncratic in the mix of his political philosophies. As best I can track his preferred policies, he advocates little state involvement in picking winners and loses in the economy as well as in culture, little state involvement in redistribution for its own sake, not much military involvement in foreign affairs and a strong safety net. Free trade, open borders, and a tax code designed to raise revenue and that public safety doesn't justify much surveillance of the public. It doesn't fit well with a party (although that's pretty close to a centrist Democrat.)
However, I'd say that's pretty much Restrained Radical's view, except on government involvement in culture.
I'd say that's pretty close to Publius50's profile.
It's pretty close to my agenda, except I might be a little more ok with a bigger role for the military.
I think our old friend Heimdall would be pretty ok with a government constrained and unleashed along those lines.
As would Jouris. As would Turkey Vulture, A. Andros, etc.
I don't know how representative the regulars are around here, but we have Republican, Democratic, independent and Libertarian commenters here that are probably closer to W.W. in policy terms than we are to our parties where we have them or a named philosophy where we don't. Without wanting to insult or criticize anyone personally or by category (in this particular comment,) I'd say that the idiosyncrasy of W.W.'s policy thinking points less towards his the originality of his program than the limitations on thought imposed by parties on their members in this moment.
And just to veer off a little, I think calling the other bloggers here "lefties" isn't fair. M.S. is clearly a lefty. The other bloggers may all be Democrats but don't seem particularly leftist. They might write nasty things about Republican positions on immigration and gay marriage and Islam in America but those are areas where the nastiness of the description mirrors the nastiness of the described. Posts here have been harshly critical of Obama's prosecution of the drug war which is an area where the administration reaches a similar level of depravity.
"He's catching more than his share of fire because every other "Democracy in America" blogger is a lefty."
That's only true by red-state definitions. The rest of the developed world would say that M.S. is the only avowed lefty of the bunch, with the others being centrists of various flavors.
"Without wanting to insult or criticize anyone personally or by category (in this particular comment,)
lol.
"I think calling the other bloggers here "lefties" isn't fair."
And John Albert Robertson:
I believe the term lefty includes anyone observably left-of-center, including center-left, not only far-left.
Its hard to beleive that this clarification was needed: even the Republican rhetoriticians are allowed some tacit premise. Adequate opportunity is the intellectually coherent goal and unqualified equality of opportunity ( presupposing identical genetic endowment throughout a population) is the nonsensical one.
True, in election frenzy all language expands to allow simplistic inferences which defeat or distract from an opponents position.
But this particular distortion might do deep and long lasting damage.