The essential characteristic that is necessary for helpful political analysis and action is not logic (though that is sometimes badly wanted), but is rather courage. The reason our liberties are eroding is because of a failure of nerve. The reason drunks on a fiscal jag have broken into your great-grandchildren’s piggy banks (in order to purchase the hooch for tonight) is because we have been too fearful to stop them.
The central issue is courage that evaporated, not arguments that were not followed. The central lack is that of backbone, not lack of data or necessary research.
When you see an out-of-control child pitching a fit in some public place, and his parents standing by helplessly with a beleagured look on their faces, the most obvious issue is lack of courage on the part of the parents. The kid pitching a fit is Occupy Brawl Street, and protesters in the streets of Athens, and retirees buying Mediscare television ads. They are, all of them, pitching a fit. They do this because it has always worked thus far. But, as Lady Thatcher put it so memorably, the problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.
We have all seen that “WalMart kid,” the one throwing a tantrum because his mom won’t buy him a Scooby Doo video or something. Let’s call him the Occupy WalMart Kid. The reason he does this is because he has always returned from previous trips to that worthy emporium with some new item in his hot little fist. He does it because it works, and it works because his parents are cowards. But it is not a technique that can work everlastingly — cue Lady Thatcher again. This item he is pitching a fit in the WalMart parking lot, refusing to listen to his mother’s fevered (and to him, tenuous) explanation that the WalMart caught fire overnight, burned to the ground, thus sending all the Scooby Doo videos to the great warehouse in the sky. He will not hear it, and he will take home what is rightfully his. Only this time, he won’t. This is not because his parents have gained some courage, but rather because God fashioned the world in such a way as to contain times when even cowards must say no.
Temper tantrums are always aimed at the gut. They are not an invitation to “come, let us reason together.” Tantrums are moves of naked coercion, and the aimed-for response is one of naked capitulation. That is the game, and all the arguments to the contrary are simply self-serving rationalizations, an exercise which cowards have practiced often, and are which they are really good at.
But, as just noted, that practice does sometimes come up against creational limits. The money is all burned up, and gone back up to that great federal reserve in the sky. It is all no mas, kaput, finis, all in, outta gas, done for, tapped out, or, as Montaigne would put it in his memorable way, le long gone.
Are you exasperated, with all right thinking men everywhere, at the repeated and persistent attempts of our Republocrat ruling class to pretend that cutting the rates of spending increases are the same thing as spending cuts? Are you tired of watching Harry Reid lying on the floor in the WalMart aisle, drumming the tiles with his heels?
Fret not. Spending cuts are coming, the real kind. And the good news is that we don’t have to elect anybody in order to ensure that it happens.
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