Even now, an overwhelming majority of "stimulus" money still hasn't been spent. Yet somehow, I keep hearing libs credit the stimulus with "saving" the economy.
So when you ask someone on the left if we can therefore suspend the rest of the spending -- since actually spending it wasn't necessary for "recovery" -- they protest. The recovery, we're told, relies on economic confidence that the money is coming. It's psychological.
Now, that's an interesting argument -- and one I don't entirely disagree with. But it really does say something about the past eight years when the left and their buddies in the press were telling us how bad the economy was. I mean, think of how much better things could have been if, instead of taking cheap political shots at George Bush's economy, the left had rallied around it.
There are points and counterpoints in debate. The neat thing about being on the right is that you have an absolute benchmark, a sort of compass: freedom. You can measure a policy by what it does to freedom, and further cost/benefit analysis is moot when one of the costs is liberty. You're not going to come up with a benefit for some socialist policy that's going to make me say, "Oh, well, in that case I'll gladly surrender my freedom."
If you argue something with a liberal, it just keeps coming down to their willingness to give up freedom in exchange for security. Not even real security, but the psychological kind -- like the security we get from seeing grandmothers being asked to remove their shoes at the airport. And who can forget when mothers were being asked by TSA screeners to sample their own breastmilk? For this pretend security, we've given up the ability to travel around the country without being challenged by government? Not worth it if you ask me.
As we watched the towers fall on 9/11/2001, a co-worker predicted: We're going to lose a lot of civil liberties over this. My own first thought that day, once I realized it was a terrorist act, was to look away -- by definition, terrorists only win if they terrify us, and I didn't want to give them the satisfaction of seeing me stop to watch. Along those lines, paralyzing our air travel system in the wake of 9/11 may be a means for defeating acts of terror, but for the terrorists it's really an end. We're living like we're afraid, and that -- not a bunch of smoldering buildings and airplanes -- is what they really want.
People, it appears, will give up a good bit of freedom for a sense of security. Even fake security.
What got me thinking about all this is Megan McArdle's piece, a couple of months ago in The Atlantic (which I've linked to before):
Once we've got a comprehensive national health care plan, what are the government's incentives? I think they're bad, for the same reason the TSA is bad. I'm afraid that instead of Security Theater, we'll get Health Care Theater, where the government goes to elaborate lengths to convince us that we're getting the best possible health care, without actually providing it.
So we go to the airport, and in a great show of defeating the means of terror -- bombs blowing up airplanes and all that -- we, ourselves, give the terrorists the ends they seek -- people unable to travel in freedom. And society gleans a pathetic sense of security from the obvious farce of having to discard our bottles of Dasani before boarding the plane.
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