Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.This might be the dumbest column the New York Times ever published. Of course, Friedman's not the first to propose sacrificing popular sovereignty for elite compulsion. It's a manifestation of what Thomas Sowell calls "the quest for cosmic justice," accentuated by a misguided belief in the inherent superiority of liberals.
One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China's leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.
Our one-party democracy is worse.
But championing China is completely crazy. Especially because -- given Friedman's reference to "one-party democracy" -- he apparently prefers socialist totalitarianism to the Democratic party. As Jonah Goldberg says:
So there you have it. If only America could drop its inefficient and antiquated system, designed in the age before globalization and modernity and, most damning of all, before the lantern of Thomas Friedman's intellect illuminated the land. If only enlightened experts could do the hard and necessary things that the new age requires, if only we could rely on these planners to set the ship of state right. Now, of course, there are "drawbacks" to such a system: crushing of dissidents with tanks, state control of reproduction, government control of the press and the internet. Omelets and broken eggs, as they say. More to the point, Friedman insists, these "drawbacks" pale in comparison to the system we have today here in America.And, I note, exactly the same argument lefties make supporting Friedman now.
I cannot begin to tell you how this is exactly the argument that was made by American fans of Mussolini in the 1920s. It is exactly the argument that was made in defense of Stalin and Lenin before him (it's the argument that idiotic, dictator-envying leftists make in defense of Castro and Chavez today).
4 comments:
I've just recently discovered this blog:
Here is a link to Obama info
Lots of good info on the background of Obama and his co-conspirators. Why it's coming from New Zealand, I don't understand. If our press were not completely infiltrated and complicit in prepetrating this fraud, they'd have found this stuff themselves.
Here's another interesting one: Also from outside the US borders.
birther issue?
> Scratch a Liberal, Find a Fascist
Nothing new there... as I've noted before, Truman himself observed it, back when it was possible to be a Dem and not be a Fascist:
Professional liberals are too arrogant to compromise. In my experience, they were also very unpleasant people on a personal level. Behind their slogans about saving the world and sharing the wealth with the common man lurked a nasty hunger for power. They'd double-cross their own mothers to get it or keep it.
- Harry S Truman, pp. 55, American Heritage 7/8 1992, from a 1970 interview --
suek:
The claim that Obama was not born in the United States is verifiably false, as courts have confirmed. In any event, no one -- certainly not an army officer seeking to evade deployment to Iraq -- has standing to challenge the question. As for the other claims, it's bad enough that the President and the Democrat majority in Congress would make America much more communitarian and socialist; it doesn't need to be -- and I doubt it is -- any more of a conspiracy than that.
OBH:
Good quote--and, as you hint, Friedman is typical of those liberals who think progressivism substitutes for popular sovereignty.
My own position is that I'm awfully curious exactly what is in the extended BC that the Obama camp doesn't want revealed -- I have no doubt, per se, that it would show his being born here, as the "copy" does.
To assume otherwise requires a level of prescience on the part of Obama's parents which hardly seems likely in the time frame in question -- in 1959, we've got someone directly placing a birth announcement in a Hawaiian paper confirming the birth. To falsely do this seems pointless, as the only -- and I do mean only -- reason I can imagine such is relevant to IS the specific job of PotUS. Not being born on American soil is pretty much largely irrelevant to every other job function, activity, whatever, that there is.
So we're assuming that, in 1959, his mother, et al, expected that he would have a serious chance at becoming PotUS in 50 years. Ah-huh.
I'm assuming that the long form has some embarrassing data point on it -- "father: unknown" -- or whatever. I seriously doubt if it's got any kind of damning info in regards to his eligibility as PotUS.
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I DO THINK that the debate does raise a valid issue, which is that it seems to me that the current strictures are thoroughly unsatisfactory that there is any question or argument regarding this at all.
I believe that there should be a legal requirement that all such information be published in a readily available forum, and original copies of full documents placed into the public record, regarding any aspect of constitutional eligibility, prior to the acceptance of any person's even being placed on the primary ballots in any venue, or the equivalent for places like Iowa which don't have primaries.
Once that is done, the voter's registrar in any venue can be pointed to said location, along with anyone with a question or concern.
Even if this is not a problem here and now, it is a possibly relevant point in the future -- and I can see the $%^$^@$$ cheating Dems actually using THIS case to discredit questions in the future for someone who actually IS ineligible.
My own hope is that they screw up so bad that no one takes a Dem candidate seriously for another 30 years, but we'll see.
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