Linking Blame Games

This opinion piece by reporter Caroline B Glick of The Jerusalem Post, writing in The Jewish Press, talks to a comparison of the demonization of Governor Sarah Palin after the Tucson shooting to the demonization of opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabi.

It is an interesting comparison.

Then along comes Blogger Richard Fernandez and his take on Professor Francis Fox Piven, who, you may recall, feels threatened because TV Personality Glenn Beck has called her out for her views, including her encouraging of violent demonstrations by "the poor".

"Mother Knows Best" is a long article and brings in Thomas Sowell in contrast to Ms Piven.

Liberation under the Piven doctrine effectively becomes a choice by the serfs of which aristocracy they believe will do best by them, since worth is determined by the political process anyway.  Which side do we back by our “mass actions”?  Liberation becomes the process of putting the “right” people in charge of the masses.  It is not — it is never — putting the masses in charge of themselves.

Why not put the masses in charge of their own lives? Because that would require facilitating innumerable transactions and contracts between individuals.  That would require self-interest and economic calculation to propel the system.  That would mean a market, whose job it would be for the state to keep fair, and that were too little a role for such as Piven thinks should rule the roost.  Besides, we all know that markets don’t anything but swindle the poor.  Markets are the reign of greed and society does so much better under the rule of enlightenment.

So put on your marching shoes and head for Washington, to put the right people in charge, and if Piven is correct, enough banging on the doors of the Capital will inevitably produce the keys to the hidden gold, which will be spent of course, in the manner Piven knows everybody would want it to be spent.

The death of an American Federal Judge and a Jewish Prime Minister are not just sad, but are detrimental to democratic discourse.  But, separate from those deaths is the desire to place blame for them on the clash of ideas.

What connects these two articles is the fact that ideas that are losing support in the marketplace of ideas are being bolstered by those who claim that their opponents are violent people, attempting to put down those ideas with violence, based upon violent rhetoric.  I find that especially laughable in the case of Professor Piven, whose proposals tend to lend support to the idea of emulating the violent riots in Europe.

A hat tip to the Instapundit for the first link and to The Chicago Boyz for the second.

Regards  —  Cliff