Looking at the Future, Via the Past

Professor Victor Davis Hanson has comments on things we believe which may not be true.

From time to time I stop and wonder how the unbelievable can become the accepted. Let me list four arbitrary, but still representative, examples of what I mean.

1)  Embracing unworkable statism.

All this goes on as Obama sees the EU running away from precisely what he wishes to implement, while at home a high-tax, high-entitlement, redistributive economy like California has managed to destroy the most richly endowed human and natural landscape — agriculture, tourism, high-tech, oil and gas, Hollywood, Napa Valley, Silicon Valley — in the nation. And yet here we continue down into the abyss.

2)  Higher education.

At some point, all this cannot go on, and we will have the academic version of September 15, 2008 — as parents no longer choose to take on $200,000 in debt to send their children to 4-year liberal arts schools, in which they will be likely indoctrinated that they should oppose the very American institutions that created the wealth and freedom that fuel their colleges and pay their faculties.

3)  Technology.

The strange thing is that none of this has been quite factored into fossilized metrics that supposedly quantify the standard of living, poverty rates, GDP, etc.  In the grocery line not long ago, two teens were chatting in Spanish to relatives by iPhone in distant Mexico.  Are they impoverished or enjoying a privilege exclusive to royalty just forty years ago?

4.  The Plutocratic party?

Are we to believe that prep-schooled and Ivy Leagued millionaire Barack Obama is the blue-collar face of the Democratic Party, while one of twelve children John Boehner is some sort of J.P. Morgan insider rich man?

To get the full flavor of it you have to read it, as Paul Marion might note.

Regards  —  Cliff