Being so smart as to be insane

The following is a comment I left at PJM on an article by Victor Davis Hanson.  All spelling, syntax and logic errors are left as-is for the amusement of the audience.  This is copied from an unmoderated comment, who knows if it will look anything like this after moderation?

Only the Shadow knows!

Thus it is presented plainly:

The simple summation between the fine theory of supporting the ‘needy’, the ‘poor’ and the ‘elderly’ with government help that then seeks to add on ‘health insurance’ for all Americans without addressing the cost of the previous entitlements going through the roof is a very simple one, known in science and engineering:

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.”

That is called The Theory and Practice Conundrum, and it describes the inability to examine previous theory and its outcomes to adjust future theories to account for the outcomes of past application of theories. It does not matter how ‘good’ it feels to think that government can ‘take care of’ the poor, needy, sick and elderly if you ignore the outcomes of previous work driving the government, itself, to bankruptcy.

War is not a causation of deficits: government should be cutting extraneous programs as a war-time efficiency. Yet the concept that we must actually cut extra goodies, say the Departments of Agriculture, Energy, Education and then have austerity budgets without one piece of pork is never cited as a problem for deficits. Yet Congress authorized both conflicts and is on the hook to pay for them… if you decry the ‘wasteful spending on war’ then do acknowledge that war is a priority set by Congress and that Congress could easily cut non-mandatory spending or even whole departments not given in the Constitution to pay for that priority.

If Obama is the pinnacle of this thinking, the underlying pyramid of it is represented in a Congress unable, unwilling, and unwanting of any change in its path of guiding good government to fiscal sanity when its own perogatives mandate that it must do so. For all the waste in DoD, the aforementioned Departments that have not been touched have yet to show any capability in actually getting a sound agricultural system in place, dealing with energy so we do not get ‘energy crises’, and raising the literacy rate one scintilla above the level set by the deplorable description of when Poor Johnny just couldn’t read. These are absolute failures of long-term Departments, and if you say that Agriculture ’solved’ the DustBowl then do look at previous work done to encourage the very same sorts of farming that caused the DustBowl pushed by the very same Department of Agriculture.

Saving us from the greatest disaster that government can create is not a definition of good government. Good government requires frugality, fiscal sanity and examining ‘entitlements’ to see if they are in any way, shape or form sustainable. Pushing new ‘entitlements’ when the old ones are failing as social constructs is not a path to a better future but a worse one. The theory is all fine and dandy, this bleeding hearts slitting fiscal wrists to show how much the blood is red… the practice that ends up in perpetual red ink, however, is a different story. Bring that up and the bleeding hearters show up, yet again, to point out how ‘mean’ you are… being unable to conceive of the end-state that their ‘goodness’ brings. All this spending on the ‘poor’ has not eliminated poverty, has not brought about a good understanding of personal finances, has not actually invested in the poor so that they can get a leg up and out of poverty… by encouraging bad spending habits, bad eating habits, and bad work habits the ‘poor’ are not ’saved’ from poverty but condemned to it in perpetuity. Yet that is touted as ‘good’.

In theory it sounds so nice.

In practice it condemns society to servitude to government largesse with fewer and fewer able to pay for it, until the largesse disappears completely in a new sea of red… not one of ink, unfortunately.

Those pushing such practices could learn from the outcomes of previous theory and be ’smart’.

Instead they perform the same experiment over and over, expecting different results.

That is the definition of insanity.