Posted by
Dave Perkins on Monday, October 13, 2008 7:35:14 AM
I just spent a week with a typical east coast liberal on a group fishing vacation. He's a friend of a friend, and a very nice guy. He's thoughtful and outgoing and ready to share his views, and I have nothing bad to say about the man. He's a good man who works hard and stays married and lives a fairly sacrificial life, all things considered.
And yet, he's terrified of 'right wing Christian fundamentalists', he generally 'hates' (
distrusts) Republicans, and he thinks Rush Limbaugh is the devil and a constant liar.
Overall, these circumstances made me leery at first of even talking politics. But apparently it couldn't be helped;
he insisted.
And I learned that a big part of what liberals 'believe' consists of what they've been told, and a VERY SMALL part of it is actual fact. This man is a huge fan of Olbermann and Maddow and MSNBC, even though he admits they're biased. He calls Fox "Fixed News", cleverly, he thinks.
Consequently I ended up watching Olbermann and Maddow about a thousand percent more than I've watched them all year, on the hotel TV, and they are a nonstop, highly professional and often very entertaining anti-McCain commercial. Maddow is exceptionally talented even while crippled by leftist hatred (
I believe she's former Err Amerika and a lesbian activist, but I could be wrong about either). She's funny, if delivery counts. Olbermann is, well, nuts. But I always liked him on ESPN, and I never knew he was a lefty until he moved to Mess NBC.
Among the conspiracies advanced by my liberal companion was the 'gas prices' classic. They go up quickly but go down slowly relative to oil prices, so the fix is in.
So I gave it a shot. I explained to him about the economics of wholesale local delivery. When price is trending up, local wholesalers fill their tanks to the brim, expecting to sell all their product at higher prices and be profitable. This ensures a steady local supply, meeting and exceeding demand, and preventing pump prices from rocketing too high just from supply demand problems.
But when prices are trending down in the oil market, local wholesalers buy JUST what they need, and NO MORE. They foresee selling it at prices lower than they paid for it, and who would 'stock up' under those conditions? So the local supply of gasoline for stations is at a desperate minimum when prices are trending down, and this causes demand from local stations to push prices higher than they would be if they just 'followed the oil', as everyone seems to think. It's simple, basic economics. It's always true, if government does not interfere. Of course, in the end the prices do follow the oil prices, but only after working their way through the economics of local wholesale delivery to stations. Now al-Reuters is
doing stories on the plummeting gasoline prices across the nation, a few weeks after oil began to plummet. Typical delay of market fuel economics, and it doesn't fit the 'conspiracy' mold, so liberals don't try to explain this kind of thing.
My liberal companion did not even let me finish the story. Clearly he did not understand basic economics, nor did he intend to try. He was perfectly happy to believe it was a conspiracy. Even when a news story on his favorite cable network explained that the 'big oil companies' are NOT the ones making the EEEVILLL profit from this conspiracy, because once they refine and sell the gas to the wholesalers it's out of their hands, he STILL believed the conspiracy made illicit profits for
gas station owners.
I tried to tell him ExxonMobil was selling off its corporate-owned gas stations BECAUSE THEY ARE UNPROFITABLE, but he wouldn't respond to that either.
This is anecdotal proof of something I've long believed;
too many people refuse to devote the necessary brainpower to understand the world around them, and are thus easily misled by demagogues and contribute through the democratic process to their own eventual economic ruin and political doom.
To paraphrase Churchill, "anyone who is under 30 and a conservative has no heart; anyone who's over 30 and a liberal has no brain".
Or at least he hasn't the will to apply his brain.
And to continue the paraphrasing, a famous Roman (
Cicero? can't remember) said something to the effect that '
once the poor discover they can vote themselves a share of the public treasury, the Empire is finished.'