12 February 2012

" gut-renovating our welfare state to fit a libertarian ideal,"



Dear Dr. Bones,

Bein’ as yet but a young an’ untried whight-wing whippersnapper, Don Rossito de Doûthat has yet to apprehend in full the beautiful music that its Papá’s _tertulía_ have been makin’ under the baton of Maestro Murray.

The NYTC’s second-string ‘conservtive’ ‘intellectual’ complains of perhaps the greatest theorist of reaction since Joe de Maistre that

[w]hat’s exasperating is what the author suggests policy makers can do about the social crisis: in essence, nothing. Or at least nothing realistic. Instead, [1] Murray argues that our leaders should embrace his own libertarian convictions, scrap all existing government programs (and the dependency and perverse incentives they create) and replace them with a universal guaranteed income. This is a fascinating idea; it’s also fantastically impractical, and entirely divorced from American political realities. Which means that it’s divorced from any possibility of actually addressing the crisis that Murray so vividly describes.

That’s only the second-cum-third paragraphette of a seven-hundred-worder, to be sure, and so from the functional standpoint it’s only a verbal trampoline upon which Don Rossito proposes to bounce so as to show off how it can soar even higher than its Tio Chuck can, as is shown (?) in the sequel by the handy-dandy four-powerpoint Doúthat Plan for a Greater North American Co-Prosperity Sphere. I think, Dr. Bones, that _homines bonæ voluntatis_ may safely neglect the _señorito_’s homebrew NeoPeruna, though it is mildly interesting to notice that one need not be a reactionary to see some merit in one Powerpoint, the last an’ presumably least, "work to reduce incarceration rates."

I may revert to that uncovenanted chink in the Doüthatesque armour later on, but the great thing here is the juvenile (as I take it to be) incomprehension of the age-old Wisdom of the Whight: "¡Don’t do anythin’, neocomrades, please, for Zeussake, please simply just stand there!" Assuming the ‘there’ is well chosen so as to create maximum obstruction [2], I think that’s almost the only product the Daughters of Virtue & Sons of Wisdom (L.L.C.) need to keep in their political cupboard. [3]

Now Party Neocomrade Prof. Dr. Ch. A. Murray is an old hand at pickin’ his factious ‘there’s, an’ doubtless understands the complete therelessness of "a universal guaranteed income." in addition to bein’ safely Neotopian an’ Dilbertesque an’ generally ain’t-never-gonna-happen, UGI has the extra advantage of *soundin’* specious, like something a Lieberal or Demoncrat or icky Psocialist might dream up. Properly deployed--deployed, that is, as Rear-Col. the Freelord of Bellcurve intends it to be--UGI ought to keep the less intelligent sort of LibFash [4] talking Policy Fiction when she would do much better to notice that his freelordship is blockin’ the road.

Bein’, as I said, still wet behind the ears, the cub twistatorialist Don Rossito de Doùthat simply does not grasp what Freelord Bellcurve is up to with UGI, let alone that, in a wider perspective, Murrayanity is a couple of orders of magnitude more likely to advance the banner of Party an’ AEIdeology than the laddie’s own "modest steps in areas where culture and economics intersect."

At the higest level of abstract rhetoric, Señorito Doùthat does not see that the last thing that scabs for ScroogeBank an’ flacks for the Daughters of Virtue & Sons of Wisdom (LLC) should take an interest in is ‘steps’. One can not achieve a salutary stagnation, or exercise a Benign Neglect™, by takin’ steps. "¡Softly, softly, catchee monkey!" -- the thing for the Vanguard of All Regressive Humanity to do, pretty obviously, is take their seats in as inconvenient a position for everybooby else--an’ then just stay put as if they were paraplegics at least until the cows come home to roost. That is pretty much the traditional vulgar notion of ‘conservative’, and, although those who are, or fancy themselves, Freelords an’ Kiddiemasters rather than mere other-ranks Party base an’ vile, very naturally start out with Eddie Burke prejudices against everythin’ vulgar or mobbish or demoncratic, nevertheless, even Vox Pop. is not *always* ’rong.

Speaking of Mr. Burke, his own freelordly notion of Whiggery as expounded in the "Letter to a Noble Lord"




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[1] You might make a memorandumb of that ‘instead’, Dr. Bones, and pass it along to your funereal grammarian colleagues. Maybe they know already, but this is certainly the first time I ever distinctly noticed that ‘instead’ requires an antecedent, which, in the case at hand, the whizkid freejunker has omitted to provide.

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[2] I daresay only a decent political grown-up would care to call obstruction ‘obstruction’. A Little Friend of Eddie Burke™ such as Don Rossito is, or feigns to be, must inevitably prefer some monnicker a little more boosterish an’ less knockerly than ‘obstruction’. "Conservatism of motion" might do. Or ¿How about "the Higher Law of Least Effort"? -- ‘higher’ to distinguish this ideoproduct from that of the late Mr. Zipf of H*rv*rd.

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[3] The pedigree of DDAJST is not to be questioned. One must ascend at least as high as Lao Tzu in quest of its origin, and when your arduous climb eventually reach that sage, you will find yourself overshadowed by a couple more Everests of antiquity so fogshrouded and ill-recorded as to be inaccessible. My understanding is that Citizen Tzu lived immediately after the invention (or discovery) of the road, a contraption which, needless to say, he denounced as yet another pernicious innovation, not to mention a blasphemous parody by uppity ex-monkeys of THE Way (®©™) _par excellance_.

Vanilla DDAJST was already as old as the hills, what Citizen Tzu did was discover (or invent) DDAJSTABTR, "Don’t do anythin’, just stand there and *block the road*." Though the hateful novelty could not be abolished, yet the amount of damage wrought could thus be keep to a minimum.

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[4] I allude, naturally, to the learnèd investigations of the only whightist _señorito_ in captivity that inherited from its Mommy rather than from its Papá.

"Policy Fiction" rhymes with "Science Fiction."

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