I’m reading National Review’s What Has Conservatism Ever Done For Us, and in trying to list an ever-growing list of amazing achievements (directly aping the scene from Life of Brian) they accidentally say “made a whole bunch of people suffer actually”
yikes this is a bit of an own-goal, isn’t it
decent healthcare! free college! shift from illegal to legal immigration! tackling climate change! stricter gun ownership! taxing the rich!
these are only some of the nightmares that you have been spared
Okay, but
- Typical US assault weapons bans don’t appear to be all that effective
- The democrats are laughably incompetent and cannot be trusted not to accidentally trainfuck one fifth of the economy if they made a single-payer healthcare bill. (Public Option has a safer failure mode.)
- College is likely in a bubble right now in the US, increasing the size of the bubble is a bad idea, and subsidizing unproductive degrees is a waste of the state’s money.
- But you can guarantee the Dems wouldn’t break degrees down by actual cost, or fund them based on post-graduation employment levels in the field of the degree, because both would be “discriminatory”
- Amnesty for illegal immigrants encourages more illegal immigration, which aside from its own issues, includes all the excesses of people-smuggling.
- Immigration cannot solve global poverty. To solve global poverty, the immigration must either crash the fertility rates of underdeveloped countries or somehow increase their production capacity. I don’t see how it would typically do either.
- Mass unskilled labor? Do we want jobs for the marginal in our inner cities or not?
I was going to end with saying that large government deficit spending eats investment capital from other sectors of the economy, but the Republicans with their tax cut obsession might actually be worse.
No one in charge actually knows what they’re doing in the most powerful nation on Earth. At least, that’s the charitable reading of American politics during my lifetime.