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  1. National Review4/19/207 min
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    National Review
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    • jeff3 years ago

      And thus the hardscrabble honest working-class cartoons of Scranton or Cleveland or Toad Suck, Arkansas, are reduced to moral ballast for the convenience of some Harvard-educated millionaire lawyer who was too lazy to sue insurance companies for a living and went to Washington instead.

      Lots of great lines in this article but this one is my favorite.

      • SEnkey3 years ago

        This is why I like reading Williamson. I don't always agree with his views but his writing is full of great lines.

    • SEnkey3 years ago

      The shortcomings of folksy moral certitude are obvious enough. When there are not enough ventilators to go around, politicians will stampede to the microphones to declare: “Everybody has a moral right to health care!” Thanks for that, Bubba. The number of ventilators available after that declaration of folksy moral certitude is — you will not be surprised to learn — exactly the same as the number of ventilators available before that declaration of folksy moral certitude. If you want to know how to get more ventilators online, then you have to tune out the folksy moral certitude for a minute or two and do the hard work of sitting down and learning about the issue from somebody who knows something about it. Those somebodies are not generally found serving in Congress.

      This is a big, complex, dynamic country. Its problems are big complex, and dynamic, too — they already were before the epidemic and the recession that it is sure to produce, and they will become more so as, in the words of one famous television subtitle, “Intensity intensifies.” If you think that the epidemic is disruptive, consider the pace at which our national fiscal position is deteriorating and then imagine a debt crisis layers on top of the viral one. (Not a certainty — a possibility.) Where I come from, that is some terrifying stuff. Probably is where you come from, too.

      The United States of America cannot be governed by platitude. It cannot be led by platitude or by those who have almost nothing to offer beyond platitude.

      Not well, anyway — and not forever.