Monday, May 24, 2010

One minute Nancy Pelosi is trumpeting jobs, jobs, jobs.

The next minute she is telling the Democratic Party's creative artists that "you can leave your work, focus on your talent, your skill, your passion, your aspirations because you will have health care."

Huh? How do those go together?

It all goes back to Marx, writes Bill Kristol. The young Marx wrote that people wouldn't be stuck in a single occupation in the socialist society. Instead they would be able to follow their bliss. The older Marx worked on the excruciating policy analysis economic necessities in Das Kapital.

Then later, along came John Maynard Keynes, who promised a life free from economic necessity and the hag-ridden "pseudo-moral principles" of the last 200 years, but not yet.

This promise of two incompatible things before breakfast reflects the over-under nature of the Democratic Party. On the one hand it is the party of creative elitists who want a life of ease so they can follow their bliss into arcane academic research and the creative arts. But it also represents the ordinary worker who just wants a good paying job.

Conservatives, writes Kristol, want none of this dual delusion.

We conservatives, for our part, reject this as the worst of both worlds: stultifying big government statism on the one hand, and dangerously utopian liberationism on the other...

And we conservatives differ from Keynes in having regard for the bourgeois virtues. We believe those virtues (itself a conservative word, these days) do have a certain worth and dignity—that bourgeois life does not make fair foul and foul fair.

So for conservatives, it’s jobs in the day and tea parties after dinner, with hunting and church and patriotic parades on the weekends. Not to mention a flourishing private sector to provide jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs to all the Pelosi Democrats voted out of office this November.

Amen to that, brother.

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