Learning Lessons Good and Hard

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. That was H.L.Mencken's clever quote.

Let's combine his line with a related quote from Benjamin Franklin: "Experience keeps a dear school, yet Fools will learn in no other."

The welfare state is the theory that the people should pay for the folly of the liberal elite good and hard.

The great question in democracy is how to get it through the thick heads of the liberal ruling class that its ideas and policies stink. Like right now.

The liberal elite has given us trillions in stimulus and bailouts but the economy is barely making headway. Obviously the elite has made a mistake. You do not revive the economy with handouts to the darlings of the politicians. Those darlings are already wasting money big time. You want to give them more money to waste?

We have known that this policy, Keynesianism, doesn't work. We have known it at least since the days of Reaganomics when the economy shot up like a rocket about three months before the Reagan tax cuts kicked in in 1983. And then continued to rocket.

There are lots of articles out today about the folly of Keynesianism, and the common sense of Reaganomics. Liberals should read them here and here. They might learn something.

But liberals never learn. So now they are going to get their heads handed to them in the mid-term elections. I am going for the long bomb on this: 80 seats in the House of Representatives, biggest since 1938. The experience of electoral defeat is a hard school. But politicians will learn in no other.