Who’s to blame? part 1

If you go here:

http://www.forbes.com/2008/11/13/friedman-liberty-republicans-oped-cx_pr_1114robinson.html

there is an admirably succinct article by Peter Robinson on why the Republicans are, to put it bluntly (which he doesn’t, but he’s a gentleman and perhaps I’m not), traitors to the cause of liberty.

Robinson recounts a dinner conversation he had with Milton Friedman, at which he complimented Friedman for basically winning the case for free-market economics in academia, in a time academia had gone overwhelmingly left.

Friedman demurred, “The challenge for my generation,” he said, “was to provide an intellectual defense of liberty. The challenge for your generation is to keep it.”

Robinson cites recent Republican sins against free markets and constitutional liberty: the prescription drug benefit, the farm bill, and McCain-Feingold.

And now, a lame-duck Republican president is about to extend the Wall Street bailout to Detroit automakers. In doing so, he’s cut the legs out from under any Republican argument in favor of letting the market sort itself out.

The son-of-a-bitch could not wait and let it be the fault of the Democratic president-elect.

And to add insult to injury, he’s doing it after broadcasting what some have described as the most passionate and articulate speech in his career, in favor of free market capitalism.

Free men can face our enemies unflinchingly, but God save us from friends like these!

After I published my article, ‘The Perfect Storm of the Left’ I was asked by several friends and comrades who I blame for this.

Here’s my answer. I blame you; conservatives, libertarians and Objectivists.

Leftists can’t help what they are. Leftism is an idiocy, a pathology. Leftists are over-educated for their intellect, which makes the world a terrifying place for them.

Twentieth-century rationalism showed them a universe unimaginably big, and terrifyingly indifferent to them. Unable to find a god anywhere in it, wounded to the core by the revelation of their own insignificance, lacking the internal resources to find significance in their own lives, they became easy meat for anyone who promised them a personal god in an omnipotent, omnibenevolent state.

In the last analysis, leftism is pitiable. After the intellectual baggage has been stripped away by the catastrophic collapse of the Marxist planned economies, and the creaking, clanking, slow-death of the Social Democratic welfare states, what you have left is the heart-rending cry of, “I am alone, I am afraid, help me!”

Next, I rip the right a new one.