Leftist World View

Thomas Sowell examines the leftist world view - the immature world of "wishing the world were a better place" due to inexperience in dealing with the real world of jobs, responsibility, trade-offs and adult concerns.

"Most of us learn that from experience-- but experience is precisely what the young are lacking. "Experience" is often just a fancy word for the mistakes that we belatedly realized we were making, only after the realities of the world made us pay a painful price for being wrong.

Those who are insulated from that pain-- whether by being born into affluence or wealth, or shielded by the welfare state, or insulated by tenure in academia or in the federal judiciary-- can remain in a state of perpetual immaturity. Individuals can refuse to grow up, especially when surrounded in their work and in their social life by similarly situated and like-minded people."

Sowell notes that it is precisely the working class peoples that these liberal groups propose to "assist" that view them with the suspicion born from the condenscension brought to bear on them when addressed by their "betters". Instead they cling to their guns and religion, and they note that happy talk to our enemies may not persuade them to be our friends. Sowell notes that the happy talk theory was tried with disasterous results in the 1930s, while the Cold War ended due not to happy talk but substantial investments in weaponry that could not be matched by Soviet central planning.

Interesting.