Michael Bennet just released the following campaign ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUKGym_iVYI.
I responded on his Facebook page:
It’s all about narratives, Michael! We need to make dysfunctional extremism recognizable for what it is, and our commitment as progressives to intelligent and just self-governance recognizable as what mainstream America, and the Founding Fathers themselves, have always been all about. The Bucks of the world can try as they might to make it uncool to believe that we aren’t just a bunch of unconnected individuals, but are also members of a society, but we’re not going to succumb to the brutality of their ideology of mutual indifference!
So, what do others think? What would it mean for America, for Colorado, and for the World, if Buck’s views were to prevail?
Here’s a response I made to one of the right-wing commentors on Michael Bennet’s Facebook page:
Oddly enough, those who actually study economics (including me) overwhelmingly disagree with your economic analysis. 80% of American economists favor Democratic over Republican economic policies (The Economist Magazine, 2008). The t…wo 2009 Nobel Prize winners in economics, Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson, both made their marks in transaction cost economics, which very compelling demonstrates the need for specific kinds of interventions by non-market hierarchies (such as governments) in order to maximize economic efficiency. Having spent the last several decades studyingand teaching in the social sciences, with particular emphases on Economics, Law, and History, to be told that seeking to implement informed policies which deal with the realities of the systems we live within “makes no sense logically,” by someone relying on blind ideological platitudes mindlessly repeated, continues to annoy and frustrate me.
What we really need, Jake, is to all agree to be reasonable people of goodwill, working together to face the challenges of a complex and subtle world. One good starting point for reason is humility: Having spent my life studying the human world, I know most clearly of all how little any of us really knows or understands. But that does not mean arbitrary opinions are as useful in the human enterprise as carefu analyses. Our humility, our knowledge of being small and fallable creatures facing an immense and overwhelming universe, should be the foundation of our wisdom.
Of course our current system of pork barrel spending is dysfunctional, but identifying the problem is not the same as identifying the solution. Even more dysfunctional than pork barrel spending is the anti-government ideology of regression, because our clumsy and imperfect, corrupt and wasteful system had been carrying us in the direction of ever-increasing prosperity and every increasing extension of opportunity, until folks like you started to obstruct it, and contributed to a deterioration of our material and immaterial infrastructure, at great expense to human welfare.
You have to do the analysis, consider all of the relevant factors, and pursue the best policies attainable within those parameters, Jake. Not just repeat caricatures of reality, and try to reduce our public policy to the least informed common denominator.
Jake, you subscribe to an ideology that claims knowledge while carefully avoiding actually acquiring it. And that, my friend, is a form of violence against humanity, and a crime against my daughter and all of our children.
It’s time to stop pretending that applying the soundest logic to the most reliable evidence in service to the most pragmatic means to the most useful ends is the bane of humanity. The only thing that’s the bane of humanity is this ideology of social disintegration and mutual indifference that so many so blindly subscribe to.