The market lost 242 points off the Dow on Wednesday, a rather modest down day for a stock market that has seen plenty of catastrophes much greater than the one playing out in Japan.
But by mid afternoon a news reader posing as an expert on Fox was so spun up that he told viewers in a shaky voice that “the only thing that we have to fear is fear itself.” In the context of our generation, that sounded more like the opening in a Nigerian oil-scam email than it did a clarion call to courage.
The difference between what the news reader meant and what we heard makes me glad.
Maybe that giant flushing sound we’ve all felt the last two years is a type of progress for us after all.
70 years after the New Deal, the public is waiting around for a true deal; a deal calculated for real people, not a welfare line for government workers and ideological scamsters.
“No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life” Lord Salisbury told us “as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe.”
For close to a century experts have told us to put our trust in government. We have a host of them in our life everyday: Federal Reserve bankers, Education Department officials, Union economists, scientists on the government dole, Energy Department officials, all here for our own good.
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Yet, government doesn’t even pretend to try to solve the very problems they claim to care about. The “experts” at the EPA designed a tax on carbon to combat so-called global warming and even they won’t claim that the tax will bring down the earth’s temperature.
Still, a failed result won’t stop the experts from insisting on this tax for our own good.
As a consequence of the care of so many government experts who insist on doing stuff for our own good, we are now at a point where nothing is true.
Men marry men and we call it marriage. Doctors kill babies and we call it choice. We practice targeted discrimination against certain classes of people, under the law, and we call it justice.
We ban the religion of some in the public square as a matter of taste and call it a moral good.
In the name of safety, the government takes away guns for self-defense, but sues states for enforcing federal immigration laws.
We “improve” public education by lowering standards rather than raising them; and we design a medical and retirement "safety net" that threatens not just life, but everything our country was built on: liberty, opportunity, property.
My religion tells me to fear not. That’s why I cling to it. Others have done the same for 2000 years
My gun too tells me to fear not, although its ammunition isn’t as refined as the word of God. Good men have armed themselves for the 500 years since Europeans first lived in North America.
So, I cling to the gun as well.
Expert government opinion? It’s been king for 70 years and it has a very spotty record.
Truth, I know, always resides wherever brave men still have ammunition. And I'll take truth over experts everyday.
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