Even though this tidbit of wisdom comes from a member of the media, a group whose members tend to be amongst the world’s the worst kind of narcissistic, entitled, self centered, elitist, and disconnected from reality scumbags – especially when they are progressives that believe their jobs is to fix the world’s wrongs instead of just reporting the facts – it holds true about the political class:
Members of the political class consider themselves exempt from the routine constraints that apply to their fellow citizens. They feel certain that they are making extraordinary sacrifices, and therefore deserve exceptional compensation (this emotion is the psychological trigger that sets off a great deal of low-level corruption). Once in government, they are soon part of a parallel reality, in which they live and breathe a separate world than the one experienced by voters.
Though this dichotomy is powerfully present at Westminster, it is worse by far on the European mainland, where a barrier between civil society and the state-funded political elite was erected several decades ago. It was this elite that made the collective decision to piledrive through European monetary union at the end of the last century. It literally cannot conceive that the euro might fail, a state of mind that has generated a series of arresting epistemological consequences.
The European elite now constructs reality around the euro, not the other way around – a method that involves all manner of ungainly manoeuvring and deceit.
There you have it in a nutshell: ideology trumps reality with these pedantic, self absorbed power mongers, and because they are convinced that they mean well, they continue to ignore reality and forge ahead with their delusional plan. It’s the very definition of insanity, as postulated by Einstein: trying the same stupid thing over and over, and expecting a different outcome this time. It’s never that the end goals and processes of their wealth redistributionist, social justice spreading, utopian fantasy cult’s altar they pretend to worship at, are flawed. No, the problem is in the execution, or the people that have executed it, only to see it all unravel in the end. So the stupid they prevaricate violates not just the laws of economics, the laws of nature, and human laws, it is a noble cause! Never mind that wherever this has played itself out over the last century plus, we have seen it devolve into the imprisonment of billions and the murder of over a hundred million at the hands of these well meaning sadists.
The political class feels it deserves privilege. And why not? Are they not the ones taking on the burden of fighting this noble and impossible fight? Breaking eggs to make them omelets and what not. They mean well! So they want reality to conform to their agenda. If not, they will force it to happen. And the unforeseen consequences of that attempt to bend reality to create fantasy land is never their fault. It’s the stupid people that don’t know their betters are doing it all for them, to better their lot, that ruin everything by not conforming. That these things eventually end in misery for all but the elite, like North Korea or Venezuela, and even Greece, and some of the other PIIGS members, is simply ignored.
And it is not just the entitled and elitist European politicians that have their head up their collective – pun intended – asses. Our progressives here in the US are just as bad, if not worse. The author in this piece gives the following tidbit:
It is this underlying philosophical disposition that explains the continued reverence felt by the European political class for the euro, when empiricists would have given up long ago. Indeed, it is impossible to avoid a certain grudging respect for the imperishable optimism of the single-currency enthusiasts, their absolute refusal to be deterred by adversity and contrary evidence. (This is something they have in common with the American neo-cons, unrepentant despite the twin calamities of Afghanistan and Iraq, and still urging fresh fields for armed intervention.)
One could apply the same logic to the Keynesians and the real world outcome of the policies that come from their nonsense beliefs. Then again, an astute observer would know that the problem the European political class faces is precisely that they are a bunch of collectivist Keynesians that refuse to give up on the Euro, and continue to pretend they can bend the laws of nature, economics, and human nature. It doesn’t work. But, “Social Justice!”, whatever that may mean. Their disconnect from reality is why we spend so much more than we can take in, and complain that the problem isn’t government spending too much, but that they are not taking away enough. If government only took enough, then it would be all rainbows and unicorns. By that logic they should do what the communists did: take it all. Whenever you hear a privileged and stinking rich politician tell you he cares about the little guy, if what eh is talking about isn’t getting government out of the way so the little guy can have a shot at prosperity, beware. What they offer will defy reality, and in the end, it will just cause pain and misery.