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The Roof, The Roof, The Roof is on Hover

Jimmie | October 1, 2009 | Comments (1)

This is as good a summary of the way liberals think about their societal tinkering as any I’ve ever read (via Mark Steyn)

Yet they do have one major thing in common, and that is the belief that, regardless of what the ruler does, the polity he rules must necessarily continue. This is perhaps the most essential, if seldom acknowledged, insight of the post-modern “liberal” mind: that if you take the pillars away, the roof will continue to hover in the air.
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There is a corollary of this largely unspoken assumption: that no matter what you do to one part of a machine, the rest of the machine will continue to function normally.
A variant of this is the frequently expressed denial of the law of unintended consequences: the belief that, if the effect you intend is good, the actual effect must be similarly happy.
Very small children, the mad, and certain extinct primitive tribes, have shared in this belief system, but only the fully college-educated liberal has the vocabulary to make it sound plausible.

The essential difference between modern liberalism and conservatism (which is the old liberalism) is that conservatives very much respect (and in some cases, fear) the law unintended consequences while liberals act as if it does not exist. However, that liberal tendency to want to monkey around with pillars of society without thinking very much about what they’re holding up has lately infested conservative thinking as well. Many conservatives who want to expand the definition of marriage, for example, either downplay or completely ignore the potential unintended consequences. This “hovering roof” belief is pretty much the heart of “compassionate conservatism” and was at the very heart of the Bush domestic agenda.

In the end, though, the roof doesn’t hover; it crashes down disastrously, but never on the people who did all the pillar-kicking. No, those people moved on years before the bill for their foolish meddling arrived. They left that check for their kids and grandkids to pay. We’re doing the same thing right now, not just economically but socially as well. At some point, the roof will fall and our kids will be standing under it.

You want to talk about fairness? How about we not ask our kids to pay the freight for our experiments. Let’s leave the important things well enough alone until we have a darned good idea what our well-intentioned bumbling is going to do.

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