Politics, Government & Public Policy: January 2014 Archives
New research shows that "liberals" don't understand "conservatives" as well as "conservatives" understand "liberals". (I use quotes because the labels aren't my preferred way to characterize the viewpoints.) It's interesting to note how uncharitable the leftists are. These results line up pretty well with my observations of people in the wild.
One other point that I find really interesting and important about Haidt's work is his findings on the ability of different groups to empathize across these ideological divides. So in his book (p. 287) Haidt reports on the following experiment: after determining whether someone is liberal or conservative, he then has each person answer the standard battery of questions as if he were the opposite ideology. So, he would ask a liberal to answer the questions as if he were a "typical conservative" and vice-versa. What he finds is quite striking: "The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who describe themselves as 'very liberal.' The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives." In other words, moderates and conservatives can understand the liberal worldview and liberals are unable to relate to the conservative worldview, especially when it comes to questions of care and fairness.In short, Haidt's research suggests that many liberals really do believe that conservatives are heartless bastards-or as a friend of mine once remarked, "Conservatives think that liberals are good people with bad ideas, whereas liberals think conservatives are bad people"-and very liberal people think that especially strongly. Haidt suggests that there is some truth to this.
James Taranto adds:
But there's a limitation to Haidt's experiments. Because his methodology is new, it has only been applied in the contemporary political context. Perhaps in a few decades it will be possible to determine the extent to which Haidt's findings reflect timeless truths about human nature as opposed to peculiarities of the present day. As time travel is a logical impossibility, Haidt cannot go back in time and gather data from earlier generations.
Obviously we're all always traveling through time, but we're limited to one direction: into the future.
Surprise! The FBI probe led by an Obama donor has leaked that there won't be any charges filed related to the Tea Party persecution. If the law really wasn't broken then that's a problem with the law itself. The proper remedy for this abuse by the IRS is institutional capital punishment: the IRS should be completely dissolved and replaced.
From the WSJ:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn't plan to file criminal charges over the Internal Revenue Service's heightened scrutiny of conservative groups, law-enforcement officials said, a move that likely will only intensify debate over the politically charged scandal.The officials said investigators didn't find the kind of political bias or "enemy hunting" that would amount to a violation of criminal law. Instead, what emerged during the probe was evidence of a mismanaged bureaucracy enforcing rules about tax-exemption applications it didn't understand, according to the law-enforcement officials.
Republican Governor of New Jersey Chris Christie's flunkies conspired to use their official power to punish their political enemies. Did Christie know about their intentional actions before they were in the news? C'mon. I was born at night, but not last night. America deserves better from our public servants.
"Private messages between Governor's Christie's [sic] deputy chief of staff and two of his top executives at the Port Authority reveal a vindictive effort to create 'traffic problems in Fort Lee' by shutting lanes to the George Washington Bridge and apparent pleasure at the resulting gridlock," the Record of Bergen County reports.
As an Instacommenter notes, this level of pettiness matches the efforts by President Obama to close the national parks during last year's government shutdown.
For pettiness, I believe this bridge fiasco is more on a par with the shutdown of federal parks during the government shutdown than the IRS abuses. The IRS abuses appear to be intimidation for election purposes. The park blockades appeared to be pettiness to prove a point. The bridge fiasco also appears to be pettiness to prove a point.
Tar and feathers.
As 2014 dawns there are fewer people with health insurance thanks to Obamacare. Considering that the goal of Obamacare was to increase coverage even with increased costs, this is a sad state of affairs -- because costs have certainly gone up. Americans are unquestionably worse off as a group thanks to Obamacare, and only two questions remain: how bad will it get? and when will it end?
America deserves better.
The White House used a Sunday morning statement to admit that only 1.1 million people have used the federal Obamacare website to sign up for the president's healthcare network by Christmas Day.News reports and advocacy websites say roughly 1 million people have enrolled with health-benefit companies via state websites, including 400,000 in California and 157,000 in New York, by the Dec. 24 deadline, which allows coverage starting Jan. 1.
The 2 million federal and state signups are roughly two-thirds the planned goal of 3.3 million enrollments by Dec. 31. They're also only one-third of the 7 million customers sought by March 31.
The total reported signups are at least 3 million fewer than the 5 million people whose health-insurance policies were cancelled prior to Christmas by President Barack Obama's ambitious tax-and-healthcare scheme.
The minus-3-million score is only partially offset by the extension of Medicaid coverage to perhaps 2 million other people, few of whom earn enough to afford commercial insurance.
Of critical note, the administration is using a deceptive definition for the word "enrolled": it is not known how many of the "enrolled" participants have actually paid for their plans.
