At the time of this writing, the result of the Iowa caucuses is that the Democratic Party has seemingly mangled and entirely botched the situation. Its ineptitude has delayed results at least 12 hours beyond when they would normally be available, due to the apparent difficulty of counting. These same Democrats want the government, at their direction, to run just about everything.
Roughly 200,000 is a useful estimate of the number of people involved in the Iowa Democratic caucuses this year. If the Democratic Party can’t manage to count up that many votes, well then, I humbly suggest that we may not want to put it in charge of a multitrillion-dollar budget for 330 million people. Basic addition, after all, is one of those skills useful in the governance of a large enterprise such as the federal government.
Sure, we’re still at the red-faced mumbling stage of excuse-making, and the full reasons for this debacle are still unclear. But regardless, such blatant incompetence isn’t exactly a great advertisement for a political party.
Then again, the justification of the socialist project has always rested upon the shakiest of foundations. Even if we leave aside the theoretical points made by Friedrich Hayek and others, that the detailed information required to manage a society centrally never is available to state bureaucrats or the moral argument that we really should all be allowed to live life as we see fit, their narrative still doesn’t hold up.
The socialist argument has always been that the very smart people, themselves of course, should tell the rest of us (through force if need be) how life is to be lived. This would carry more weight if it were actually the smart people making the argument.
What actually happens, though? Government work is done by those looking for a quiet life and a good pension. All sound characters who love their children and all that, but not exactly the brains of our generation needed to direct the detailed affairs of the rest of us. The problem with the socialist belief that a good and forceful government will save us all is that the people who could possibly fulfill this role are all off elsewhere. In reality, governance is most often being done by those incapable of providing the claimed goal.
Nonetheless, the Democrats want to centrally plan our healthcare, the economy, and even the environment. Yes, and all of this is to be done by those who cannot count up simple votes. Right.
We should also get our chuckles in now, while we can. Given the current evidence coming out of the Iowa caucuses, we’ll have little to laugh about if the Democrats’ proposed system is ever imposed.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
