Schadenfreude: Just Another Way to Say I Love It or Why Liberals Are Smarter Than Conservatives

Recently I have been in a rare good political mood.  I've been skipping on the sunny side of the street because of the healthcare debacle (denouement? catastrophe? or my favorite:  Obamageddon?) that is Obamacare.  There is nothing quite like telling your political opponents (and anyone else who would listen to a crank like me) that their plans were going to end in tears and then turn around and find them in the corner blubbering with mascara running thickly down damp cheeks.  I think I now truly understand what the Germans mean by schadenfreude.  And golly is it fun.

And the fun is just beginning!  The IT was the easy part.  There is no physical or economic law that says you must screw up your systems project (although there is a rule of thumb that says that the Federal Government will screw up any systems project larger than a Windows upgrade) but from now on out the birds hitting the pavement with a sickening splat really will be chickens trying to roost at velocity.  And that's because the other things wrong with the law directly contradict fundamental reality - as Les (As God is my witness, I thought Turkeys could fly) Nessman learned:  like gravity and turkey aerodynamics, the Gods of political economy are cruel masters who do not suffer fools gladly.  Even if you are a five time winner of the Buckeye News Hawk award.

But as I watch Obamacare spokespeople channeling Kevin Bacon claiming that all will be well as soon as those gosh darn IT kids straighten up and fly right and that it's a good thing to cancel millions of policies and replace them with much more expensive options that just happen to not include any of the good doctors or hospitals and so on and so forth I get uncomfortable.  It's like watching a prize fight get out of hand.  The punch drunk defending champeen keeps getting back up bent and bloody just to get knocked down again.  At some point I start worrying less about the outcome than whether his blood gets on my ceremonial boxing loafers.  But the ref won't call the fight because he (like the mainstream press) has ten big ones riding on the Champ to win.  So it goes on until the punch drunk pugilist can no longer stand in the forlorn hope that he can turn it all around with a lucky swing.

Liberals Are the Clever Ones

Which brings me to the point of this post (although my introductory 'excessive celebration' in the end zone was a heckuva lot of fun):  Liberals (and advocates of state supremacy and power in general) are smarter than we conservatives are - they have to be.  It was actually rather easy for this libertarian-conservative to predict that O'care was going to crater:  all I needed to know was the conservative Canon of Tears:  Adam Smith (people are selfish), Ed Burke (they're unpredictable), Fred Hayek (all these selfish, unpredictable people doing their own thing means making them do what you want them to really, really hard), and Connie Eble (shit happens).

After all, predicting that an unread, unproofed 2,700 page law that creates a "national" "program" that seeks to "transform" one sixth of the economy, giving 30 million people insurance, while letting everyone keep their current plan and doctor at a lower cost than today will fail spectacularly isn't rocket science.  Just like it isn't hard to predict that trying to turn two primitive, ethnically and religiously balkanized muslim countries into Jeffersonian (or even Mohammedan) democracies was going to end badly.  I mean talk about putting yourself in places where shit is bound to happen.*

But I digress.  Back to Liberal brilliance:  leftist schemes (I'm using scheme in both the English sense of the word: plans or programs and American:  sneaky, underhanded) like O'care explicitly eschew (gesundheit) assumptions like self interest or behavioral complexity or even shit happening - for a mechanistic, legalistic view of the chaos that is our nation. Like the Ivy League lawyers they inevitably are, they hold to the novel faith that if they write the 'right' runes on the magical Congressional Hard drive and the Bureaucratic Priests press "Enter", then what they will - regardless of the opinions and plans of the other 315 million Americans - will happen as they planned it while they ride off to save the people from some other disaster about to befall them. But of course incompetent geniuses are always making this mistake - just ask Dougie "Dr. Evil" Powers:

Dr. Evil:  All right guard, begin the unnecessarily slow-moving dipping mechanism. 
[guard starts dipping mechanism] 
Dr. Evil: Close the tank! 
Scott Evil: Wait, aren't you even going to watch them? They could get away! 
Dr. Evil: No no no, I'm going to leave them alone and not actually witness them dying, I'm just gonna assume it all went to plan.

Which seems to be what everyone in the Administration above the rank of PHP Coder First Class did. And that brings me to my point, well two points actually:  First of all, liberal schemes always tend to ithe grandiose and complex:  grandiose because that's what liberals do:  they fundamentally transform.  And to do grandiose you need to get everybody in the Zeppelin and that takes a pinch here and stitch there for the endless number of special (in both the adult day care and political corruption senses of the word) supporters with special needs.

But - and this is the rub:  to make massive and novel changes is to war against reality.  A reality that is filled with self interest, unpredictability, mass confusion and shit happening.  In some cases you find yourself pushing against self interest, in others you fabricate complex provisions to deal with behaviors that you predict will happen because of something else you've done which is in response to another provision which was to counter a third undesired outcome.  And it's not long before you end up wih 2700 incomprehensible, mutually contradictory pages of legal dreck.

And it is definitely harder to keep track of all of the pluses and minuses, the nested multi-layer flow charts and special deals for special folks that this entails rather than use the simple rules of thumb that us low wattage conservatives use. So simply to get elected and function in Washington liberals must have higher IQs**, particularly when you recall that in addition to conceiving and keeping track of the 2700 pages of flowchart fun they also need to keep straight which narrative goes with which group of special needs.  Get enough of the details wrong and well.....you have O'care.

So hoist a glass to the intrepid liberal statists of Washington DC:  never have so many expended so much brain power to make the irrational and implausible work really badly.  We conservatives stand in awe of their snowballing intellectual achievement.

*None of this is to suggest that Republicans can't do the same stupid things, after all, look at Iraq and Afghanistan.  They were easy to conquer (simple task that we're good at) but an absolute jihadist nightmare to turn into 'respectable' democratic republics or even disreputable balkan kleptocracies.  We should learn from the example of those arch-conservative revolutionaries of yore: the Founding Fathers.  They set themselves a single, very difficult task: ditch the British Empire while retaining basically everything else, even the nasty bits like slavery, puritanism and really bad teeth. Contrast this with the French revolution which tried to turn Frenchmen into Thermidors or whatever and you get the difference between conservative and liberal change.  Too many degrees of freedom will kill you every time.

**This 'smarty pants' attribute of liberals drives conservatives nuts.  And it's our own fault. We continually get into contests with liberals on their territory using their rules.  It's a little like a master plumber entering a spelling bee.  The little alphabet jockeys can spell old elbow wrench's waders off but being able to spell campylobacteriosis or escherichia coli isn't going to do squat (and neither will you) if the toilets back up.