The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled ...

  
... was to convince the world he didn't exist. This is one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite movies, The Usual Suspects. We see devils everywhere trying to pull this off, but none more successfully than the left who have somehow managed to convince much of the world that capitalism is to blame when government is the true culprit.

For example, health care. The more government gets involved with medicine, the higher the prices go. It's one of the least free markets that I can think of and there are many aspects of health care that desperately need the help of capitalism (see my blog on the subject), yet somehow all we hear is the opposite. It's as if the devils of government control, cronyism and politics were blameless.

Another great example is the 2008 collapse of the real estate market and the subsequent credit crisis, immediately followed by TARP and other government interventions. Headline after headline assured us that the blame for your underwater mortgage should be placed on Wall Street greed ... predatory lending and the repackaging and leveraging of these loans to "make a quick buck at the expense of the little guy." Sure, the government gave incentives to lenders to relax their standards so that everyone could enjoy the benefits of home ownership. And sure, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac spent dozens of billions of dollars buying up these loans, thus reducing the perceived risk of trading in them. But government's artificial manipulation of the real estate market had no measurable effect and the real evil-doer was capitalism, right?

How about black poverty? Freedom is to blame there, too ... namely the freedom to be racist. So, government needs to rise again to stamp out discrimination anywhere and everywhere. We need affirmative action, minimum wage, public housing, food stamps, welfare, social services and preferences for minority-owned businesses. Of course, we are not supposed to notice that no group has been the "beneficiary" of more government "help" than poor blacks and simultaneously no group is in worse shape. Generation after generation of blacks have now been raised believing that sustenance comes in the form of a government check instead of your own hard work. Ethnic group after ethnic group, with every skin color, have been able to find their place in the American fabric, yet capitalism and freedom are to blame for the hardships of only one of them.

(As an aside, the normal counter-argument here is that slavery was an extraordinarily deep hole for blacks to overcome, but I don't buy that argument. I used to, but not any more. Blacks were on the rise and were doing a great job of climbing the American socioeconomic ladder during the time of the civil rights movement when the left implemented all the above "help". An emergence was interrupted, in my opinion.)

And finally, the government has beautifully avoided blame for out-sourcing and offshore manufacturing. It's all the greedy companies that have shipped jobs overseas and abandoned the American worker. The ridiculously high cost of union labor (yes, our govt caused this), enormously expensive workplace regulations, health care costs (again!), corporate taxes and the threat of litigation for you name it ... none of these play a role in a company's decision to open a factory in Mexico? Believe it or not, a company would much prefer to keep their manufacturing local to their headquarters ... managing an offshore plant is a major headache and quality is likely to suffer. But when the cost difference is 5X, there's no comparison. Policy after policy has pushed production away from the US.

This list could go on and on ... farm subsidies, the high cost of college tuition, the lack of innovation in our schools, rationing of permits and business licenses, high gas prices ... it's endless. And so many people continue to buy the anti-capitalism cheer. It would be entertaining watching the clownish Occupy Wall Street crowds rage against capitalism if they weren't so typical of the left, helping the devil do his work.

But when we read the papers or watch the evening news ... poof ... he's gone.

The Thinking Class

One interesting piece of the "right vs left" story is that right-leaning media outlets tend to do better than equivalent left-leaning ones. Now, with the political parties roughly the same size and the balance of power always tipping back and forth, why is the market for conservative ideas bigger?

For example, Fox News viewership is 4x-5x that of MSNBC. Rush Limbaugh couldn't even see Air America from his lofty ratings perch. Political non-fiction by conservatives (Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin) outsell their liberal counterparts by a significant margin.

Look at Al Gore's Current TV ... Keith Olbermann's show recently reported a whopping 46,000 viewers. More than that attended a recent Paul McCartney concert in Cincinnati and Olbermann is getting paid $10M per year to host a nationally televised show.

Why is this? Why do liberals not turn out in force to hear the ideals and philosophy of the left? But when it's time to donate or vote, they run neck and neck with conservatives?

Perhaps we can investigate this by breaking down the demographics of the Democratic Party. Let's consider the profiles of groups that vote largely Democratic:

• Government workers: 23 million
• Labor/Union: 14 million
• People receiving govt assistance in some form: approx 60 million (there are 40 million receiving food stamps)

Looking at groups voting largely Republican:

• Evangelical Christians (anti-abortion): 40 million
• Military: 3 million

If we assume these groups are predominately single issue voters, then we can see that Democrats have an edge on "guaranteed" votes on election day. These people are not going to be swayed by ideas or debate. History shows that approximately 70% of these groups will vote for the party that gives them what they want.

It's also interesting that about 20% of the US population describe themselves as liberal while about twice that associate with a conservative ideology. These are philosophical points of view, cutting across many issues and not likely to be a single issue voter.

My conclusion is this: there are a lot more people interested in conservative ideas than are interested in liberal ideas and the data support this. The fact that the Democrats successfully compete with Republicans on election day is attributable to their alignment with certain single issue voters who want more government, more power to organized labor and more government handouts.

These people don't care about ideas. They don't care if what is happening is morally right or if such policies overall do damage to the country. They just want their check every month.

Why buy a book?