Liberals Tell You Government is the Solution to Everything, but Don’t Care if it Works
“The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.” -- P. J. O'Rourke
One of the things I’ve always found interesting about Democrats is that they simultaneously promote government as the solution to every problem, but they also seem completely indifferent to whether their policies work or not. They told every lie under the sun to pass Obamacare, but then when it drove people’s insurance rates into the stratosphere, their attitude was basically, “Too late for you to do anything about it now, suckers.”
Democrats constantly extol the virtues of high-speed rail, although, in a country as large as America, it doesn’t make much sense in most places. Arguably, one of the places it does make sense is a state with a dense population, like California. So, how has that been going?
In 2008, California voters approved $9.95 billion of state bond funding as seed money to build an 800-mile high-speed rail (HSR) network connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco, and the Central Valley to coastal cities, at speeds of up to 220 miles per hour, with an expected completion date of 2020.
...But now, 15 years after the bond issue, three years after the expected completion date, not one train has left the station. Not one route has been completed, even though nearly all the $9.95 billion seed money has been spent. And the original budget of about $33 billion for the entire 800-mile system is now inadequate to build just one route (Bakersfield to Merced), whose cost pencils out to $207 million per mile—a cost that will almost certainly rise in the future, and for a route that may not be ready for ten years. Or more. Or perhaps ever.
...There is no path to completion for the fantasy rail system that was falsely sold to voters 15 years ago. Finishing the Bakersfield-Merced route, which will cost in excess of $35 billion, and which won’t be operative for ten years, doesn’t come close to penciling out. The only reasonable decision is to end a project that should never have begun.
Similarly, California has one of the worst homeless problems in America and their response has largely been to bend over backward to cater to the homeless. They’ve spent 24 billion dollars doing this since 2019. So, how is this working out?
Since 2019, California has spent about $24 billion on homelessness, but in this five-year period, homelessness increased by about 30,000, to more than 181,000. Put differently, California spent the equivalent of about $160,000 per person (based on the 2019 figure) over the last five years.
If you want to see a similarly effective program at the federal level, Joe Biden & Kamala Harris’s 42 billion dollar attempt to roll out high-speed Internet to rural areas fits the bill:
One of President Joe Biden's pledges upon entering office in 2021 was to expand Americans' access to high-speed broadband Internet. But despite apportioning tens of billions of dollars to the task, not one person has been connected to the Internet as a result of the initiative.
Contained within the 2021 infrastructure bill, the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) program authorized more than $42 billion in grants, to "connect everyone in America to reliable, affordable high-speed Internet by the end of the decade."
"In 2021, the Biden Administration got $42.45 billion from Congress to deploy high-speed Internet to millions of Americans," Brendan Carr, the senior Republican commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter) this month. "Years later, it has not connected even 1 person with those funds. In fact, it now says that no construction projects will even start until 2025 at [the] earliest."
Keep in mind, these are the people who are constantly telling you that all you need to do to fix all your problems is give the government more money and power. Yet, when the government gets more money and power, what do you get?
Hot garbage.
Yet, does that set off any alarm bells on the Left? Do any liberals ever say, “We’re the ones who say government is the solution to every problem, so we have a big-time obligation to prove people it’s a good idea?”
No.
They literally do not care if their policies work.
They don’t care if rent control drives up rent, no bail laws and the refusal of Soros prosecutors to charge criminals causes increases in crime, or whether incessantly promoting gay and trans soldiers is creating a military recruiting crisis. They’re indifferent to whether constantly promoting gender confusion in schools is artificially creating more gay and trans students or whether putting men in dresses into women’s prisons is leading to rapes. They don’t care if the masks worked during COVID, they don’t care if the regulations they put in place make sense and they don’t care if the school systems in Chicago are so bad that not a single child tested proficient in math in 67 schools while no child tested proficient in reading in 32 schools.
It would be one thing if liberals looked at all of this, thought it was outrageous, and voted the people responsible for these disasters out of office, but the truth is that run-of-the-mill liberals don’t care whether their policies work or not any more than liberal politicians. This is why memes like this exist about the crimewaves that have happened in liberal cities since Trump left office:
It doesn’t have to be this way.
For example, Ron DeSantis has a reputation for being the most competent governor in America. Look at this and tell me if he’s living up to his reputation:
Why can’t liberals ever seem to perform like this? Why do they put policies in place and then lie about them, cook the books, pretend to be more conservative around election time, change the subject – anything but actually evaluate their own policies and change directions if they fail? Because at this point, liberalism is closer to a religion than an ideology or a governing philosophy and the only important thing is sticking to the latest doctrine. Not results. Not actually helping anybody. Not making anyone’s life better. Just sticking to whatever the latest trendy liberal idea is and damn the consequences.
All of what we are seeing unfold before us has been both predictable and predicted. Yet, people push on with their unbased agendas without any sense or humility. (Witness the Bret Baer “interview” with the Kamaleon”.
BASED: “Facts do not care about your feelings.”
UNBASED: “My feelings don’t care about facts.”
When objective truth was abandoned in education, the gates to Hell were opened. Sadly, the BASED will pay the toll for the UNBASED’s abject refusal to acknowledge their error.
“One of the things I’ve always found interesting about Democrats is that they simultaneously promote government as the solution to every problem, but they also seem completely indifferent to whether their policies work or not.”
But this is not the least bit surprising.
The main reason that Dems promote government as the solution to every problem is that such promotion helps them attain, and retain, political power.
Other than the tendencies of all politicians away from epistemic humility, and of left-of-center politicians to be comfortable with / approving of authoritarianism, it really ain’t any more complicated than that.
I could point out cynically that when the policies don’t work out, it becomes justification for another cycle of ‘government solutions’, and I’d be correct, but this is just a secondary, side-benefit of the Dem approach.