I keep not commenting on things Alice in Texas says because it’s fun to go to the site of someone you have no communication with and occasionally see yourself linked. (Seeing yourself upstaged by having your ideas fleshed out with more point and humor than you yourself managed is not fun, though it is instructive.) Unfortunately, homeschooling four children appears to make it difficult for her to hang around in gay bars where we might meet, so our mutual introduction will have to be on-line. So, taking her links as an offer of a handshake, let me say, Welcome to America, Alice…uh…from a guy who lives in Japan.



Anyway, she’s almost always right on, as when she says this:

But then, liberals have always had a problem with boundaries. They would like all walls taken down, giving everyone free access to everyone else’s possessions and property, allowing us to be one big happy family all together. Because if only people would simply hand over everything they most treasure to complete strangers, the world would be a nicer place. Oh yeah. You see, it’s all about stuff.

What most bewilders me about such people is their ability to act, on the one hand, as if our kind of social order were so natural to the human organism that you can meddle with it at will without making it collapse…and then to display, on the other hand, a tendency toward control-freak micro-planning when they get their hands on actual institutions. But as Alice encapsulates here, there’s a whole skein of other, equally nasty assumptions involved: that there’s a fixed amount of good fortune to go around, that therefore envy is the natural and proper reaction to others’ good fortune, and that it’s better to make everyone equally miserable than to allow unequal outcomes of any kind.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 11th, 2004 at 12:12 and is filed under misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.