From the admirable Sultan's The Not Listening Tour:
Listening to someone means accepting the idea that there are things you don't know, and things you may be wrong about. That's hard to do when you're working from a philosophy that insists problems can be solved by following a rigid social or economic plan from a tenured academic. Why would you listen to someone who doesn't even have a PhD and is several social classes below you? Instead you smile patiently while he's talking and then explain to him why he's wrong. And it that doesn't work, you pretend to agree with him, while explaining that both of you actually share the same agenda. Your agenda.
The left does this over and over again-- and then doesn't understand why it's reviled for it. Three years ago it sold the same totalitarian rubbish, the bad economics and meaningless slogans by passing it off as a messianic event that would transform all of human history.
Now the failed messiah and his million dollar buses are trying to salvage the disaster. And yet even staring into the face of the economic apocalypse, the misery they inflicted on so many, and the fall of the national economy-- all they can do is mumble about bad luck and pass off the same bad policies as a bold new approach to saving the economy.
People are hurting out there, and it is because the government has gotten in their way. People are fearful of what the government plans to do to them, and to their businesses, next. My take is that the entire US economy is holding its breath until 2013. In the meantime, people will hunker down and try to survive the economic plague.
