Below The Beltway

I’ve always known that government-worshiping liberals were naive, but I never thought they’d reached the level of naivety that Ezra Klein displayed in The Washington Post last week:

What we’re seeing here is not merely distrust in the House health-care reform bill. It’s distrust in the political system. A healthy relationship does not require an explicit detailing of the “institutional checks” that will prevent one partner from beating or killing the other. In a healthy relationship, such madness is simply unthinkable. If it was not unthinkable, then no number of institutional checks could repair that relationship. Similarly, the relationship between the protesters and the government is not healthy. The protesters believe the government capable of madness. There is no evidence for that claim, which means that there is no answer for it, either. That claim is not about what is in this bill, or what government has done in Medicare and Medicaid and the VA. It is about what a certain slice of Americans think their government — and by extension, their fellow citizens — capable of.

Ezra, do I really need to give you this list ?

1. Slavery
2. Jim Crow
3. The massacres of American Indians
4. The lies that started the Mexican, Spanish-American, and Vietnam Wars
5. The unnecessary American intervention in World War I
6. The internment of Japanese citizens during World War II
7. Watergate
8. The Iraq War
9. The War On (Some) Drugs
10. Daily violations of the 4th Amendment by law enforcement at the local, state, and federal levels

And that’s just in the United States, if you wanted to go world wide you could add the Holocaust, World War II, Stalin’s war against the Ukrainian peasantry, China’s “Cultural Revolution”, Pol Pot, North Korea, Iran, and pretty much the entire Muslim world.

The point, dear Ezra, is simple — every evil that has been committed in the history of mankind can be laid at the feet of the state.

The people I worry about aren’t the ones who distrust the government, it’s the one’s like Klein that don’t.