Most of the progressives I know and read seem reasonably intelligent, or at least not exceptionally stupid. Nonetheless, they often adopt positions that make a mockery of critical thinking.
Take their bias against market-based health reform: They can’t articulate a coherent justification for their position, yet they reject the market in favor of a nanny-state “solution” modeled on a series of spectacular failures.
So, what’s wrong with them? Bryan Caplan quotes a study that seems to confirm Ayn Rand’s maxim, “Critics of the free market are more neurotic than proponents,” then adds the following:
People low in Stability … habitually blow minor problems out of proportion. Even when they live in First World countries, they manage to convince themselves that the sky is falling. Their typically neurotic response is to beg for Big Brother to save them from their largely imaginary problems.
Thus, having convinced themselves that the sky is falling on U.S. health care, they yearn for salvation at the hands of our President, his congressional accomplices, and their legions of bureaucratic Myrmidons.
And lest you think that the charge of liberal neuroticism is merely a right-wing calumny, this Gallup survey suggests that liberals also view themselves as less stable than their conservative brethren:
None of this will come as a surprise to any conservative or libertarian who has ever attempted to have a rational conversation with a progressive about health care reform.
It does, however, suggest that the lunatics are now running the asylum.
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