Universities Shield Liberal Thinkers from Reality

Member Group : Jerry Shenk

"There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull
or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people
with high IQs." – Thomas Sowell

For years, many predominately liberal professors staffing American
institutions of higher learning and self-identified "intellectual" graduates
indoctrinated by them have infiltrated government and the media, tackling
politics and policy as they are practiced in faculty lounges.

They act in the mistaken belief that learning about something is the same as
doing it, while dismissing the possibility that things they’ve taught,
thought and learned may be wrong.

Lifetime academic tenure guarantees that, other than an occasional bruised
ego, there’s really nothing at stake and little to be lost in faculty
lounges. But exporting that academic mindset to the public arena has caused
negative outcomes for everyone – including those who survived college and
prospered, primarily in the private sector, after shedding or avoiding the
liberal baggage dispensed by most institutions.

The real world isn’t a faculty lounge, an academic exercise or a lab
experiment. The real world is inhabited by billions of real-life people
whose trillions of large and small daily personal decisions affect
individuals’ and families’ chances to survive in an indifferent world.

But the world is no more indifferent to them than are the arrogant academics
and their "intellectual" progeny who imagine themselves to be sufficiently
knowledgeable to make decisions for and set policy affecting everyone.

American citizens have long been victimized by wrong-headed academic
influences in government. The modern American notion of liberal intellectual
political hegemony began with the administration of President Woodrow Wilson
(1913-21), a partisan Virginia Democrat – the first post-Civil War
Southerner to win the White House – a wishful progressive, Ph.D., former
professor and president of Princeton University – and the first American
president to reject the Founders’ principles.

In his book "The Founders’ Key," Larry P. Arnn wrote: "Woodrow Wilson said
that (the U.S. Constitution) was obsolete, written for an age that believed
in the theories of Isaac Newton and regarded government as a mechanism."

That age, Wilson believed, was now superseded by Darwin and the theory of
evolution, which allows us to see that "government is a living organism, one
that must change over time."

Wilson’s antipathy to America’s founding principles and his progressive
spending and fiscal policies helped to create the depression of 1920-21, an
economic downturn cured by the austerity imposed by Wilson’s successors,
Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge.

Harding cut the federal budget 48 percent from 1920 to 1922, and Coolidge
continued Harding’s fiscal prudence. Together, Harding and Coolidge produced
nine years of budget surpluses and the world’s best post-war national
economy.

But, until 2009, the greatest example of academic-inspired government
disasters was engineered by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Depression-era, academic
appointees, the "Brain Trust."

The Great Depression began as a recession that escalated to full depression
by Brain Trust policies that deepened and prolonged it. Other than the Brain
Trust’s natural instincts to impose recovery-destroying tax increases and
follow the misguided Keynesian admonition to spend indiscriminately, there
was no guiding economic principle behind the New Deal.

Like other New Dealers, when asked to describe the political and
philosophical underpinnings of FDR’s approach to government, Raymond Moley,
a member of FDR’s Brain Trust, cited "pragmatism."

In fact, the theme of FDR’s governing philosophy, as incessantly parroted by
his Brain Trust, was "experimentalism."

Historian Eric Goldman wrote "(FDR) trusted no system except the system of
endless experimentation." FDR himself made the point repeatedly: "This
country needs bold, persistent experimentation … above all, try
something."

FDR and his Brain Trust tried nearly everything – except the right things.

Dismissing history and the successful common-sense policies of Harding and
Coolidge, FDR and his highly credentialed but inexperienced, inept Brain
Trust approached governance like a campus lab class. They experimented –
tinkered, actually – with America; and failed.

The unwitting irony in modern progressivism’s unearned sense of superiority
is that, like Wilson, FDR and his Brain Trust whom they still celebrate,
American liberals imagine themselves to be intellectuals who embrace change
and reject dogmatic adherence to the past.

In reality, obstinately and anti-pragmatically, American liberals cling to
the "ideals" of FDR’s 80-year old New Deal despite the evidence of its
faults; despite the demographic, financial and actuarial unsustainability of
its social legacy; and despite the failure of the Obama administration’s
tax, spending and social policies that mimic the New Deal.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." – George
Santayana

http://www.ldnews.com/columns/ci_21731622/universities-shield-liberal-thinke
rs-from-political-economic-realities