Tag Archives: Jonathan Gruber

The assumption of cluelessness and the magic pudding

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http://youtu.be/bMb3gn3YunE

The video of Trey Gowdy cross-examining Jonathan Gruber is for the ages. I have added this to what already is found below, but it speaks volumes. And at the end, there is a question asked by the Chairman that sums everything up on the left side of politics.

The Democrats, like all parties of the left, are still working on the principle that the people who support them really are stupid. This is about Gruber and Obamacare, but why could it not be Bill Shorten discussing the devastation that has taken place in the Australian economy since the ALP applied its stimulus:

“Let me be clear, I am extremely frustrated with Dr. Gruber’s statements,” Cummings continued. “They were irresponsibly, incredibly disrespectful, and did not reflect reality. And they were indeed insulting.”

“I was in Congress when this law was debated, and Dr. Gruber does not speak for me, or the chairman of the other committees who worked tirelessly on this bill,” he said. “We debated this legislation for nearly a year before it was finally passed and signed by the president! Never once did I believe or did anyone suggest that we were somehow hiding our goals from the American people.”

“But worst of all,” the ranking member concluded, “Dr. Gruber’s statements gave Republicans a public relations gift in their relentless political campaign to tear down the ACA and eliminate health care for millions of Americans!”

As for Australia, so far as the ALP is concerned, it matters not at all that they dug the hole which was specifically designed for the Coalition to fall into once it took government. They can now go on about the economic problems the country has, and harangue about every attempt to fix what they have done. They know the problems exist, how necessary it is to get things right and how intractable they are since they tried to fix them but couldn’t. But whatever they know, they are using the problems Abbott must deal with as reasons to get themselves back into government two years from now.

The assumption of cluelessness and the magic pudding must be very deeply built into how these people think about their supporters.

Keane as mustard and Razer sharp

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I came across a book the other day with the title, A Short History of Stupid by Bernard Keane and Helen Razer. Not knowing who either of these people were, before committing my $29.95 I thought I would suss out their views by going to the index and seeing what they had to say on global warming, the most certain indicator to me of stupid. Alas, no index but there was, at the back, a series of lists of which there were strangely two with the same heading, “Top Ten Enemies of Stupid”, one beginning on page 299 and the other on page 314. Since I don’t know any more about the book than the title, the names of the unknown-to-me authors, the absence of an index and these lists, everything I now say must be taken cum salis grano, as they say. Might well be a wonderful book, filled with insight and knowledge. But then there were these two lists, and one in each, as the grand enemies of stupid amongst the twenty top ten, there were:

Karl Marx and
John Maynard Keynes.

I take it that to embrace the views of Marx and Keynes is, according to these authors, part of the way one defeats the forces of stupidity. Now my own near certainty, having read widely in both, is the high likelihood that they have never read much of either, assuming they have read any at all. And if they have read what M&K wrote, and still think of them as part of the smart set, they are, I must tell you, not very good judges of what is and what is not stupid, at least so far as the practical effects of following their advice. But at least there is this one piece of good that these lists have done, which was to save me $29.95.

What is more remarkable, however, is their very bad timing in having such a book published just at this moment when we have had definitive recognition where stupidity in politics is most prevalently found. This, of course, has come courtesy of Jonathan Gruber, Obamacare’s multi-million dollar man, who explained how Democrat voters are too stupid to know what’s good for them so had to be deceived to allow their betters to fulfil their agenda.

“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” Mr. Gruber said. “Call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass.”

Well, to get it to pass they had to depend on getting stupid people to support the change – that is, they had to depend on supporters of the political left to be just as stupid as they were assumed to be. Dangling in front of these voters was the promise of cheaper health care costs run through the government. And if they believed that they really were stupid, just the kinds of people to take policy advice from J.M. Keynes and Karl Marx.

Jonathan Gruber once again: “It’s a very clever basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the American voter”

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He is such a grub, but a perfect miniature of the kind of people who represent the left in politics. Dishonest, smug and elitist. Just leave everything to the experts and the less we hear from you the better things will go. Yet his description almost perfectly fits my own belief about the typical voter for parties of the left who, just as he says, can be exploited because of their lack of economic understanding, and indeed because of their lack of understanding of much else besides. The quote comes at 3:29 in the clip. I wonder how clever he thinks of himself right now. We pulled it over on you rubes, didn’t we?