Posted by
Andrews on Thursday, April 17, 2008 10:39:04 AM
How many bad political ideas rest upon the idea of "those other people"?
Think about taxes. Democrats promise to make you rich by taxing "the rich". In other words, "those other people" will be paying for your government benefits.
Or medical assistance. The premise is that, while you are certainly capable of planning for your needs, there are "those other people" who are not capable, and so we need to provide for these stupid, incompetent people.
Or social security. While they would never question that you are mature enough to put away money for the future, there are "those other people" who would never plan and end up starving in the streets.
Or gun control. While proponents admit you may be a quite responsible gun owner, "those other people" will use guns to commit crimes, or may just shoot someone when they get upset, or may leave them lying around loaded in their baby's crib.
Leaving the subject of laws for a moment, it has even been offered as a
defense of Obama's gaffe. He was not insulting any specific voter, his comments only apply to "those other people" who really fit his description.
I suppose, with so many of our laws based on the presumption of incompetence, it was inevitable we would invent "those other people". First, because politicians can't very well tell voters they think the voters are incompetent boobs. So they have to say "we need this law, not because of people like you, but those morons over there..." Otherwise they would have no hope of getting any votes. Who would support a law based on the premise that they are incompetent?
On top of that there is a second problem with the presumed incompetence implicit in laws. As I wrote
a long time ago, if we assume people are so incompetent the government has to step in, then how is it that a government made up of people drawn from the incompetent masses, elected by the incompetent masses, suddenly becomes competent? "Those other people" solve that quandary. The politicians, and those who elect them, are from the competent group, the incompetents they need to protect are just "those other people".
There is one problem with this whole theory. Politicians are addressing their message to the nation as a whole. They are assuring everyone that they don't mean them. So, who are these "other people" then? The standard political speech on the need to protect "those other people" from themselves seems to imply that every listener is presumed competent. If every individual American is competent, then how do we become incompetent in the aggregate?
Of course, the truth is, to those politicians, they are the competent ones and everyone else is part of "those other people", but they would never dare say it. But the laws they pass once in office make it abundantly clear, whatever they say their faith in your competence is quite limited.