I congratulate Mr. Sahil Kapur on his most recent piece on The Huffington Post. I understand that it must be quite thrilling to have some of your work featured in the nutroots, er.. excuse me, "netroots."
Given that Mr. Kapur is a far leftist and on the Huffington Post, I'm certain that Republicans will be quick to follow his unsolicited advice. You'll remember he wrote quite a bit justifying the protests in front of our school during the Karl Rove protests. He said that the protests, including the paint, did no permanent damage in the comment section of this Los Angeles Times article.
Let's go through his most recent op-ed. You'll be surprised that there's some stuff that I actually agree with. He's wrong on a lot, too, like what he calls "trickle down" economics.
Much of that discussion focuses wrongly on income, rather than either total compensation, like say benefits, etc. or purchasing power.
Research from peer published journals (read: not CNN) show that, in fact, inequality has narrowed considerably when we address the inflation of the services that upper incomes consume and the lower costs of real goods that poorer incomes consume via trade with China.
As The American makes clear,
[A new paper titled ]“Inequality and Prices: Does China Benefit the Poor in America?,” shows that from 1994 to 2005, much of the increase in U.S. income inequality was actually offset by a decline in the price index of the goods that poorer households consume. Inflation for the richest 10 percent of U.S. households, which tend to spend more on services, was 6 percent higher than inflation for the poorest 10 percent, which tend to spend more on nondurable goods, the type of goods often imported from China and sold at Wal-Mart.Of course, you won't hear much of how awesome trade is from Obama or the Democrats who held up a trade deal with Colombia and South Korea. I guess it's better for us to shed blood with our Korean and Colombian friends than to share money.
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Mr. Kapur writes further that "[The G.O.P.] can continue to discard robust scientific theories such as evolution and global warming and instead appeal to irrationality and corporate fetishism."
I don't think a majority of Republicans disagree with evolution, only that they want evolution to be taught alongside creationism in their schools. On global warming, the scientific consensus is still out there and I'd prefer not to totally restructure our entire economy based upon the ramblings of Al Gore, who certainly isn't living his life as if there were global warming.
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On his bit about the G.O.P. rejecting intellectuals, he cites an op-ed by David Brooks, a New York Times columnist as somehow evidence for the disdain of the smart people. It reminds me of something David Brooks said when he arrived at Claremont McKenna -- that the G.O.P. had too many blogs, and not enough books. Factually, the statement just isn't true, as a more recent article in City Journal mentions. If conservatism really were so hostile to intellectuals, why do we have so many think tanks?
On the contrary, I find that it is academia that is hostile to conservatives and libertarians who have their classes shouted down and are denied tenure. But, of course, anyone who has read God & Man at Yale knows that this is an old problem, not likely to be resolved any time in the near future.
I think the best summation of Brooks' disenchantment is to see that while conservatism isn't the dunce's movement its enemies would portray it is, it certainly has its share of intellectual light weights. But what movement doesn't?
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Oh, and 90% of the country rejected the current direction of the country, not the Republican governance. It was insufficiently free market and high spending that made me disagree with the direction that the country is going in when a pollster asked me two weeks ago.
