The Spot-On Quote Of The Week… [Updated Below]
…is awarded to Glenn Reynolds, Lord of the Lanche and proprietor of Instapundit, for his understanding that form follows function:
…The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.
Spot-on.
Giving someone a guitar, or any other instrument, does not a musician make.
Once again, Leftist thinking has shown that it is ass-backwards thinking. The Left has no clue as to what makes things like markets and culture and society work because it has no understanding of the mechanics of these things, of the underlying structures.
The whole Self-Esteem Movement was the same way: it said to the children ‘You are special. You should be proud of yourself just because you are yourself’ and other such insipid phrases. The Progressive Educators had absolutely no clue that self-esteem is something that needs to be earned and that it is a merely a marker of something else. All the Movement has achieved is to cause much anguish among it’s students when they discover that what they’ve been given is hollow and useless.
UPDATE at 1115…
Linked by Morgan Freeberg at House Of Eratosthenes, who calls Instapundit’s comments ‘Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately’. Thanks.
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