The liberal-progressive faith relies on inculcating a belief in an omniscient, benevolent and just government god, so it's heartening to watch progressives systematically destroy that faith in their own deity (particularly among the young), as polling data now show. Pondering how the IRS scandals (which occurred entirely on Obama's watch) have destroyed public confidence in the government agency, Peggy Noonan writes:
One irony here is that the Obama White House, always keen to increase the reach and power of government, also seems profoundly disinterested in good governing. It is strange. The long-term project of liberalism involves encouraging the idea of faith in government as a bringer or guarantor of greater justice. But who needs more government if government works so very badly, and is in its operations unjust?Recalling Stein's Law in economics—If something cannot go on forever, it will stop—Charles Krauthammer writes:
Detroit, for example, can no longer go on borrowing, spending, raising taxes and dangerously cutting such essential services as street lighting and police protection. So it stops. It goes bust.Dan Mitchell, in Atlas Shrugs in Detroit, argues:
Cause of death? Corruption, both legal and illegal, plus a classic case of reactionary liberalism in which the governing Democrats — there’s been no Republican mayor in half a century — simply refused to adapt to the straitened economic circumstances that followed the post-World War II auto boom.
