What Are Rich People Thinking?

Whatever our peoblems are - we want to blame someone else. I just got laid off. Don;t know where my next job is coming from - in this market it could take a year. My son starts college next fall...or so he thinks. You know what - it's my problem. Not the dems.....not the neocons. I have to figure it out by myself.

I voted for Obama and I am an loyal Democrat. If I try to blame this on anyone, I am foolish and wasting my time. I would be better served getting on with my job search and finding gainful employment out there where ever it may be.

Actually, the last time I was laid off was dueing the end of GHW Bush administration - ironic. But it is not either of the President Bushes fault that I was (and am) unemployed.

Geeze people stop looking to blame someone and start making a difference!

My wife and I are clearly in the over $250K group. We voted for Obama for his stance on the environment and healthcare. Each of these areas need real, intelligent solutions. The McCain ideas don't even come close. Can't imagine continuing a war just to secure the oil industry interests. Investment in alternitive energy is essential to our future (economy, environment and national security). Obama had the right ideas about these criticla issues. We can afford to pay a bit more in taxes for a country that has a real, fair future.

A correction, please, Mr. Gross. Chris Shays was the last House Republican in New England. But Peter King's third district - representing mostly Nassau County on Long Island - is firmly east of the Hudson. And, if you want to get really technical, senators are also congressmen. The Republicans have three senators east of the Hudson.

Partisans on both sides of the artificial aisle would be more persuasive if they dumped the silly generalizations about their opponents (clue: the writer often begins with "Thats the difference between a conservative and a liberal....", followed by a claim that all virtue and reason reposes in the writer's own political camp, while the opponents are brain-dead, depraved, dishonest and/or treasonous).

We don't all even agree about what "conservative" and "liberal" mean, and the terms truly approach the absurd when they are employed as absolute categories of opinion. Putative 'conservatives' and 'liberals' don't even agree universally within their OWN respective general groups... there are plenty of self-identified conservatives who don't advocate criminalization of abortion, and liberals who believe that the Second Amendment guarantees ordinary citizens the right to bear arms.

Maybe if we stuck to the facts and policies at issue, with a little less partisan "rah-rah", and refused to be pigeon-holed by total identification with one party or the other (, we'd find some common ground, and some solutions to our problems.

Haley16 is partly right; the article is written from a "democrat's" twisted opinion of a republican's p.o.v. That is the fundamental difference between a conservative and liberal -- a liberal believes his opinions _are_ reality.

If timmins16 is correct, how much more droll. The economy suffers from loads of bad debt foisted on us by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, so let's vote the #2 recipient of donations from these corrupt quasi-government organizations to be President. Sure, that'll work.

FATJOEY has it right....

Haley16 is only partly right; the article is clearly written from a "democrat's" internal model of a republican p.o.v. That is the real difference between a conservative and a liberal -- a liberal believes his internal model _is_ reality.

Is it possible that they were in fact voting for their self interests, but in a more long term sense? i.e. people are dependent ultimately on the health of the economy overall and these people felt that since the economy appears to be heading into the septic tank, that a change in approach was needed. Sort of the trickle up effect.

new boss,same as the old boss

The article is interesting but clearly written from a republican's p.o.v., who voted for the McCain/Palin ticket. He doesn't seem to grasp that people could possibly vote socially instead of economically. I think a lot of people saw that voting economically wasn't working out for anyone (but a select few). No one benefits while watching the rest of the country suffer. Unlike the book "Whats the Matter with Kansas?" where the middle class or poor were voting against their wallets for a social agenda and essentially ruining any economic profit they could have made or held on to, the wealthier members of Connecticut seem to feel that they can stand to lose some money to taxes for the sake of the country. Maybe in the past 4 years they realized that without a country (or at least this country's economy) they have nothing. This is still the same phenomenon of having people vote for social reasons instead of for fiscal ones that was discussed in Thomas Frank's book. What Mr. Gross fails to understand is that if people get jobs and make money they will then have money to spend and kick back into the economy, but when you take away the middle class you are left with nothing. Maybe the residents of Connecticut understand that.

I think that is the fundamental difference between a conservative and a liberal--selfishness.

The article is interesting but clearly written from a republican's p.o.v., who voted for the McCain/Palin ticket. He doesn't seem to grasp that people could possibly vote socially instead of economically. I think a lot of people saw that voting economically wasn't working out for anyone (but a select few). No one benefits while watching the rest of the country suffer. Unlike the book "Whats the Matter with Kansas?" where the middle class or poor were voting against their wallets for a social agenda and essentially ruining any economic profit they could have made or held on to, the wealthier members of Connecticut seem to feel that they can stand to lose some money to taxes for the sake of the country. Maybe in the past 4 years they realized that without a country (or at least this country's economy) they have nothing. This is still the same phenomenon of having people vote for social reasons instead of for fiscal ones that was discussed in Thomas Frank's book. What Mr. Gross fails to understand is that if people get jobs and make money they will then have money to spend and kick back into the economy, but when you take away the middle class you are left with nothing. Maybe the residents of Connecticut understand that.

I think that is the fundamental difference between a conservative and a liberal--selfishness.

"Intellectuals"
Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Among the many wonders to be expected from an Obama administration, if Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times is to be believed, is ending "the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life."

He cited Adlai Stevenson, the suave and debonair governor of Illinois, who twice ran for president against Eisenhower in the 1950s, as an example of an intellectual in politics.

Intellectuals, according to Mr. Kristof, are people who are "interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity," people who "read the classics."

It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

Adlai Stevenson was certainly regarded as an intellectual by intellectuals in the 1950s. But, half a century later, facts paint a very different picture.

Historian Michael Beschloss, among others, has noted that Stevenson "could go quite happily for months or years without picking up a book." But Stevenson had the airs of an intellectual -- the form, rather than the substance.

What is more telling, form was enough to impress the intellectuals, not only then but even now, years after the facts have been revealed, though apparently not to Mr. Kristof.

That is one of many reasons why intellectuals are not taken as seriously by others as they take themselves.

As for reading the classics, President Harry Truman, whom no one thought of as an intellectual, was a voracious reader of heavyweight stuff like Thucydides and read Cicero in the original Latin. When Chief Justice Carl Vinson quoted in Latin, Truman was able to correct him.

Yet intellectuals tended to think of the unpretentious and plain-spoken Truman as little more than a country bumpkin.

Similarly, no one ever thought of President Calvin Coolidge as an intellectual. Yet Coolidge also read the classics in the White House. He read both Latin and Greek, and read Dante in the original Italian, since he spoke several languages. It was said that the taciturn Coolidge could be silent in five different languages.

The intellectual levels of politicians are just one of the many things that intellectuals have grossly misjudged for years on end.

During the 1930s, some of the leading intellectuals in America condemned our economic system and pointed to the centrally planned Soviet economy as a model-- all this at a time when literally millions of people were starving to death in the Soviet Union, from a famine in a country with some of the richest farmland in Europe and historically a large exporter of food.

New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for telling the intelligentsia what they wanted to hear-- that claims of starvation in the Ukraine were false.

After British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge reported from the Ukraine on the massive deaths from starvation there, he was ostracized after returning to England and unable to find a job.

More than half a century later, when the archives of the Soviet Union were finally opened up under Mikhail Gorbachev, it turned out that about six million people had died in that famine-- about the same number as the people killed in Hitler's Holocaust.

In the 1930s, it was the intellectuals who pooh-poohed the dangers from the rise of Hitler and urged Western disarmament.

It would be no feat to fill a big book with all the things on which intellectuals were grossly mistaken, just in the 20th century-- far more so than ordinary people.

History fully vindicates the late William F. Buckley's view that he would rather be ruled by people represented by the first 100 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard.

How have intellectuals managed to be so wrong, so often? By thinking that because they are knowledgeable-- or even expert-- within some narrow band out of the vast spectrum of human concerns, that makes them wise guides to the masses and to the rulers of the nation.

But the ignorance of Ph.D.s is still ignorance and high-IQ groupthink is still groupthink, which is the antithesis of real thinking.



Copyright © 2008 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

I would be careful assuming education and intelligence will equal the right decisions. Intelligence and education can create wrong decisions as well. They can be used incorrectly as easily as being used for the right reasons.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/105385-obama-s-half-baked-green-obsession

The well-educated understand that investing in education costs money - and without investing in education America stands to lose its edge. Elementary! Furthermore, if you can use a calculator, it doesn't take long to figure out what trillions of interest-bearing loans cost.