A Canadian friend of mine recent wrote and said: "liberals are opportunistic little devils; they pick up a tool, any handy convenient issue, and wield it to urge their 'cause' onward. When the tool, and by extension, the  'cause', is demonstrated to be flawed six ways to Sunday, they simply discard it and pick up another. Liberals rarely defend a wounded issue; it will lose its legs and fade to black within a few news cycles."  

 

This describe a typical liberal's myriad moral and practical disabilities to a tee. To me, it boils down to a near absence of standards, which seems of having lived their entire lives in a world where they're required to create very little of consequence.  

 

A man who builds something tangible, like a house, a bridge, a business, even a formula for a new medicine or computer program, knows very well the results of cutting corners. The thing he's built fails in obvious ways and he has to start over, often at great cost to himself, his reputation, his ability to turn a profit and continue in his chosen line of work. Failure, for people who build and who put at risk their own capital resources, is so fraught with consequences, that it compels them to do good work...

Liberals, who exists in a political environment, such as in their various taxpayer-funded roles as politicians, unionists, government workers, welfare state facilitators, etc., have no personal experience with accountability. Even when they utterly fail to achieve their social goals, fail to live within their financial means and impose damaging burdens of the productive people and institutions, they manage to skirt responsibility.

 

If their program fails it was because it was underfunded. If the pot of money available to the government is stolen or otherwise wasted, there are no consequences. The idea of "good enough for government work" wasn't created out of whole cloth, -- it was conceived after trillions of dollars of wasted resources put into the hands of government accomplished very little of what was promised.  

My Canadian friend asked me, whether Albany was actually worse than Sacramento?

 

I told him that the NYS legislature is populated with mostly awful men and women, and here's why. They might be average joes when they get elected, but once they come to Albany, the culture there changes them.

 

If they try to buck it, they're left out in the cold socially and (as a practical matter) professionally, and are given no decision-making responsibility. That is too much to bear, and changes begin to occur such that they no longer see the world as they once did, but they don't know that this has happened.

 

Pretty soon it makes perfect sense to them to enter the bazaar and to barter votes for votes, votes for campaign contributions, votes for control of pork-barrel spending back home, and votes for endorsements. And it is always the publicly funded special interests who control the most money and influence in this exchange, so when all is said and done, government spending is increased to obscene and irresponsible levels, and policy is irretrievably tilted to the liberal direction.

The ideas of the good of the whole or stewardship of public resources, and the responsibility inherent in holding pubic office all become subsidiary to their re-election and career, which is dependent upon becoming a tool of the left.

 

I may be wrong, but I have 30 years worth of observations to go on, and that's what I've concluded. The Speaker of our Assembly is on the payroll of more than one personal injury law firm in NYC, estimated to net him a million each year, in exchange for which he never argues a case in court nor acts the part of a lawyer. He simply kills all proposals to place limits on lawsuits. Tort reform, which could save the City of NY and state government and the private economy hundreds of millions per year, is always a dead letter thanks to Speaker Silver.

 

Now, if that isn't a liberal culture of corruption, what is it? I don't know if Sacramento or Trenton is worse. But I know Albany is bad enough to need disinfecting from top to bottom.