David McElroy

Why do you hate people who disagree with you politically? Is it because you don’t want them to live in the way their ideas suggest? Or do you hate them because they want to force you to live by their rules?

You might protest that you don’t really hate your political opponents. OK. For the sake of argument, let’s grant the fiction that all of us here are kind-hearted and reasonable people. Let’s talk about other people. Why do you suppose liberals hate conservatives? Why do you suppose conservatives hate liberals? Why do you suppose everyone hates those weirdo fringe political groups? (I’m using “liberal” and “conservative” in their generally accepted public definitions here.)

There’s an underlying assumption in public debate today. The idea is that whatever rules the majority want, that’s the set of rules that should be imposed on everyone. What if we were free to live under different rules — whatever rules we chose for the people we chose to live with? What if the territory known as the United States, for instance, were more like a thousand little nations or cities or enclaves — whatever people voluntarily choose to make their property a part of?

That’s what some of us want. We want a thousand nations to bloom — instead of forcing everybody to live under the same set of rules that the monolithic majority choose.

My utopia isn’t the same as yours. There’s nothing wrong with that. I should be able to build my own or to live in someone else’s version of a perfect world. You should be able to do the same thing. There’s no reason for us to join with the shrieking talking heads and combatants on TV talk shows. We can choose to pursue something entirely different — where you and people who agree with you live your way.

It’s time to dream big about the future — and quit trying to force everyone to live life as we believe it ought to be lived.

Some people oppose the state because of the evil intentions of the people with power. I’m worried about something far worse and far more common. I’m worried about the unintended consequences of those with good intentions.

In the ’70s, pretty much everyone agreed that overpopulation was one of the top problems in the world, especially for fast-growing poor nations such as China. Trendy U.S. environmentalists such as Paul Ehrlich were saying alarming things about the inevitable mass starvation coming just any day now. In his book, “The Population Bomb,” Ehrlich made predictions which were staggeringly wrong, including this:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate….

Although Ehrlich and his apologists remain unrepentant about his repeated wrong predictions, one group of people who listened to the same argument and decided to act. The communist government of mainland China enacted a draconian law to slow down population growth — complete with propaganda posters such as the one above, exhorting the people to “implement the basic national policy.” (If you’d like to know more about “experts” such as Ehrlich and why their predictions, I recommend Dan Gardner’s book, “Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail — and Why We Believe Them Anyway.”)

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I have a confession to make. Over the last 20 years, I’ve regularly been a part of an ongoing scheme to exploit school children. If you live in a district where one of my past political clients has run for office, you’ve see the evidence. If not, I guarantee you’ve seen someone else engage in the same fraud.

So what’s the exploitive scheme? You can see Barack Obama doing his version of it here. I could show you dozens of examples of my own past clients doing it, but I won’t do that, because I don’t rat out my own clients. (When I get bought, I stay bought.) Here’s how it works.

Let’s say you’re running for a seat in your state legislature. Or mayor. Or city council. Or president. Or dog catcher. I don’t care what you’re running for, this works. Find a school with a principal or teacher who’s friendly to you. Show up there and pose for pictures of you with the students. You might do a shot such as Obama’s where you’re playing the big shot explaining the world to the kids. Or if you get younger kids, you gather several of them tightly around you and take a picture of the candidate reading to the kids. (That was one of my specialties.)

Then you plaster these warm and fuzzy pictures (or lofty and commanding pictures) of you with kids onto brochures and TV ads — and you make vague promises about how you will “work to fix schools” and that you’ll “make sure our kids get the education they deserve.” If you’re in a Republican-leaning district, you’ll make some vague promises (not too specific, of course) about more educational choice and cutting school waste. If you’re in a Democratic-leaning district, you’ll make vague promises about increasing funding, but never specific enough that anyone could accuse you of wanting to raise taxes.

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