Clive Crook is an idiot
I subscribe to The Economist. I feel it’s worthwhile and I get a lot out of it. However, occasionally there are bizarre little free-market axioms. For example, they can publish a piece on how Singapore has a incredibly efficient bureaucracy and credit the bureaucrats’ unusually high salaries for that efficiency in one breath and later on damn American teachers’ unions for keeping salaries above some undefined ‘market value’ in another.
Their anonymous bylines let this happen, since you never know who wrote what piece. For a long time, Clive Crook, blogger for the Atlantic, was deputy editor of The Economist. His blog is a fascinating insight into how editors at The Economist can rework complex events to fit a narrow-minded free-market ideology. He also makes remarkably strange, or hopefully disingenuous observations:
Isn’t it strange that everybody who thinks Obamacare is good policy is sure the reform is constitutional, and everybody who thinks it’s bad policy is sure it isn’t? If you aren’t puzzled by that, I think you should be.
I’m not puzzled by that because I haven’t been living under a rock in Northumberland for the last twenty-five years as I can only assume Crook has. It is confusing if you believe that there is one right way to interpret the Constitution that is magically bestowed upon graduates of prestigious law schools. It’s not puzzling at all if you realize that members of the Supreme Court - like everyone in the country - simply decides if they like a certain policy or law and then searches out supporting material accordingly.
This should not be news unless you are a very small or very ignorant child. The commenters over on the blog have been taking Crook to task over that first sentence, but the part that makes Crook’s blog required reading is what I’ve outlined above: not only is his premise highly questionable, thereby invalidating his entire theory, but it does not even hold up under its own internal logic (Crook is surprised that human beings - shocker coming - sometimes say something that is not perfectly true).
Crook is that remarkably dense kid you knew in high school who somehow got straight As. You assumed college would even everything out - that s/he couldn’t game the system forever - then you run into them at a 15-year reunion and their the VP of a Fortune 500 company and as incompetent as you remember them.
