Everyone should have their own Board of Advisors, gained by seeking out the most knowledgeable and proven voices available in the public square. One of the great contributions of the Internet is that it elevates new voices, and it amplifies proven ones.
Thomas Sowell is such a voice. A brilliant economist and political philosopher, he is certainly on my Board of Advisors. His book Conflict of Visions is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the way one’s worldview is formed, how it drives one’s political views, and how it drives a culture & nation when embraced at large.
His insights here on Barack Obama’s candidacy (at National Review Online) are worth careful consideration.
Some key statements from the article are below, but I believe the assertion of his final sentence sums up the critical importance of intergenerational communication to pass on the historical facts and perspective we need to properly evaluate the latest-and-greatest fad in politics: “Everything seems new to those too young to remember the old and too ignorant of history to have heard about it.”
There is no reason why someone as arrogant, foolishly clever, and ultimately dangerous as Barack Obama should become president especially not at a time when the threat of international terrorists with nuclear weapons looms over 300 million Americans.
Many people seem to regard elections as occasions for venting emotions, like cheering for your favorite team or choosing a homecoming queen.
…One of the painful aspects of studying great catastrophes of the past is discovering how many times people were preoccupied with trivialities when they were teetering on the edge of doom. The demographics of the presidency are far less important than the momentous weight of responsibility that office carries.
…
Although Senator Obama has presented himself as the candidate of new things using the mantra of change endlessly the cold fact is that virtually everything he says about domestic policy is straight out of the 1960s and virtually everything he says about foreign policy is straight out of the 1930s.
Protecting criminals, attacking business, increasing government spending, promoting a sense of envy and grievance, raising taxes on people who are productive, and subsidizing those who are not all this is a re-run of the 1960s.
We paid a terrible price for such 1960s notions in the years that followed, in the form of soaring crime rates, double-digit inflation, and double-digit unemployment. During the 1960s, ghettoes across the countries were ravaged by riots from which many have not fully recovered to this day.
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