THE POWER OF POLICY WONKS AND YOU

I don't know about you, but I woke up one day, some undetermined moment a few years ago, and suddenly found myself in a country that is being run by an overabundance of rules put in place by unrecognizable leaders in our government.  By unrecognizable, I mean people with whom I can't relate.  By that I mean, people with which I have nothing in common.  I look at Nancy Pelosi and wonder, how in the world did that woman land a position representing any American?  I look at Barney Frank and wonder, who votes for this guy?  I look at Obama and ask myself, from where is he getting these policy ideas that very few people in America either want or like?  Our unrecognizable government has become a polit-bureau of people who seem so far out of the American experience that I can't help but ask the silly question, "What planet are these people from?"

We are experiencing a disconnect with our government like I have never seen.  Angelo Codevilla addressed this in a recent essay on "America's Ruling Class."   This power struggle between the people and the government has everything to do with an ideology of power not compatible with practicality.   People are generally practical.  Yes, a few times in someone's life someone might take a flyer of extravagance, but most people are mostly practical.  Yet our government servants are living on an extravagance of power and foolishness the likes of which, over time, has put the practical masses so far under water (14 trillion USD) we are drowning in arbitrary laws and unfathomable debt, laws and debt placed upon us by people who will never suffer the consequences of same.  The struggle is about power, i.e. the individual vs. the ruling class.  I add to that, the underlying struggle is the ideology of power and how to attain it.  And that ideology is being thrust upon us by policy wonks who are anti-American, foreign, globalist, and greedy in nature and thought. 

Practical people don't sit around in think tanks worrying about ideology.  That is not to say that practical people don't have a view of the "big picture" or that they don't care about philosophies of life.  Practical people can and do grasp abstract problems, social dynamics, and understand the implications of power.  However, practical people make useful things, solve everyday problems, and do what they need to do to survive.  Conversely, policy wonks use their time looking at statistics, discussing utopian outcomes, and find reasons to manipulate the practical people.  Policy wonks are micro-managers who wish to micro-manage you for the sake of their own power.

Cass Sunstein, for instance, is a great example of a micro-managing policy wonk.  Sunstein is Obama's Czar of Information and Regulatory Affairs.  (This is a new arm of the executive branch that Obama has created to give himself more power over the American people.  Obama's Czars are not accountable to the people, but are arms of an ever imposing executive branch of government.)  Sunstein, who has a law degree, has spent his entire life in the legal profession, academia and government positions.  He has co-authored books which describe his ideological philosophies and recommendations for the implementation of those philosophies.  

According to Wikepedia: 

Sunstein co-authored Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and HappinessRichard Thaler of the University of Chicago. Nudge discusses how public and private organizations can help people make better choices in their daily lives. Thaler and Sunstein argue that (Yale University Press, 2008) with economist

People often make poor choices – and look back at them with bafflement! We do this because as human beings, we all are susceptible to a wide array of routine biases that can lead to an equally wide array of embarrassing blunders in education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, happiness, and even the planet itself.

In other words, Mr. Sunstein believes that institutions of governance should "Nudge" you into choices regarding your everyday life.  Now that he is in charge of Information and Regulations, he has the power to do just that.  ("Nudge" is just a nice word for force, by the way.)  Looking at the categories above in which he wishes to "Nudge" the people,  I almost broke out laughing.  He suggests government can better regulate our choices in those categories, while in reality our government education system is failing, government finance is corrupt and crumbling, health care is imploding under Obama, mortgages under Fannie and Freddie have bankrupted our government, and he wants credit regulations for the people while the government borrows 14 trillion USD.  Who is he kidding?  Would you take advice from people who created that mess?  He wants the government to micromanage the people's choices without the people's consent.  He isn't kidding.  While he says that we are all susceptible to routine biases, Mr. Sunstein's own personal biases are O.K. to force onto everyone else.  This is what Obama's "change" was about, i.e. ideologues, policy wonks, telling you how to live and taking the power out of the hands of the practical people, out of the hands of Americans, out of the hands of the voters.  A new slave class made up of middle class practical Americans is upon us, brought to us by policy wonks hired by Barack Obama.  You see he likes slavery as long as it empowers him and his policy wonks. 

There isn't anything historically great or new about Obama and his policy wonks.   His policies are entirely based on creating centralized power and nothing to do with practical reality.  Today, practical people are being forced to follow impractical policies put in place by ideological policy wonks, i.e. Codevilla's Ruling Class.  (Example A: Banks, forced by government, into high risk loans to satisfy social engineering brought to you by policy wonks. Example B: Car companies, forced by government, into manufacturing $40,000.00 cars that travel 40 miles on a battery charge.  Example C: Windmills, pushed by government policies, which use more energy to create than they produce.) This is upside-down and backwards from the American dream and the U.S. Constitution.  The next time you see a policy wonk, tell him or her to have a glass of wine and go hang out with bohemians musing the meaning of life somewhere on a tropical island, maybe Cuba, preferably outside of the United States.... and leave the rest of us, practical Americans, alone.