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Opening Arguments

Dynamic Daniels

Columnist George Will notices Mitch Daniels and Mike Pence and wonders if Indiana represents the wave of the future:

There is more to limited government than limiting its spending, but there will be nothing limited about government unless its spending is strenuously limited.

This does not impress Torpor Indiana or Taking Down Words, another Indiana blog. I would recommend that the both of them (as well as Masson's Blog, which notes their comments), take the time to read Virginia's Postrel's insightful "The Future and its Enemies" that Daniels has taken inspiration from. She explains, among other things, why you can't build a "bridge to the future." (Because it assumes that you're going from one fixed point to another fixed point. The future isn't like that -- think of trying to cross a raging river on a raft. By the time you get to the other side, you will be at a point you cannot have imagined.)

I'm more impressed with Daniels because of the Postrel connection than anything else I've learned about him -- it shows he's a dynamist (her term). Wave of the future, indeed.

Posted in: Hoosier lore

Comments

torporific
Mon, 11/28/2005 - 5:20pm

I'll check it out even if I am sure I'll disagree with it. Thanks for the link.

Barry
Tue, 11/29/2005 - 10:49am

Nearly an immediate turn-off, that column.

To quote Will, quoting Daniels: "For example, regarding immigration, an issue that dramatizes this division, many social conservatives are restrictionists, but Daniels, whose state's population is, he says, 'getting older and not growing,' welcomes immigrants, who usually are 'young people with dreams -- a good development.'"

That is so much utter bullsh!t. The men who hijacked planes on September 11, 2001 and crashed them in Manhattan, D.C., and Penna. were "young people with dreams", too--dreams of Allah and heaven and virgin girls and pretty young boys. Do we want those "young people with dreams" here in Indiana? People are different. Arabs (of whom Mitch is one) are not the same as Mexicans are not the same as Guatemalans are not the same as Icelanders are not the same as Irish.

George Kennan, the great American early Cold War strategist, in a book he wrote near the end of his life, recalled that life on the Wisconsin frontier for his grandparents was very hard and, by modern Western standards, "underdeveloped." The settlers of Wisconsin were able to turn underdeveloped frontier into productive cities, towns & settlements because of the culture in which they participated, he said, and we ought to stop apologizing for our success. There is a reason that North America, initially settled primarily by people of English or Anglo-Celtic stock, developed and prospered while South America, Central America, and Mexico, settled primarily by people of the Iberian peninsula, stagnated in corruption. (The reason isn't racial--it's cultural.)

If we continue to replace people of northern European stock with people of non northern European stock, we will continue our decline and will very soon find ourselves living in a Third World country.

Instead of Mitch thanking northern Europeans for being tolerant enough to elect an Arab like himself as governor of our state, he sneers at us, tells us that we're dying off, and will easily be replaced by Mexicans and Guatemalans. Thanks Mitch. You're wrong. But we'll not forget the knife you've thrust in our back.

torporindy
Tue, 11/29/2005 - 7:58pm

Wow, for the record, Barry and I disagree with the article for very different reasons.

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