Class Warfare

Zendo Deb at TFS Magnum is on a roll, with domestic and foreign examples of government screw-ups, to go with the recent ones here:

Common sense protections are one thing, but spending 13 hours on paperwork to follow a suspect?

We've all heard the passive voice defense from some Gov flack: Mistakes were made. So why does the government and its supporters on the left tolerate repeated government screw-ups?. Deb offers a suggestion:

They don't want to stop crime. They want to stop police, so the population will be in fear. Scared, unarmed, helpless - defines both sheep and the average citizen of the UK.

Or Washington DC, or Chicago, or Orange County California. We can extend this to areas other than policing - look at the ridiculous Rules Of Engagement that hobble our guys in Iraq.

But again, why would they want this? It's not that they want to stop the police per se. Rather, it's a power grab by the intellectual class. Class warfare. Consider:

The intellectual class in this country at least are the highly educated ones: doctors, lawyers, teachers, journalists. All of these have two things in common. Firstly, they were all the smartest kids in their class. Not the strongest, or fastest, or most entrepreneurial. They got the best grades, by fitting into the mold of the intellectual class.

Secondly, and most importantly, they got ahead not through individual one-on-one confrontation, but by using the power structures of the intellectual class to their advantage. Now they're entrenched at all levels of the government (lawyers), schools (teachers), and media (journalists), using the power of these institutions to get ahead.

Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), try to extend this to international relations. The entire European Union is the European intellectual class writ large, in a very real and legally binding sense. No wonder lefty intellectuals say we should be more like Europe.

They use this power by setting up rules and regulations. Complicated rules and regulations, that someone outside the power structure will be unlikely to navigate successfully. If these rules don't work, they'll add new rules. If those don't work, they'll add more. Eventually, they tie everyone else in enough knots that they win, just like in Middle School. The rules, of course, are not enforced against members of the intellectual class ....

Say Uncle has a good post on cops, and how most of them are (surprise!) regular, decent guys. He doesn't go far enough - the cops are trapped between trying to do a good job, keeping everyone safe, and their bosses - members of an intellectual class that hates their guts.

Well, maybe that's too strong, but the intellectual class doesn't trust them worth a darn. And I think that this explains why things are often set up to guarantee FAIL, like in Deb's examples. The UK.Gov simply doesn't want competent, autonomous policing, because that would be control exercised by someone other than the intellectual class.

So the real question to ask when you see one of the monumental screw-ups is not whether the folks in charge are idiots, because they're not. It's not even whether they want this outcome, because they don't. The right question is whether they are willing to grant control to people who can make things better. The answer to that is "no" unless the people under consideration are part of the intellectual class.

The following groups are not part of the intellectual class, and continually labor against suspicion from them: police, military, small businesses, anyone in favor of smaller government or the second amendment. These groups will never get the benefit of the doubt from the press, or government, or courts, because they're outsiders.