A Fitting Eulogy

I'm still surprised that I cannot work up at least some fake nicey-nice for Senator Kennedy. But I can't. Read the Michael Kelly GQ piece I linked to in a comment.

Besides tirelessly advocating for collectivism, he had an intrinsic cruelty. We saw it directed against George W. Bush, after he had bent over backwards to accommodate and credit Kennedy for No Child Left Behind. We saw it against Judge Robert Bork as Brother br reminded. But the patrician, aristocratic assumption that everybody poorer or less powerful than he was there for his own personal amusement is unforgivable.

He's the great sage of NOW and NARAL for his abortion advocacy, but appears to think little of molesting, mistreating (killing?) women. Nope, he's a right bastard -- I could not wish the pain on anyone, but I am glad he is dead before he can transfer more liberty from me to him and his well connected friends.

Sorry to go on, I really have discovered darkness in my heart that I was not aware of.

Nick Gillespie gives a more nuanced if only slightly more positive evaluation. I like the title/subtitle of his Reason piece: "Ted Kennedy and the Death (Hopefully) of an Era. The controversial senator belonged to a different age, one ill-suited to today's increasingly decentralized world."

Bigger was better, and government at every level but especially at the highest level, had to lead the way. In an increasingly flat, dispersed, networked world in which power, information, knowledge, purchasing power, and more was rapidly decentralizing, Kennedy was all for sitting at the top of a pyramid and directing activity. In this way, he was of his time and place, a post-war America that figured that all the kinks of everyday life had been mastered by a few experts in government, business, and culture. All you needed to do was have the right guys twirling the dials up and down. As thoughtful observers of all political stripes have noted, this sort of thinking was at best delusional, at worst destructive. And it was always massively expensive.

Consider No Child Left Behind. In the guise of giving students and parents the ability to opt out of objectively failing schools, it instead ramped up federal education spending (by more than 40 percent) to unprecedented levels; additionally, it has imposed significant costs on state and local budgets. More than that, it has mired public education in even more bureaucratic rigaramole. At the same time, it has accomplished nothing toward its stated goal of "closing the achievement gap" between lower-income minorities and white students. Something similar holds for the Americans with Disabilities Act, whose passage created vast new legal and governmental procedures that have impacted virtually every aspect of American life, all without actually increasing the income or workforce participation rates of the disabled. The Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit, another law in which Kennedy played a major role, is the very definition of an explosively expensive government boondoggle that shuffled tax dollars from the relatively young and poor to the relatively old and wealthy.

Posted by John Kranz at August 27, 2009 12:10 PM