The Incompetence of Leftist Ideology

Kevin Wade and Fay Voshell:

Competence is the ability to get things done. The word itself has no particular value judgment attached to it.

Many perfectly intelligent people have been labeled “incompetent,” particularly by conservatives, when actually they are or have been quite competent — at achieving disasters.  We have such a person sitting in the White House — quite intelligent, but committed to disastrous ideology. Our present administration is not incompetent in the way its officials go about achieving their goals, using as they do the incredible powers of bureaucracy and executive orders to bypass Congress and override the Constitution. They are perfectly competent in promoting and putting their toxically incompetent leftist ideology into effect.

To put it another way, people who are competent at creating disasters are not necessarily dimwitted, though some are. The problem is not their stupidity. The problem is that their core ideas about how the world works are wrong. If their basic ideas are wrong, everything else goes wrong.

History abounds with cases of bright people who have been zealously committed to wrong ideas they were expert in putting into action.

Trofim Lysenko was an intelligent Russian peasant who rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of agricultural Lamarckianism. He manipulated the scientific method in order it fit into Soviet communist ideology. Political ideology dictated his agricultural methods, with disastrous results that lingered for decades. German race theorists were bright people, but they were committed to a “science” of race glorifying Aryans and denigrating the rest of humanity. We all know how those race theorists’ ideas turned out. Today’s global warmists are not stupid people, but they go beyond the limits of scientific method, endorsing instead what is basically deluded apocalyptic prophecy. Chairman Mao Zedong’s idea to have citizens smelt iron in their backyards was ineffably stupid, but he himself was a cunning and savvy manipulator who got appalling things done with remarkable efficiency.

It is not hard to find examples of how things have gone wrong because of bad ideas now in ascendency in Washington. A complete list would fill a book, but a random list could include the incompetence of the ObamaCare website and the ACA in general; the incredible expense of trafficking alien children around the U.S. versus the cost of returning them to their own villages; the nonstop printing of trillions and trillions of dollars; the appalling waste and improper payments in Medicare and Medicaid; the corruption of the Food Stamp program and the misuse of the Social Security disabilities program.

The competence to wreak havoc extends to whole nations, which can be completely run into the ground because defective ideology is effectively employed by a bunch of zealous, bright people who are wholeheartedly committed to bad ideas.

As Panos Mourdoukoutas noted in Forbes magazine, recent economic troubles in Greece have been due almost solely to bad ideas put into practice by competent ideologues whose business model very effectively produced economic and societal catastrophe:

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