I’m not boasting when I say that I move in very rarefied circles. It’s a fact that became glaringly obvious to me today when I started reaching out to legal colleagues via LinkedIn. I’m launching a new business enterprise, and those connections will be useful.
For those unfamiliar with it, LinkedIn is the professional equivalent of Facebook. Rather than chit-chatting about children, sports, and the minutiae of their lives, people use LinkedIn to post their resumes, boast about their professional accomplishments, and network with other professionals to whom they can be useful or who can be useful to them. So, as I said, I’m working on using LinkedIn to touch base with lawyers I’ve met over the years, whether high school classmates who went into law, law school classmates, professional colleagues, or people whom I’ve met through PTA and the neighborhood who also happen to be lawyers.
As with Facebook, LinkedIn examines your friends’ friends and, if two of them share a common friend, LinkedIn will suggest that person to you as a possible link in your own professional network. This is where I get to the rarefied bit. When I scroll through my LinkedIn contacts (who currently number less than 100, because I’ve never paid that much attention to cultivating these contacts), I get suggestions that run the gamut from high stratum A to rarefied stratum B: ambassadors, corporate CEOs, senior counsel at major corporations, managing partners of huge law firms, etc. In my circles, these titles are predominant amongst the various professional friendships LinkedIn identifies for me. I
What interests me so much about these people is that I know for a fact as to most, and can reasonably guess as to the remainder, that they voted for Obama and, within their own states, counties, and cities, also voted for the most Democrat and Progressive (although not Green) candidates. This milieu — rich in degrees, Ivy League diplomas, and money — is disproportionately Leftist in orientation. If you ask them about their political beliefs, they will say that it’s because they’re smart and educated, implying that brilliant mines inevitably embrace Progressivism.
I see things differently, of course. All of these people are products of America’s colleges, universities, and professional schools, not to mention fine high schools, both public and private, in nice neighborhoods and suburbs. All of these schools lean Left or have simply stopped leaning and collapsed completely on the Leftist side of education.
So these smart people are right that there’s an inevitability here, but it’s not that the logical output of a brilliant mind is Leftism. Education certainly matters, but not in the way they think. The fact is that, if you’re academically smart, you’re more likely to graduate from high school, attend college, and even attend professional school. In other words, the smarter you are, the longer your exposure to Leftist academic thought will be. These high earning, upper echelon people didn’t embrace Leftism because their intellectual analysis inexorably led them to it. Instead, they embraced Leftism because their smarts mean they’ve been steeped in the Leftist stew for infinitely longer than the average American who didn’t go on to a higher degree.
These same people also remind me that academic smarts do not correlate with real life intelligence. I have no doubt that these people are good lawyers, doctors, CEOs, ambassadors, etc. What they’re trained to do, they do well. Outside of their sphere of expertise, however, they’re remarkably naive and intellectually incurious.
Here’s my example for today: In the wake of the election, I’ve heard five Obama supporters — all of whom also voted for all the California Democrats and for all the California taxes — complain that their taxes are going up next year. The cognitive dissonance is almost painful. All of them consistently embrace big spending — and, therefore Obama and his fellow Democrats — because they’ve been trained to believe that the spending on welfare, entitlements, and “select” businesses is a “good thing.” This is a knee jerk belief. They will always vote for these “good things,” and for the candidate who promises them. And they will ignore the rhetoric about higher taxes (Obama was not shy about targeting them as the next big source of funding), and they will ignore fiscal cliffs, and they will ignore plain old common sense that says that someone must pay the piper.
One of the things that made the rounds on my Facebook was a boastful poster saying that those states with the highest number of college-educated people all went for Obama. The implication is that these smart Blue State people, unlike the ill-educated yahoos in Red States, are the ones who have the brains and ability to understand how Obamanomics will serve America.
What the genius who created this poster missed the fact that these smart Blue States are, not coincidentally, almost all broke. Thus, of the list above, the following Blue States are amongst those states running the biggest budget shortfalls in America: Virginia, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Hampshire, and Minnesota. In other words, 80% of the “best educated” states are in dire financial straights. You’d think that, with all those smart people, they’d be rolling in the green stuff.
It turns out that one of the biggest indicators of Blue state-ness isn’t smarts — it’s brokes. Here’s the list of the states Obama won, with the ones that have more than a 10% budget shortfall marked, appropriately enough, in red:*
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
Florida
Hawaii
Illinois
Iowa
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
Ohio
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
Wisconsin
It’s striking that, of the 26 states that gave their electoral votes to Obama, 84% are in debt. (The perpetually broke District of Columbia also gave its vote to Obama, raising to 85% the number of broke jurisdictions that went true blue.) You’d think that, with all those smart people floating around, they’d manage their money better. In a way, you could say that the Blue States are actually Red States, given their financial hemorrhaging.
By the way, given that we’re still in a recession, it’s true that many Red States are also in debt. Still, there’s no doubt that the Red States are managing their money better than the ones filled with all those educated Progressive geniuses:
Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
Georgia
Idaho
Indiana
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
North Carolina
North Dakota
Oklahoma
South Carolina
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
West Virginia
Wyoming
As you can see, only 41% of the “dumb” Red States are seriously in the red. They may not have the degrees, but they have sufficient smarts to control their budgets — which is the fundamental responsibility of all viable governments.
If the election is any indicator, it shows that our education system leaves people incapable of rational economic thought. This is true even when these same educated people are the ones most hurt by their economic ignorance and Leftist credulity.
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*I culled the state deficit information from here.