Illustrated Reminders About Creeping Government Control, Courtesy 1952

bohn-socialism-communism-democrats-obama

I think I stumbled across these on some jaded advertising blog, where they were tee-heeing over the idea that individual entitlements might be a sop for broader government centralization. A predictably disapprobative academic article identifies the bottom one as having been published in the Saturday Evening Post on April 12, 1952, part of the “propagandist war waged” by greedy corporations “in defense of the citadel of capitalism.” They’re both probably a little over-dramatic but they’re still presented as evidence that – really, kids – there was a time when having a soft Fabian in the White House would have been kind of a big deal.

Of course there was also time when a White House had to display a minimum of intellectual consistency and honesty. If the President had just sneeringly mocked concerned citizens while his mouth-breathing cultists insisted you’d have to be a total fucking idiot to think he was raising taxes – all this coming after a year of studious journalistic quiescence on the issue – the White House wouldn’t follow up by watering down its no-taxes pledge. Or if the entirety of the left had just spent a year gratingly insisting that only a shameless lying nutjob would suggest that health care rationing was coming, the OMB Director wouldn’t be gaming out how health care rationing is going to take hold.

And yet Obama’s still petulantly whining about all that information out there, along with X-Boxes or Pacman or kids on his lawn or whatever. Though – credit for consistency where it’s due – too much information is at least one problem he seems personally committed to solving. Epistemic closure indeed.