Thomas Sowell discusses the housing boom and bust — and the political reaction:
[W]hat we’ve seen in these past few months is an exercise in unprecedented powers. I mean, to fire the chairman of General Motors, to tell credit card companies how they should run their business, tell GM what kind of cars it should be making, and there’s no sign of an end in sight yet. Obama’s policies are a work in progress. So a lot depends on how far he will push, but I see no signs of him turning back. I see no substantial resistance in Congress. But you never know, as things start to unfold voices of sanity may prevail.
[...]
The presumption that Obama knows how all these industries ought to be operating better than people who have spent lives in those industries, and a general cockiness going back till before he was president, and the fact that he has no experience whatever in managing anything. Only someone who has never had the responsibility for managing anything could believe he could manage just about everything.
Shannon Love cites Sowell and declares that Leftism is defined by its hubris.
Bill Waddell adds that he’s become convinced that a liberal is someone whose education stops when they leave a college campus; while a conservative’s education begins at that point.
Historian Robert Conquest stated his own law that everyone is a conservative about the things he knows best.
Of course, nowadays “true” conservatives — the ones without hubris, etc. — seem about as common as unicorns in these parts.