Patriot Politics

Cass Sunstein, another Obama czar, is poised to take the helm at the Office of Budget and Management as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.  Is that title going to fit on a business card, or is it lifted from a list of acceptable socialist agencies?   We can all be relieved, though, that Cass must be eminently qualified.  He sure is an expert on a lot of stuff:

Cass thinks being an individual is too confusing and “pernicious” for most of us.  Of course the government is in a better position to decide what’s best:

Much of the time, the United States seems to have embraced a confused and pernicious form of individualism. This approach endorses rights of private property and freedom of contract, and respects political liberty, but claims to distrust “government intervention” and insists that people must fend for themselves. This form of so-called individualism is incoherent, a tangle of confusions. – Cass R. Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need it More Than Ever, Basic Books, New York, 2004, p. 3

Cass doesn’t think our money is ours.  It’s only ours through divine-like distribution achieved with bureaucratic oversight.  Why, it’s only through the benevolence of the government that we have any personal money at all:

“In what sense in the money in our pockets and bank accounts fully ‘ours’? Did we earn it by our own autonomous efforts? Could we have inherited it without the assistance of probate courts? Do we save it without the support of bank regulators? Could we spend it if there were no public officials to coordinate the efforts and pool the resources of the community in which we live?… Without taxes there would be no liberty. Without taxes there would be no property. Without taxes, few of us would have any assets worth defending. [It is] a dim fiction that some people enjoy and exercise their rights without placing any burden whatsoever on the public fisc. … There is no liberty without dependency. That is why we should celebrate tax day …” – Cass R. Sunstein, “Why We Should Celebrate Paying Taxes,” The Chicago Tribune, April 14, 1999

And of course, Cass is the better to decide what you see, hear, and speak, whether it’s on the internet, the radio, or perhaps even at your dinner table:

A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government.

–Cass Sunstein, arguing for a Fairness Doctrine for the Internet in his book, Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton University Press, 2007), p.137

Cass thinks that unfettered access to the Internet can lead only to what he calls cyberbalkanization – by which groups of like-minded individuals self-restrict into their own private communications echo chambers.  So he wants to make sure everyone gets a balanced look at things by imposing the balance.

Cass wants us to know that

People often make poor choices – and look back at them with bafflement! We do this because as human beings, we all are susceptible to a wide array of routine biases that can lead to an equally wide array of embarrassing blunders in education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, happiness, and even the planet itself. – from Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness

In Nudge, a book he co-authored with Richard Thaler, Wikipedia reports he suggests it is better to attempt positive change by giving the choice of good behavior (nudging) rather than by sanctions against bad behavior.  We’re all toddlers now and the government is our mommy.

It’s getting so that we’ve got to look under the Cabinet’s Aubusson to get to the dirty tier of appointments underneath.

Did you know that Cass Sunstein is married to Samantha Power ?  Yep, that ole Samantha, who thinks Hillary Clinton is a “monster.”  Maybe it takes living with one to know one, eh?

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