Response to The Corner

Over at NRO's Corner Ramesh and Jonah addressed my take on Thomas Geoghegan's attack on Private Accounts. In differing degrees, they feel I was too hard on Geoghegan.

To the extent that I could construct a valid argument in the direction that Geoghegan was ostensibly attempting to go (that being that it is at least theoretically possible that privitization in a given realm is not desirable when doing so would create too much of a burden on the average citizen), I can understand their sentiment. But I don't retract any of my argumentation.

Jonah touched on the sentiment that spurred me to write in the first place. As he says:

"How are conservatives going to possibly make any headway about the need for smaller government and more individual responsibility if we're prepared to stipulate that it's a respectable position to be too slothful to keep your own money and hand-it-down to your children..."

I fully agree. As a Conservative, I am fundamentally against the "nanny-state" that Geoghegan and his ilk necessarily advocate in pieces like yesterday's.

Now, were it merely a philosophical disagreement, I would not have gotten as riled up by Geoghegan's article (For example, when John Derbyshire of NR/NRO offered a similar argument, I wasn't compelled to respond even though I absolutely disagreed). But the sarcasm, personal vitriol, and utter lack of compassion to working class Americans that Geoghegan exhibited seemed to me worth responding to forcefully.

Do I lightly throw around words like "a**shole" and human slug? No. But sometimes we must call things what they truly are. Or at least what they choose to present themselves to be.