Rush Limbaugh and Databasing

I keep thinking of things to put in this blog and I keep not having time to write them up.

In a twist of thought, driving to work today listening to the Obama show, I mean NPR, I thought of something Rush Limbaugh said on his TV show over a decade ago late one night when I had gotten home from my summer job bartending and was flipping channels. He started out by talking about how people are idiots and went into a diatribe for like five minutes on it. He then observed that if you were really conservative, you could not believe that, on the whole, people were idiots. If you did, then you had to believe they needed government to take care of them. Since conservatives believed in keeping government out of your life, they had to also believe that if left alone, people could care for themselves.

That comment has stuck with me for a long time as one of the only “smart” things Rush ever said. It’s like an itch I can’t quite scratch. I am pretty misanthropic. People are cattle and the herd is dumb. They will act selfishly and short sighted and are quite capable of happily running off the cliff and then wondering how they ended up falling (and looking for someone else to blame while they are at it; those damn greedy cliffs). I also believe that government should be small, cheap, and not intrusive. This sets up a bit of a conundrum as you see. How can one believe that people are dumb but not believe they need to be taken care of?

Of late, I have been thinking of something my father said to me. He observed that he was glad he lived south of the (Missouri) River because he felt when he went north of it the society became much more sharply divided between the haves and the have-nots. As a student of history, I know that it was the rise of the middle class that made the Industrial Revolution happen and propelled Western society, particularly England, to dominance. A strong middle class makes for a strong and ultimately wealthy society. Logically, then the whole is better off if the middle class profits and when things begin to get to sharply divided they need to be… corrected. Keep that in mind.

Back to Rush’s syllogism: Today it occurred to me that the piece of the logic that was assumed but unsaid is that if people are too dumb to look out for themselves competently then it falls to others to do it for them. I’m not sure I agree with that. To some extent, redistribution of wealth from the upper tier to the rest of the society creates a strong middle class. That should be good, right? Maybe. In the Industrial Revolution, the middle class became strong because it worked to become so. If wealth is redistributed via taxes, then the growth of the middle class is artificial. It may strengthen the society or it may weaken it as the society is trained that it is entitled to unearned income. From an incentive point of view it really sucks; you “punish” those who are the most productive part of society so you can support the least productive parts. The bottom’s incentive to improve is lessened while the tops incentive to keep producing is also lessened.

Viewed in Darwinistic terms, if you have people who cannot “make it” on their own and need to be “assisted” to survive, and you support them with the surplus created by those who can clearly “make it,” you are acting counter to evolution. You are introducing an element into your society which in good times you can afford to carry, but when the lean times come may create the difference between survival and extinction. You are, in essence, breading in weakness by creating a parasite. So, if as Rush said, you believe people are dumb, maybe the answer is to let them be dumb and see if they survive.


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My other project is programming a database on my iPhone using the HanDBase program. I’m learning a lot and I almost have my beta ready to go.