Breaking! Hell Freezes Over: NYT Columnist Admits Palin Said Something Smart!

In the article Some of Sarah Palin's Ideas Cross the Political Divide, columnist Anand Ghiridharadas makes a persuasive case that Sarah Palin's recent speech in Iowa "delivered a devastating indictment of the entire U.S. political establishment — left, right and center — and pointed toward a way of transcending the presently unbridgeable political divide."

He breaks her case down into three interlocking points:

First, that the United States is now governed by a “permanent political class,” drawn from both parties, that is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people. Second, that these Republicans and Democrats have allied with big business to mutual advantage to create what she called “corporate crony capitalism.” Third, that the real political divide in the United States may no longer be between friends and foes of Big Government, but between friends and foes of vast, remote, unaccountable institutions (both public and private).

He then goes on to describe how she supports those points in her speech, and adds what I think is a clarifying, non-partisan conclusion that freedom-loving people of many political persuasions can appreciate:

The political conversation in the United States is paralyzed by a simplistic division of labor. Democrats protect that portion of human flourishing that is threatened by big money and enhanced by government action. Republicans protect that portion of human flourishing that is threatened by big government and enhanced by the free market.

What is seldom said is that human flourishing is a complex and delicate thing, and that we needn’t choose whether government or the market jeopardizes it more, because both can threaten it at the same time.

Ms. Palin may be hinting at a new political alignment that would pit a vigorous localism against a kind of national-global institutionalism.

On one side would be those Americans who believe in the power of vast, well-developed institutions like Goldman Sachs, the Teamsters Union, General Electric, Google and the U.S. Department of Education to make the world better. On the other side would be people who believe that power, whether public or private, becomes corrupt and unresponsive the more remote and more anonymous it becomes; they would press to live in self-contained, self-governing enclaves that bear the burden of their own prosperity.

No one knows yet whether Ms. Palin will actually run for president. But she did just get more interesting.

The only nit I'd pick is that I'd disagree with the idea that "we needn't choose whether government or the market jeopardizes it more, because both can threaten it at the same time." Because what we're seeing in action isn't "the market" threatening "human flourishing," it's still government threatening it, by dint of Big Government being used as a tool of Big Business to distort markets and outcomes.

It all comes back to Big Government. Big Business by itself is very limited in the damage it can do without the active collusion of Big Government.

Thomas Sowell has been writing for years that the distorting effect of Big Government on markets through rent controls, subsidies, tax breaks, protectionist regulations and so on, is the real problem, not the actual operation of free markets themselves.

We need to retreat from a Federal government powerful enough and arrogant enough to think it can pick winners and losers with our money (Solyndra, anyone?), and return to Federal government mainly concerned with protecting our rights, our borders and our sovereignty.

Another important point in this article, is that Ghiridharadas essentially admits, in a confused and unintentional way, that everything Palin supporters have said about media bias against her is correct.

On the one hand:

"Let us begin by confessing that, if Sarah Palin surfaced to say something intelligent and wise and fresh about the present American condition, many of us would fail to hear it."

On the other hand:

"The next day, the “lamestream” media, as she calls it, played into her fantasy of it by ignoring the ideas she unfurled and dwelling almost entirely on the will-she-won’t-she question of her presidential ambitions."

Well, you know what? It's not a "fantasy" when a columnist feels the need to open his column by claiming that the idea of Palin saying something "intelligent and wise and fresh" is such a shocking idea that many columnists would fail to hear it.

Palin has always had much to say that is intelligent, wise and fresh. And the "lamestream" media has willfully ignored it in favor of savaging her with lies and distractions at every point.