I won't go on a rant...

...because Mark Steyn has handled the job for me.

I especially want to emphasize this quote, which goes to the heart of one of my two deepest complaints about the kind of liberalism that some of my good friends (I know from the best of intentions) espouse:

The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death.

And no, I don't think that's exaggeration; I've been willing for decades to argue that environmentalism kills people, and that Western environmentalism reduces to rich Westerners protecting their preferred forms of recreation at horrific human cost to the Third World. It's pretty simple economics, at least for those of us who have figured out that Marx was, you know, a flaming-butted moron.

My two deepest complaints with progressivism as a philosophy (as opposed to progressives themselves as individuals) are:

1. The means (government-sponsored violence against those who have dared merely to think that progressives are wrong, or even that progressives have good goals but very silly ideas about how to achieve them) are evil, and therefore not justified by the ends.

2. The means, being predicated on progressives' thorough and apparently incurable ignorance of economic law, are consistently counterproductive, and therefore should be rejected on grounds of simple prudence even if they weren't to be rejected on moral grounds. (You are never so completely and utterly and comprehensively screwed as when a progressive shows up with a government program with which he intends to help you.)

Having said this, I think it necessary to specify explictly that my friends who are committed to means that I think are evil, certainly are not deliberately using evil means, since they do not themselves see any problem in their methods (except of course when those methods are used by Republicans). I do not consider them evil, merely suffering from moral confusion.

Also, I'm just firing off a here's-how-I-feel emotive piece, not starting a debate. I know my friends think I'm wrong on both my objections. And I think they're wrong right back. And I don't have the time to wage a full-scale debate on economic and political philosophy that won't change anybody's mind anyway. So perhaps the thing to do is cheerfully to buy each other a couple of beers and watch the NBA playoffs.