Arrogance, Unfettered

Philosopher George Santayana warned us that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Many others have said the same or similar. Most of us have heard it, most of us get it, and most of us can found countless examples that prove it.

With two caveats.

1. Those who repeat it usually do remember it.

2. History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme. -- Mark Twain

The second is the subconscious excuse that the people in the first embrace.

Consider the effort by New York Governor Kathy Hochul to ban menthol cigarettes and other flavored tobacco products. There is no way, no way that Hochul is unaware of the name Eric Garner, or the story of his death at the hands of revenuers the NYPD.

Garner died because police were tasked with clamping down on the sale of untaxed cigarettes. Because the State of New York, in its infinite wisdom, imposed a tax on cigarettes so punitive that a black market flourished. To the extent that more than half the cigarettes sold within its borders are illicit.

So, what does a properly progressive politician do?

Make the problem even worse.

Menthol cigarettes are preferred by 85% of black smokers, and 30% of menthol smokers are black. For reference, 12% of the American populace is black. The menthol ban will disproportionately affect the black community, and its enforcement will disproportionately send cops into black neighborhoods to seek out illicit cancer sticks in a state where there's already a massive illicit cancer stick market. Meaning there's already an illicit cancer stick importation, distribution, and sale network.

The obviousness of the problem-to-be is that of an eight hundred pound, hot-pink and tie-dye gorilla standing amongst a bunch of field mice. More Eric Garners will be incentivized to risk adversarial interactions with the police in order to supply people's desires, state bans notwithstanding. Prohibitionists of a progressive sort will blame the cops when such go bad, prohibitionists of a conservative sort will blame the perps for not cooperating. Neither gets the point - the ultimate blame for this harm will rest on the prohibitionists themselves, who created the conditions for these bad interactions. Interfering in consensual transactions is not the government's business, and it owns all the damage done by that interference.

This brings to mind a variant of Santayana's aphorism, one that's more accurate and sidesteps the "not remembering" mis-fit.

Learn from history or you're doomed to repeat it. -- Jesse Ventura

It still falls prey to the core of the second caveat - that politicians think they can outsmart their predecessors. That politicians are rarely the smartest people in the room makes this worse. Dunning and Kruger could not be reached for comment.

Across history, and across our landscape, there are countless examples of leaders whose arrogance was such that they figured they could get right what so many got wrong before. From prohibitions on this and that to socialistic systems of governance, the "we are the ones we have been waiting for" crowd demonstrates, time and again, that,

There is no lesson of history too obvious for politicians to ignore.

Serendipitously, a political acquaintance shared this bit in the midst of my writing.

The past is rewritten so quickly, you don't know what's going to happen yesterday -- Soviet joke

This is how they're working around the lessons of history. Change history, and people are less "armed" to point at it to warn against what is being done today.

The parallels between todays leftists and the Soviets of a century ago are astounding and horrifying. Yet, people keep voting them into office and granting them ever more power.

What truly sucks is that those people are dragging us into the messes they're creating. And blaming us, not themselves, when those messes emerge.

When the next black man suffers at the hands of a police department turned Sheriff-of-Nottingham by rapacious politicians, I will say "I told you so."