From Jacob Hornberger at Reason magazine:
"Notwithstanding slavery and other violations of liberty, our American ancestors brought into existence the freest society in history."
So... let's get this straight: if you ignore the hideous crime of slavery, our ancestors created the freest society in history.
That's fascinating. If you ignore the national debt, we've created the debt-freest society in history. If you ignore the crime rate - if you simply exclude every victim and perpetrator of a crime from your statistics - we've created the most crime-free society in history!
And this tool writes for a magazine called Reason?
Excluding data that disproves your theory is a no-no in science and logic. You can quite literally prove anything if you cherry-pick your data hard enough. Normally con men try to hide the fact that they've massaged the data, so as to make their case more compelling. But Hornberger tells us right up front, as if he doesn't know it's wrong. As if he doesn't expect his complete abandonment of logic to be a problem for his audience.
Because, of course, it won't be. Ignorance has become the new wisdom, at least for the Tea Party crowd, that prides itself on avoiding the poison of book-larnin'. If it makes a pointy-headed white-coated intellectual annoyed, why, you must be doing it right!
Hornberger goes on to argue that we should somehow re-create the glorious freedom of 1880 while preserving the civil rights granted to women and minorities since then. Hornberger appears unable to grasp that we got here from there for a reason; that it seems likely that the problems we face today are a result of the solutions we applied yesterday. In Hornberger's magical world, all social policies are ala cart; you can pick and choose at will, because none of them are interrelated. Just like "taxes" and "deficit": they're unrelated policies, and neolibtearians seem perpetually confused that Americans don't simply choose to have neither.
It all reminds me of "The Secret;" if you keep thinking about a deficit, why of course you'll attract one! You need to think positive thoughts and ignore the negative energy, and everything will work out fine!