Angry, middle-aged billionaire Peter Thiel has a column up in the Washington Post that is remarkable for both its incoherence and lack of substance. Briefly, he advocates the election of Donald Trump so that we Americans can have a universal health care system that works, dadgumit, just like the one in Canada. And it won’t cost an arm and a leg neither! Know why? Because when someone screws up, we’ll just tell him “You’re fired!”
Thiel cherry picks examples with all the innocence of a college freshman: If it proves my point, it must be true! In World War II, we built the atomic bomb in three years! Now we can’t build a jet fighter in 20! In 1975, the DC Metro was a “marvel”! Now it stinks! In the Republican primary, Jeb Bush spent a ton of money and Donald Trump spent nothing, and Trump won! Case closed!
I am second to none in my contempt for the F-35 “Hanger Queen”, which Thiel so justly ridicules, but he doesn’t understand that he’s comparing apples and oranges. The atomic bomb was built to save Western Civilization from Adolph Hitler; the F-35 is being built to save the military-industrial complex from being tossed in the dustbin of history with the Cold War, where it belongs. The purpose of the F-35 isn’t to shoot down enemy planes. The purpose of the F-35 is to spend money, and it’s fulfilling that purpose to perfection.
Thiel is stunned to learn that the DC Metro’s escalators and ticket machines don’t always work.1 Was he around back in 2008, when America’s financial machine didn’t work? At all? And had to be bailed out with trillions of interest-free loans from Uncle All-Thumbs?
Worst of all, Mr. Thiel concludes his dismissal of Metro with the following, stunningly gratuitous sneer: “[Metro] might have been secretly relieved last month when one of its own became the first U.S. law enforcement officer charged with supporting the Islamic State: At least foreign subversion would supply a satisfying explanation for the system’s failures.” If two terrorists met via Facebook, and bought a gun using PayPal, could we conclude that “Peter Thiel hates America”?
It’s “interesting” that you can be smart enough to make billions and still argue public policy on the basis of talking points picked up by watching fifteen minutes of “Fox and Friends”.
- I acknowledge that, to a significant extent, Metro, like bombers B-1, 2, and 3, and the F-35, is a job-creation, rather than a people-moving, machine. Unlike the Air Force’s babies, however, it does more than merely spend the taxpayers’ money. ↩︎
