Friday afternoon Rush Limbaugh took a call from a conservative teenager who wanted to know how to help his generation “realize what’s happening in our nation.” Rush offered some thoughts, beginning with this:

Liberalism is so easy.  All you have to do is see some suffering and tell everybody that you see it, and that it really bothers you. Right there, you are given great credit for having great compassion, and people will say great things about you.  All you have to do is notice it.  You don’t have to offer a solution.  If you do offer a solution, say, “The government ought to do something,” then they’ll really, really love you. Liberalism’s easy. 

That’s why a lot of people end up going there, is no resistance to it. It doesn’t take any kind of thought because it’s all based in emotion, and thinking is harder than feeling.  Thinking’s an applied process. 

That’s a good point. It is indeed easy to see a problem and say “the government ought to do something.” People don’t make enough money? Raise the minimum wage. Don’t think about what the effects of that might be. Or just increase welfare. And again, don’t think through the long-term effects. IBM is too big? Break it up, even as new competition is about to leave IBM in the dust. Part of the problem here is taking a snapshot view of the world – which at any point will be full of inefficiencies and inequalities— rather than a dynamic view. The world is constantly changing. Economic growth is a process. Things that are first bought only by the rich become cheaper and more available to the middle class and then to everyone. And centralized, compulsory “solutions” to immediate problems may impede growth, improvement, and progress.

But Rush might have mentioned that sometimes “conservatism” is easy, too. All you have to do is see a problem and demand a government program. Some people get in trouble with drugs? Ban ’em. The Middle East is in chaos? Bomb some more countries. Russia is assertive? Stand up to ’em! “It doesn’t take any kind of thought because it’s all based in emotion, and thinking is harder than feeling.  Thinking’s an applied process.” And when you think about it, you might realize that prohibition introduces all sorts of new problems, that the United States can’t control the whole world any more than it can control the American economy, that threatening war with a nuclear-armed Russia might have disastrous consequences.

Yes, thinking is harder than feeling. It’s easy to say, “The government ought to do something.” And both liberals and conservatives default too easily to such easy answers.