Reflections On McGovern

With Geroge McGovern by his death bed, Reason magazine offers an appreciation.

One excerpt:

"In retrospect, I wish I had known more about the hazards and difficulties of such a business," he wrotein 1992. "I also wish that during the years I was in public office, I had had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day." In more recent years, citing the same experience, he campaigned against new labor regulations."

Truer words could not be spoken.

Just the other day I was in conversation with a client of mine and we discusses this exact issue only it was in a Quebec context.

Quebec (Canada in general), does a horrendous job at cultivating innovation and entrepreneurship and seeing how the buffoons in the PQ behave it's not hard to see why.

Man, there isn't a party I detest more and respect less than the Parti Quebecois.

I mentioned to him what I've proposed here in the past. I see value in having courses in entrepreneurship for young students. The whole lesson or term or whatever would be dedicated to opening a business. I would even talk about the philosophy of entrepreneurial endeavors.

It's only when people go through the process can they really appreciate what it takes to launch and operate a business. Only then would they see how a piece of legislation may look good to the person with nothing at stake but has serious consequences for the wealth creators.

McGovern's comment is a telling one and one in which needs to be sorely discussed. Too many people making the decisions don't know - heck perhaps even care - what the fuck they are doing.

It's as if they start a fire and simply walk away. Why not? It's so easy to not be accountable in politics.

Above all, away from the the business side of the post here, I like this:

"[M]ost Americans see the establishment center as an empty, decaying void that commands neither their confidence nor their love," McGovern asserted in one of the great unknown campaign speeches in American history. "It is the establishment center that has led us into the stupidest and cruelest war in all history. That war is a moral and political disaster—a terrible cancer eating away the soul of the nation....It was not the American worker who designed the Vietnam war or our military machine. It was the establishment wise men, the academicians of the center. As Walter Lippmann once observed, 'There is nothing worse than a belligerent professor.'"

Four decades later, America's president is a law prof with a kill list. I'd take McGovern over Obama any day.

McGovern sounds like he was Goldwater's twin in that they seemed like honorable men.