Hoover’s Blabbering Imperialist (Or, Is There a Cure for VD?)

After reading the speech by VD Hanson referred to below by Chris Manion, which was apparently part of a Hoover Institution event in D.C., I was struck at how the neocons have poisoned Hoover. As an economist, I used to have the highest opinion of some of the fine publications coming from Hoover by Milton Friedman, Tom Sowell, Tom Moore, Alvin Rabushka, and others. There are still some fine scholars there, of course, but it seems that a disproportionate share of Hoover’s resources, like AEI’s, go to promote the work of blabbering , ranting imperialists like VD Hanson. His blather doesn’t seem to be based in any particular discipline — not history, political philosophy, economics, or anything. It always has that Three Stooges-style “Nya, nya, nya, nya, nya” tone to it as he grasps at straws to make the same old arguments over and over again ad nauseum: Kill, kill, kill, bomb, bomb, bomb, the hell with the rest of the world. There’s never any balance, never any benefit/cost thinking, never any mention of the pervasive Law of Unintended Consequences, never any serious argumentation over opposing viewpoints. It’s pure Straussian gobbledygook, in other words.

Hoover supporters who are used to reading Tom Sowell’s razor-sharp logic must be mystified over Hoover’s overemphasis on such garbage as this.

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