Spending The Left's magical thinking By Robert Tracinski November 19, 2021 02:35 AM Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Email Print Spending The Left's magical thinking By Robert Tracinski November 19, 2021 02:35 AM Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Email Print One of the key things I learned from reading Ayn Rand is that many arguments that are supposedly about politics aren’t really about politics. They’re about something deeper. They’re about philosophy, and sometimes about very abstract and foundational issues in philosophy. Often, they are a projection of basic assumptions about the nature of reality (the branch of philosophy called “metaphysics”) or the means by which we know the truth (“epistemology”). The most common of those projections is “magical thinking,” a term taken from psychiatry but with deeper philosophical roots. It is the implicit assumption that the law of cause and effect can be suspended, that if we wish hard enough, if we want something strongly enough, we can bypass all of life's normal limits and trade-offs. You can find this everywhere in politics, where its appeal is obvious: You can promise everything to every constituency, without worrying about how it will all get done. But magical thinking tends to be most prominent in the party in power, and at the moment, it is most brazen on the Left. Take the Democrats’ multitrillion-dollar Build Back Better spending bill, which was supposed to add or extend a whole set of welfare...