Nice write-up over at TierneyLabs in the New York Times. True confession: I'd love to say, "Oh, I always knew better", but the truth is I was also deceived by this, and believed it right up until I read that article.

And so I must move one more step to the right.

I always took the story as implying that, when possible, "common" resources should be made into some kind of "property" to be sold and/or privately managed, but those on the left heard (and used) it as a story about how some form of government needed to manage common resources. Worse, some on the left used it to argue that we needed to kill more people — undoubtedly not their friends or themselves. (Worse still, some of those same extremists now occupy positions of power in the Obama administration.)

Should I have know better? Yeah, probably — it does sometimes seem as if almost every story, factoid, and rationale I've ever encountered for increased governmental power (or other leftist pet projects) has eventually turned out to be at least flawed, if not, in many cases, an outright lie. But I do try to be fair, and admit there are places where the other side has a point. And yet: fool me twice, shame on me. What to say about "fool me dozens of times"? It may mean I'm a recovering moron, but it probably also says something remarkable about what fools me — what position is composed of so many accreted untruths?