Wishful thinking...

Dr. Curtis from Laurel, MD on Potential v. Opportunity:

"When I see a repeated pattern of failure or low-level performance, I treat potential as noise and not data. My colleagues often talk about a patient's potential when there is chronic failure, but it always requires an if.

The data is that Maurice Clarett and others like him have repeatedly done what is necessary to produce the negative outcomes that they have experienced. His predicament today is a summary of his actions from a series of yesterdays. Clarett's athletic success is an interruption in his criminal career, not the other way around.

This behavioral approach to reality applies to individuals and to political philosophies. In politics, the left gets caught up in if statements and other forms of wishful thinking. Socialists and their siblings will insist that Hayek is wrong and that socialism fails because it has not been done right. In other words, that socialism has a lot of potential but...It is the ifs, buts, and shoulds that underpin it, not the devastating reality of it. Its potential, like Clarett's potential, is pure noise. The good that socialism may do on rare occasion is a distraction form the overwhelming pattern of failure that it has produced wherever it has been tried.

I wish Maurice Clarett had what it took to make better decisions, but he didn't. His story is written by what he did, not by what he should have done or could have done. I also wish that 9/11 had not occurred, but it did. I voted for Bush because he did not use wish statements about our enemies. The left did, and still does, as in, "If only we understood why they hate us..." I refused to give the people who would not look at the data squarely my vote. Our enemies want us dead. I can wish it were different, but I would place my wife and children in peril with that wish. As with people, so too with policy.