Missing the Point

Once again, Sock Thief misses the point of the Listener's editorial. They're not saying that:

it is "insufferable arrogance" to say that "some things are right, and some things are wrong:"

They're saying that it is insufferably arrogant to think that what other people think doesn't matter.

This is Brash's problem - not that he has clear ideas about morality, or even that he thinks that he can derive his chosen economic policies from his chosen moral foundations, but that he is a fundamentalist who doesn't give a shit what anybody else thinks. He has the Way, the Truth, and the Light to deliver us from the Economic Darkness. Why is this arrogant? Because it completely ignores the fact that politics is about what we want, and about balancing the disparate views of the ends and goals of society in a way that we can all live with (or at least not kill each other over).

According to Brash, what we want doesn't matter. If we're stupid enough not to want his economic prescriptions, we should just shut up and take our medicine. It's for our own good, and we'll thank him in the end. It's Rousseau's "forcing people to be free", all over again...

But then, what else would we expect from a technocrat from Treasury?