Eagle-Tribune columnist Barbara Anderson offers her recommended fall reading list this week.
Among the books she’s looking forward to is WBZ-TV political analyst Jon Keller’s “The Bluest State,” which advance publicity touts as a look at how Massachusetts has come to be characterized by:
addiction to tax revenues and a raging edifice complex couched in disrespect to wage earners; phony identity politics without real results for women and minorities; reflexive anti-Americanism in foreign affairs; vain indulgence in obnoxious political correctness; self-serving featherbedding; NIMBYism; authoritarian distortion of the balance of governmental power, all simmered in a broth of hypocritical paternalism.
Sounds accurate. I was reminded of this penchant Bay State politicians have for protecting their constituents from themselves by a quote from Herbert Spencer I came across in a recent New Yorker review of a new biography of the 19th-century British philosopher:
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.
