It seems to happen all the time because, well, it does.
Liberals leap into enacting a policy that is so obviously wrong, get warned that the policy is obviously wrong, and after some period of time, they are forced to admit that the policy was obviously wrong, and nobody pays a price. Instead, they get either forgiveness or even praise for reversing a course that they chose in the first place.
In the meantime, incalculable damage is done.
“We were trying to do the right thing.”
There are countless examples. Remember “kids are resilient?” “Defund the police?” “If we only make nice with Iran, they will disarm?” “More money will end homelessness?”
In Germany, Angela Merkel, a nominally center-right politician, lurched far left in the mid-20-teens. She opened her borders to rapists, and famously closed all of Germany’s nuclear power plants and chose to put all her energy eggs into the Russian gas basket, despite warnings from Trump and others that both policies were a terrible mistake.
Well, after a decade of disaster, the current German Chancellor is waking up to the fact that, gee, maybe that was a bad idea after all.
Merz says that Germany’s decision to shut down all its nuclear power plants was a huge mistake and very costly for the German economy.
Everybody told them 10 years ago but the Germans refused to listen.
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) January 15, 2026
No duh.
When Trump warned the Germans that relying on Russian gas was a terrible strategic mistake, the Germans quite literally laughed at him. They were the strategic geniuses, and Trump was a buffoon. Germans have always had a strong anti-nuclear movement, of course, and the establishment jumped at the chance to get rid of nuclear when it arrived after Fukushima.
This post reminded me how the German delegation to the U.N reacted and laughed when President Trump warned Germany in 2018 (!) not to depend on Russian gas for energy. Their contemptuous reaction pretty much sums it all up and explains how 🇩🇪 arrogance destroyed Germany’s own… pic.twitter.com/SVN9a6QkmO
— Yair Einhorn (@yaireinhorn) January 15, 2026
The Russian gas decision was pure madness, but the sophisticates of Europe of course knew better than the brash Americans. Americans are so stupid, and Orange Americans the most stupid of all. Right?
Right?
In the intervening decade, Germany has gone from an industrial superpower to one that is deindustrializing, with its economy in a shambles.
Germany shut down its last nuclear power plants in 2023 – a decision which removed 4 gigawatts of reliable, low-cost baseload electricity.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz has now admitted that shutdown was a strategic mistake, calling Germany’s ‘energy transition’ the most expensive… pic.twitter.com/8uyNqHhJVF
— Electroverse (@Electroversenet) January 16, 2026
Germany shut down its last nuclear power plants in 2023 – a decision which removed 4 gigawatts of reliable, low-cost baseload electricity.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz has now admitted that shutdown was a strategic mistake, calling Germany’s ‘energy transition’ the most expensive in the world.
The country turned to intermittent wind and solar, backed by gas, imports, and emergency coal restarts – and the obvious consequences followed:
Electricity prices surged.
Grid reliability weakened.
Fossil fuel use actually increased.
Every single consequence of their decision to make an “energy transition” was not just predictable, but predicted by people far smarter than these environmentalist wackos.
Must Watch: @SecretaryWright reveals the disasters Germany faced when it tried to implement so-called green energy like offshore wind.
We must learn from their mistakes and keep this disastrous “energy” option far away from our coasts. pic.twitter.com/erV5TAIhHN
— NE Fishermen’s Stewardship Assoc. (@fishstewardship) January 16, 2026
All that these policies have accomplished is simultaneously making the economy much worse AND burning the cash necessary to improve the efficiency that will, in the long term, accomplish many of the goals they claim to want to reach.
My point is not so much that Germany made a mistake—of course, they did—but rather that this is part of a pattern of liberal policies that are predictably disastrous when implemented, with all the people involved remaining in power.
When I was young, I believed smart people always saw things clearly and were thus immune to terrible ideas. What I’ve realized since then is that they do often embrace bad ideas, but unlike dumb people, they’re good at coming up with sophistry in defense of those ideas.
— jojo (@jojo193713) January 19, 2026
First, being intelligent doesn’t correlate as well with being clear eyed and perceptive as many suppose.
Second, and related, being up close to see how things work often gets you a better understanding of what’s happening than complex modeling and reasoning performed at a remove.
Third, the failures of technocracy were of such magnitude as to be existential and permanently discrediting so that ‘being wrong’ even in a major way was much less of a concern than doing whatever possible to keep the whole enterprise afloat.
Fourth, there was a cultural/ ideological prohibition of polite euphemisms and elisions that still managed to communicate uncomfortable truths and so for years there was no cultural or ideological mechanism to effectively diagnose social reality and many empiric phenomena.
For these sorts of reasons I doubt that the high IQ/ Elite Human Capital people are going to be of much help in solving our problems. Not only do they often fail to understand what’s at issue and overestimate their abilities, but their fallibility to a large degree explains why we are where we are in the first place.
Liberals point to intentions as if, in the long run, intentions matter. Neville Chamberlain had good intentions, too. He wanted to avoid a disastrous war, and frankly, his policy was more plausibly likely to succeed than “defunding the police.” It was at least conceivable that Hitler could be appeased and that Churchill was wrong.
Even BlackRock CEO Larry Fink now admits that “transitioning” to solar and wind will cause a global power shortage—after spending years pressuring companies to do exactly that.
The “transition” he advanced has already sabotaged our power supply and raised our electricity bills. pic.twitter.com/wggLJ78xzP
— Alex Epstein (@AlexEpstein) January 18, 2026
There is no universe in which defunding the police would not make things worse. Or, for that matter, destroying nuclear power plants and relying on Russian gas for power.
Most people don’t know this, but even now, Germany has sent more money to Russia during the Ukraine War than to Ukraine, through gas purchases.
When it comes to public policy, stated intentions are utterly irrelevant. What matters is whether things are made better or worse.
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