Lowell Ponte
Tuesday, April 24, 2007

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When a dog wags its tail, humans have long recognized this as a sign of happiness or excitement. But three Italian researchers have discovered a new message in this canine semaphore.

It makes a great different whether your pooch wags its tail to the left or to the right, report Giorgio Vallortiagara of the University of Trieste, and Angelo Quaranta and Marcello Siniscalchi of the University of Bari writing in the March 20 issue of Current Biology.

A dog that feels positive about somebody or something will wag to the right side of its rump. A dog with negative feelings, as science reporter Sandra Blakeslee describes this finding in the April 24 New York Times, will wag its tail "biased to the left."

Is this a clue to something deeper?

The mainstream media, clearly "biased to the left," is relentlessly negative about the United States and all things pro-American.

So, too, are the congressional leaders of America's leftist Democratic Party. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D.-Nev., days ago declared that the current U.S. military enterprise in Iraq had lost, a shockingly partisan act of political opportunism that cannot help but harm the morale of American troops still risking their lives in the field there.

This is yet more evidence to support those critics who say that the Democratic Party, having bet all its chips on an American defeat in Iraq, must now do everything in its power to undermine whatever might lead to even a marginal victory there.

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The right-left asymmetry in dogs appears to be hard-wired into their genetic blueprint. Could the same be true for our wag-the-dog politics at both ends of the political spectrum?

Could it be that liberals and conservatives are both born with a genetic political predisposition to see the world predominantly with a monocular left- or right-eyed way?

Twenty-eight percent of college students in a recent game experiment were strongly predisposed to penalize those who earned considerably more money than they did, even when this gained the 28 percent nothing and cost them dearly.

One possible reason for this, wrote University of California San Diego political scientists Christopher T. Dawes, James H. Fowler and colleagues in the April 12 issue of the British science journal Nature, could be that "inequality itself arouses negative emotions."

"[F]inding that humans have an innate tendency toward enforcing a norm of income equality," wrote science journalist Ronald Bailey about this research in the April 20 issue of the libertarian magazine Reason, "would explain the persistent attraction of communism, progressive tax rates, the demand for universal government-supplied health care, minimum wage laws, and other such destructive modern leveling ideologies and policies."

But not all human beings favor this kind of redistributionist equalization. Other studies, wrote Dawes and colleagues, "show that experimental subjects feel anger towards free-riders in a public goods setting and this anger may motivate punishment."

The common thread here is one of the strongest human impulses — envy — which stirs resentment against both the person who gets a free ride while we must pay, or who earns more than we do.

In the Ten Commandments, the almighty understood and prohibited the tendency of our species to covet our neighbor's ox, ass, and wife.

This is precisely the emotional cornerstone on which today's Democratic Party, with its relentless class warfare appeals to tax and hate the rich and its promises to expropriate what others have earned so that the fruits of their labor can be given to you in government largesse.

This latest new scientific research found that those at the low end of the income ladder devote significant effort to hating and harming the rich.

Democrats exploit the basest of these human impulses as a way to win elections, but the long-term effect of these polarizing politics of resentment and envy is the debasing of our society and its now-vanishing traditions of rationalism, pragmatism, and bipartisanship.

The political left for the past century has made equality its highest value. The political right, by contrast, has tended to see liberty as its political polaris, its North Star around which all other ideals turn.

Liberty, of course, begets inequality by letting each individual achieve what he or she can. And equality, which must be imposed by the state (because in fact human beings are not equal in ability, ambition and effort), inevitably undermines individual liberty.

And yet, like the French Revolution that followed ours, the American Revolution and Constitution tried to enshrine these contradictory ideals.

Until recently in our history, the United States dealt with this contradiction by affirming that we were all "equal before the law." But increasingly we live in George Orwell's dystopian Animal Farm, where all creatures are "equal," but some "are more equal than others."

How can we be equal before the law when a small minority of citizens pays more than 40 percent of its income in income taxes, but approximately half of citizens pay no income tax whatsoever?

To this large latter group, the government has become a giant dispensing machine of goodies for which others will be forced to pay.

And such "progressive" taxation is rationalized and expanded by the left, including those running the Democratic Party in Congress, as a leveling mechanism to close (eventually to zero) whatever gap exists between the assets of the rich and the poor.

Our use of the term left comes from the French legislature and the seemingly-arbitrary opposite sides of its chamber on which its right and left factions gathered.

Humankind almost universally perceives left-oriented asymmetry as evil and uncivilized, as our languages reflect. To ancient Romans their Latin word for left was "sinister." To the French the left is "gauche."

Only in ancient Greece did things left take on a semi-positive connotation. Their word for left was aristoi, the root of our word aristocracy.

Today's increasingly sinister Democratic leaders have little nobility, but they resemble aristocrats in being both elitist and imperious. And because these wags, America could soon be going to the dogs.

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