We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
*Unless you live in New Hampshire or get the exciting Bloomberg Channel on your cable network.
Well, there are plenty of questions surrounding tonight's GOP debate, but one of them overrides them all.
Will the candidates soundly condemn the Washington Post's outrageous attack on Rick Perry? Will Herman Cain again play the race card by bringing it up as he did last week? While a few of the braver candidates dared to use the word "entitlements" in the last two debates, will any of them have the cheek, the gall, the moxie, the sheer effrontery to use the term "lavish government pensions" in tonight's debate? Will any of them, after having read Maggie's Farm this morning (as I'm sure they all do), call for NASA to be severely downsized? Will Rick Perry continue to endorse the slaughter of Innocent Young Girls™ (copyright Michele Bachmann Enterprises 2011) with the HPV vaccine? If he does, will Rick Santorum and Ron Paul have to pay Bachmann royalties to use her favorite copyrighted phrase in their own spittle-spewing diatribes?
So there are some of the questions surrounding tonight's debate. But, as I said, there's one little mystery that far outweighs them all:
Why the hell isn't it being aired? Or even mentioned?
Zero articles about it this morning on Fox, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, USA Today or the Washington Times. There's a big splashy pic on the Washington Examiner's home page, but the article appears to be offline.
The Washington Post, which is co-hosting the event, has an article here. The streaming link is on the page. Starts at 8 pm Eastern. There's also a TV station in New Hampshire airing it, as well as the exciting Bloomberg Channel for those of you with satellite dishes and 500 channels at the ready.
And it's taking place around this:
King Arthur could not be reached for comment.
From a technical standpoint, this looks kind of dicey. They'll have to have a cameraman straight across almost every candidate or the angles are going to make the person directly in front the camera appear like they're at the head of the table, and anyone shot at an angle is going to look like a subordinate.
And sitting down isn't what contenders usually do when they're trying to oust the usurper behind the throne. It'll make them all look subordinate to the guy in the Big House. Which, given that the Post is a liberal tabloid rag, is probably the intention.
That's also indicative as to the type of questions that will be posed. Look for the moderators to keep them fighting among themselves and thus keep them from mentioning a certain White House resident by name.
What they want is for the viewer to order the candidates in their least liked order. You least like one candidate more than the others, then move up the list to the candidate you least like the least. So you guess you'll vote for him or her, but only until they do or say something else that the MSM points out as demonstrably unlikeable, in which case you might just vote for that nice Mr. Obama, since at least you know where he stands on things.
Or, just as likely, because people don't like voting for 'lessers of evil', you just stay home.
Mission: Accomplished.
I'll report in tomorrow on this mess. There might be an unanticipated effect from having the candidates sitting, rather than standing. They might appear more 'businesslike', which, given the dire straits our economy is in, might come across as a real plus. It might give it more of a 'boardroom atmosphere'. We'll see.
Few economists, and even fewer politicians, have dared utter the word 'Depression'. It's making a comeback, though. Are we in one? My guess is, no not yet. We've been close, and the economy isn't exactly moving in a direction that makes one think there's tremendous upside.
But we haven't been in anything more than a prolonged, deep recession.
Given the state of affairs surrounding debt, political inertia, crony capitalism, manufacturing, foreign exchange and unstable currency, it won't take much to force the U.S. into a much deeper downturn which would be labeled a Depression.
"They may have stopped another 'Great' depression but not a depression and what for many was the most profound lesson of economic history may turn out to be wrong," he said, adding the fact that government debts and obligations were already so high before the crisis pump priming meant they now risked backfiring.
Warren’s emphatic assertion of the unremarkable — that the individual depends on cooperative behaviors by others — misses this point: It is conservatism, not liberalism, that takes society seriously. Liberalism preaches confident social engineering by the regulatory state. Conservatism urges government humility in the face of society’s creative complexity.
Society — hundreds of millions of people making billions of decisions daily — is a marvel of spontaneous order among individuals in voluntary cooperation. Government facilitates this cooperation with roads, schools, police, etc. — and by getting out of its way. This is a sensible, dynamic, prosperous society’s “underlying social contract.”
Elites like Warren believe that we benighted masses cannot really handle freedom. What we really cannot handle is excessive government meddling in our lives.
The other day, former Google employee Doug Edwards asked President Obama to please raise my taxes. Edwards has the luxury of being "unemployed by choice." This is a very nice choice to have, one which I wish I had when I was unemployed. Not having the financial wherewithal Mr. Edwards has, it forced me to make some very different choices during my period of unemployment. One of them was not related to raising my taxes at all.
Where Edwards, and Warren Buffett, go off the rails is their assumption that raising their taxes is something they should be allowed to impose on others who may not share their views. If Mr. Edwards has a very good friend who is also making money by selling his stock from "a small startup that did quite well", it's quite possible that friend is happy with his tax rate. Is it fair or right for Mr. Edwards to tell his friend that his taxes should be raised?
More importantly, what is Mr. Edwards doing with his money that he wants the government to have? He pointed to Pell Grants, infrastructure and job training programs as things he considered important and worthy of having his money taxed. We could all agree that infrastructure is in need of improvement. But couldn't Mr. Edwards put his money to better use by setting up scholarships and grants on his own, or becoming an entrepreneur and doing his own job training program by starting a business? Mr. Edwards, I don't want to tell you how to spend your money. After all, it's yours, and I have no right to tell you how it is best used. That's up to you. If you want to pay more taxes, then pay. After all, you can gift money to the government. Nobody's stopping you.
On the other hand, if I had the luxury of Mr. Edwards' position, I'm fairly certain I could set up a scholarship fund and provide money for schools far more efficiently than the government. Why would I want the government to take my money, spend hundreds of thousands of what they collect on bureaucrats who don't add value, and have those people distribute the money to needy school students? There's less money to help the students. Of course, it does become a remarkably inefficient jobs program. I suppose that's the joy. You've been taxed and given several people useless jobs that you could probably do better on your own.
If I had the background that Mr. Edwards has, and lived in the startup capital of the US, I could probably be an entrepreneur. Then my money does several things. It becomes productive, I get to have my own jobs program, and the company and all its employees get taxed. Funny thing about the free market; you can actually be quite effective with your money if you have a good idea.
Mr. Edwards and Buffett aren't asking not for their taxes to be raised, but for everyone's taxes to be raised, and they have missed the very point that not raising taxes creates value if people want it to create value. Edwards and Buffett think the money has to go to the government to be effective. Sadly, the money will produce nothing of value, and the government will only ask for more later after this money is misspent.
Mr. Edwards, the only thing I can think is that you mean well, but you have missed the boat entirely. It would probably be far more useful to everyone if you and your "Patriotic Millionaires for Higher Taxes" set up a Venture Capital Fund or funded some schools in down and out regions of the US. I'm sure all of your "Patriotic Millionaire" friends are very smart and capable people, so one option would help create jobs and taxes, while the other would reduce our reliance on the federal government for handouts. Either way, you get to feel better and we all win.
Only 17% of American physicians are members. I quit them long ago, over their politics. Like so many foundations and non-profits in America, they were hijacked by Lefties years ago.
The antipathy of physicians for the AMA is not just about money, turf, and guild. It goes way beyond that. However, apparently the AMA's strenuous support of Obamacare (seemingly without understanding any of its implications) has been the final straw.
There is a new breed of young physicians, especially women, who don't mind being employees, having bosses, or working as an agent of the government, but most docs over 40 are not interested in that. In general, docs like autonomy, flexibility, self-direction. Also, they hate paperwork and bureaucracy.
The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined.... [T]he powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.
This division of labor accords with the venerable principle of subsidiarity, which allocates governmental responsibilities to the lowest levels able to exercise them. The effect is to ensure that governmental decisions most immediately affecting people's lives will be made by officials who are the closest to them and have the most intimate knowledge of the relevant facts and conditions. This design served us so well during the first 150 years of our national existence that the eminent British historian Lord Acton, declared that our constitutional development of federalism "has produced a community more powerful, more prosperous, more intelligent, and more free than any other which the world has seen." Over the years, however, our federal government has engaged in massive raids on the constitutional prerogatives of the states. Today there is virtually no governmental responsibility beyond the reach of federal authority. As a consequence, our nation has been converted into an administrative state overseen by unelected officials who issue regulations that reach into every corner of American life. Few appreciate the extent of this transformation. In 1935, at the outset of the New Deal, the United States Code consisted of a single volume containing 2,275 pages of statutes. Today, it comprises 30 volumes of statutory law. When I was in law school, Title 42, which contains the federal laws relating to public health and welfare, consisted of just 128 pages. Today it contains over 6,200 pages, more than twice as many as the entire body of federal law at the beginning of the New Deal.
Bureaus and agencies issue endless marching orders to administer those federal statutes. By 2010, the Code of Federal Regulations contained over 166,000 pages of detailed, fine-print regulations that have the force of law and affect virtually every aspect of American life.
People have to spend tons of money on lawyers just to know what is in those pages. What a waste. Good for the legal industry, however.
The people don't owe Warren and her vast government machine anything. She owes it to them.
For over a century, the public has paid far more into government than it has received back in benefits. That extra money has gone to people like Warren. It has gone into the entire rotten machinery of crony capitalism, welfare state machine politics and massive bureaucracy. So let's be clear about this. We don't owe Warren and her ilk anything. She owes us.
Glazer is one of those people whose thinking we have always admired, whether we agreed with his conclusions or not. I say this while quite aware that he is somebody who has never really done anything other than think and study things, and has probably never lifted an engine from a Chevy, built a stone wall, or shot a deer, and really probably knows little about life.
President Obama’s revival of an ambitious social policy agenda makes this a good time to reexamine the work of one of the most brilliant critics of the first wave: Nathan Glazer, now 88, a Harvard sociologist and one of the last of the founding generation of neoconservatives (a term often applied to him, though he has never really embraced it). In his bluntly titled 1988 book, The Limits of Social Policy, Glazer examined two decades’ worth of programs and reached a sobering conclusion: “Against the view that to every problem there is a solution, I came to believe that we can have only partial and less than wholly satisfying answers to the social problems in question. Whereas the prevailing wisdom was that social policies would make steady progress in nibbling away at the agenda of problems set by the forces of industrialization and urbanization, I came to believe that although social policy had ameliorated some of the problems we had inherited, it had also given rise to other problems no less grave in their effect on human happiness.”
What gave that conclusion special power was the intellectual journey that Glazer took to reach it.
It took Glazer a while to realize that liberty and freedom might be a better social policy than anything that the DC and Ivy brainiacs can design "for us." I could have told him that 40 years ago when I first realized that there are sick people in the world who enjoy power and control, and who have the delusion that they deserve those things because they imagine that they are smarter than I am. They are not. I want to be the master of my life.
A post from our friend Rick, who will be a regular author here at Maggie's once we negotiate the compensation details (he won't take paper money):
"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes its laws" — Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild
Many of us want to get rich. Some of us, anyway. What’s the fastest way to do it? Print your own money.
If it were only that easy. But what if it were? Ignoring counterfeiters, there have been several cases where privately printed money has fueled growth and provided value. Up to a point, that is, because as we all know, if it were that easy, everybody would do it. Yet the government does it because the government wants everyone to be rich, or the government wants to support declining prices, or the government wants to pay back money it borrowed. So the government creates money and backs it up with full faith and confidence and this should be enough for everyone to be rich and happy.
Why hasn't this goal ever been achieved? Let's take a look at one example where this theory was put to work.
In August 1717, somebody had a bright idea. The idea was based on the concept that the New World offered so much resource wealth and opportunity that anyone with a monopoly could sell portions of that untapped wealth to others, reduce his risk, and make himself and investors rich via joint stock ownership. Stock ownership was not a new idea, but this offer carried tremendous upside, particularly because the company offering the stock was owned and backed by a bank, and the company had been granted a government monopoly on all trade in the region.
John Law was the proprietor of the Banque Générale Privée (General Private Bank), which he funded by investing heavily in the debt of the French government. He literally invented paper money because he viewed money only as a medium of exchange, not a store of value or unit of account. It represented a claim on some value already in existence, and therefore could not have an impact on prices or overall valuations. He was brilliant and everyone, including himself, knew it. Law was so smart he was able to win card games by mentally calculating the odds. He also developed economic theories which are still the basis of some modern economic theory. One of his most persistent creations was the establishment of a central bank, which would oversee and manage the issuance of credit and paper money. Based on his theories, paper money had no relationship to the price of goods and services.
On this day in 1683 King Jan Sobieski of Poland arrived at Vienna to break the siege of the Turks and rescue the Christian West from the Hosts of Mohammed. The rout of the Ottoman troops before the gates of Vienna by the Polish hussars gave us a little breathing room, a coffee-and-croissants break that lasted for the next three hundred and eighteen years.
The Battle of Vienna in which King Sobieski defeated the 100,000-man army of "Islamic hordes" under Kara Mustafa Pasha was one day after the arrival of the Polish army with their winged hussars - Sept. 12. The western expansion of the Caliphate ended there, but the push back took many years.
My friend Mark Safranski, at his blog Zenpundit and contributions elsewhere (like Small Wars Journal), provides some of the best digestions of complex matters of national security policies and debates that a layperson can find.
Safranski has turned his attention to R2P, Right To Protect, as its advocates term it. It is the liberal internationalists’ concept of how US foreign policy ought to be. R2P reflects limitations of the US abilities to militarily intervene elsewhere as perceived by our liberal elites but raises our humanitarian impulses selectively by them to justify certain interventions, again, as they perceive which to be worthwhile. Further, R2P raises hazy international law or consensus of international liberal elites to supremacy over national law or consensus.
One of R2P’s main propounders, Anne Marie Slaughter, even advocates each US agency and members of our judiciary to act independently of Executive or Congressional oversight or law to conform to the consensus of foreign liberal elites. Slaughter is not just someone blathering. Slaughter was Dean of Princeton's influential Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs from 2002–2009 then from 2009-2011 she served as Director of Policy Planning for the United States Department of State, now back at Princeton. Slaughter’s thinking is telling in the pieties mouthed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama as they ignore US laws, ignore Syria’s worse repression and threat as they intervene in Libya, and extol a hostile majority in the UN to undeserved credence. Slaughter isn’t alone. Obama administration insiders Samantha Powers and Susan Rice are R2P foxes in the henhouse.
As Safranski sums up:
Slaughter is a revolutionary who aspires to a world that would functionally resemble the Holy Roman Empire, writ large, with a diffusion of power away from legal process ofstate institutions to the networking informalities of the larger social class from whom a majority of state and IGO officials are drawn, as a global community.
At first glance, disaggregating the state and granting at least a measure of sovereignty to its component parts might appear to weaken the state. In fact, it will bolster the power of the state as the primary actor in the international system…Giving each government institution a measure of legitimate authority under international law, with accompanying duties, marks government officials as distinctive in larger policy networks and allows the state to extend its reach.
Actually, it extends the uncontrolled reach of liberal elites within our government to act regardless of our laws or popular will.
Safranski comments:
R2P will require the imposition of policy mechanisms that will change the political community of the United States, moving it away from democratic accountability to the electorate toward “legal”, administrative, accountability under international law; a process of harmonizing US policies to an amorphous, transnational, elite consensus, manifested in supranational and international bodies. Or decided privately and quietly, ratifying decisions later as a mere formality in a rubber-stamping process that is opaque to everyone outside of the ruling group.
Who is to say that there is not, somewhere in the intellectual ether, an R2P for the environment, to protect the life of the unborn, to mandate strict control of small arms, or safeguard the political rights of minorities by strictly regulating speech? Or whatever might be invented to suit the needs of the moment?
Well, there is such in the “intellectual ether”, as in this example from William Magnuson, lecturer on international law at Harvard, and a graduate of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs:
While it is undoubtedly true that the loss of life is a greater harm than the loss of free speech rights, the major arguments (moral, legal, and consequential) in favor of the responsibility to protect doctrine apply equally to free speech as to crimes against humanity. Freedom of speech is a fundamental right. The widespread suppression of speech may cause us to doubt that state sovereignty is worthy of respect under Rawls’s and Walzer’s discussion of well-ordered societies. An obligation to intervene to protect free speech may persuade states to refrain from muzzling the media or jailing dissidents.
Transnational self-elected elites making “the world safe of democracy” or for their own supremacy? How many have children serving in the military, I wonder. Just look at how few in our State Department were willing to serve in civilian reconstruction in Iraq or Afghanistan. Yeah, “leading from behind”, as in Groucho Marx saying, “follow me, you go first,” making a tragic joke of core national interests in security that are actually recognized by average Americans, substituting instead rationalizations for scattered interventions although nice not essential and frittering away our lives and resources.
Added: Mark Safranski posts on this post, adding the key conclusion:
This is not an argument over whether genocide is bad and should be prevented or the positive good of Western liberal societal values but rather over how power will be exercised in our name, for what reasons and by whom. Any good ends sought under a putative R2P doctrine can be done today if the political will for intervention is present. That will is crystalized when the ends, ways and means are scrutinized in open, free, debate under our constitutional norms, not by a self-appointed vanguard.
Also, read Saints Go Marching In in The National Interest: (H/T: American Power blog's Donald Douglas)
. The conclusion:
As Libya shows, war and utopia should not be mixed up. War is too serious, utopia too unserious, for that.
"A half-century experiment in draping steamship anchors around the necks of the productive class and expecting them to run a four-minute mile has ended in failure. The confiscation of rights and property, the moral impoverishment of generations caused by the state’s usurpation of parental obligations, the elevation of a credentialed elite that believes academia’s fashions are a worthy substitute for knowledge of history and human nature, and above all the faith in a weightless cipher whose oratorical panache now consists of looking from one teleprompter screen to the other with the enthusiasm of a man watching someone else’s kids play tennis–it’s over, whether you believe in it or not. It cannot be sustained without reducing everyone to penurious equality, crippling the power of the United States, and subsuming the economy to a no-growth future that rations energy.
To which some progressives respond: You say that like it’s a bad thing."
The debate was quite interesting. Everyone turned in an decent performance, with no obvious stumbles or pie-on-the-face moments. For the most part, the questions were fair and reasonable, and the always-smooth Brian Williams did the moderating along with some dweeb from the left-leaning Politico whom I immediately disliked.
Let's start this off with a simple multiple choice question, shall we?
Q: In the great big, beautiful room in which the debate took place, what hangs over the audience's head?
A. A huge glass chandelier B. 9,863 small chandeliers C. An exact replica of the Sistine Chapel D. Air Force One
Answer: D. Admittedly, it's a little disconcerting at first. I mean, Air Force One is a big plane. But there it is, hanging away. Must be friggin' awesome during an earthquake.
Some Maggie's Farm readers have the feeling that Federal government in the US has been a gigantic sponge of money and power for over 100 years, to the point that we view Washington, DC almost like an imperial city (albeit with the consent of the governed), with an arrogant subculture which is oblivious to the views of huge regions of the country.
People nowadays clearly look to the Feds to meet their wants and to supply their needs far more than to their states or localities. However, the further governance is from the people they serve, the less responsive it is to the views of states and localities. Thus, for example, people in South Carolina feel somewhat disenfranchised when the Feds attempt to interfere with their Right To Work local opinions.
In the process, the Federal government has nurtured and fertilized gigantic constituencies with financial and/or power stakes in every detail of everything it undertakes. This is quite convenient for the constituencies - one-stop shopping instead of bothering with all of those messy states with their knuckle-dragging realtor and liquor store-owner legislatures and their back-woods governors.
Power and authority, unlike money and wealth, is a zero-sum game. Any authority or power which accrues centrally is lost by the individual, the localities, and the states (see Obamacare).
So, to get to today's poll question, if you were King For A Day, which Federal departments and agencies would you abolish to return the responsibilities, powers, monies,and choices to the individual, the localities, or to the states?
I'll start it off: The US Department of Education (what the heck does the federal government have to do with education, which is/was a local matter? We remember why - Jimmy Carter promised to create it to get the support of the teachers' union. Has American education improved since then? I'd say it has gotten worse as the power has moved from the PTA and local school boards, to Washington.)
My second candidate: Fannie Mae (this quasi-governmental, highly political agency threw a giant wrench into the gears of the world economy. Many predicted what would happen, but nobody cared.)
Lewis’s aversion to government was clearly revealed in 1951 when Winston Churchill, within weeks after he regained office as prime minister of Great Britain, wrote to Lewis offering to have him knighted as “Commander of the Order of the British Empire.”Lewis flatly declined the honor because he, unlike the “progressives,” was never interested in politics and was deeply skeptical of government power and politicians, as expressed in the first two lines of his poem “Lines during a General Election”: “Their threats are terrible enough, but we could bear / All that; it is their promises that bring despair.”
The absurdity of Garofalo’s theory is evident to anyone who knows even a little bit about Herman Cain. He’s no one’s dupe. But to the racist left he’s the Clarence Thomas of the political world. “How dare he wander off the plantation. We want our escaped slave back!”
I have always contended that Repubs (and their allied Conservatives and Libertarians) are the non-racist party. It's the party of Lincoln, the part of Ike who desegrated the army, and the party whose support was essential in passing the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s against a large segment of Dems.
I have always contended that the Left is the racist party in viewing American blacks as a helpless, feckless, childish category of people, a permanent victim underclass destined to eternal dependence on government actions and benefits and the beneficence of white Libs who want to take care of them, like pets. That's the "plantation" people talk about. In my view, this is a deeply condescending and insulting way of viewing any group of people.
People like Tom Sowell, Herman Cain, Mayor Nutter, Bill Cosby, Juan Williams, Shelby Steele, and many others agree with this.
Fact is, before WW2 there was a vast (although often segregated) black middle class in America, church-going, hard-working, self-respecting, etc. The disruption of the black family during the war (large numbers of black men moving north for high-paying industrial jobs), combined with the Great Society's enabling and supporting of family dissolution, have been the real problems. Young single motherhood under unstable and poor (due to the singleness) conditions are the obvious problem, and everybody knows it. No amount of money can fix a subculture like that.
Of course, there are still large numbers of middle-class blacks in America. However white Liberals, in their hypersensitive yet condescending way, are phobic about speaking about the self-destructive black subculture (even though there are poor white subcultures which are no different, and can be found anywhere), in the US as in the UK (vid h/t SDA):
(This woman has chosen government as her husband. She does not seem too bright, but is clearly gaming the system. What that piece ignores is how many entry-level jobs in the UK are eagerly taken by ambitious and entrepreneurial immigrants. "There are no jobs" because somebody else got to them first, or convinced somebody to create them. Same thing in the US: the Hispanic immigrants around here work their butts off, and are not too proud to get their hands dirty. Nobody has a job handed to them on a silver platter.)
So even though the US is probably the least racist nation on earth, it seems necessary to the Left to keep the racism meme alive - even with a black president. Otherwise, they'd have to talk about the truth of the (possibly insoluble) problem of underclass dysfunction and exploitation of assistance - regardless of skin tone. Free money.
To keep the meme alive, sometimes people have to look pretty hard to identify a sort of victimhood which requires or justifies government dependency and unequal treatment. Here's a beaut: Secret Racism Running Wild in Our Government.
I’ve heard more than 20 years of this oppressive windbaggery from do-gooder liberals who treat my unhyphenated American brothers and sisters and me as treacherous puppets for The Man. Their smug refusal to acknowledge free will, individual choice and true diversity of thought confirms that race-obsessed liberals remain the most unrepentant and odious racists of all.
They have become their own self-parody, but they are dangerous because the constant repetition works in creating a public imagination that Republican candidates are racist.
So if you think it cannot get any worse, trust me, it will.
The excesses of ancient Athenian democracy and its near destruction at the hands of Sparta made the founders particularly wary of direct democracies, which as James Madison wrote, "have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." By empowering people no matter how lacking in virtue, character, or knowledge, democracy gives greater scope to their irrational appetites, leaving them vulnerable to factional strife or the demagogue who promises them the gratification of their desires at the expense of freedom and political order. Then democracy becomes "ochlocracy," a "mob rule" that descends into tyranny:
"For the mob," Polybius writes, "habituated to feed at the expense of others, and to have its hopes of a livelihood in the property of its neighbors, as soon as it has got a leader sufficiently ambitious and daring, being excluded by poverty from the sweets of civil honors, produces a reign of mere violence. Then come tumultuous assemblies, massacres, banishments, redivisions of land; until, after losing all trace of civilization, it has once more found a master and a despot."
Though this may seem like a dusty political philosophy lesson, remember that the United States has evolved perilously close to the sort of direct democracy that would have horrified the founders.
From the Barrister, laptopping it in by the pool this week, ceegar in hand.
John F. Kennedy did not say "Ask first what your country can do for you," but that's where Liberal/Socialist politics have taken us. Such politics appeal to our weakest, most dependent tendencies, weaken the spirit of the people, and have the wanted, or unintended, effect of making all dependents and/or serfs of the Almighty State.
In a sense, we are all complicit, because almost everybody has something they want the Federal government to do, or to do more of, with their neighbors' money. People want their Medicare and their Social Security and their US Armed Forces and their national forests, interstate highways, and other things too.
Government is all about money these days. American governance was not always that way, but it has been for 100 years, and that's the good reason that politics is more about money than anything else. This is Stossel (h/t SDA):
As I write in my book: “Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity.” The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe, the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the highest number of single mothers, the highest abortion rate. Marriage is all but defunct, except for William and Kate, fellow toffs, upscale gays and Muslims. From page 204: “For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population.”
The issue at hand, it seems to me, is whether there are any real limits to federal power these days. Seeing as we were a nation founded on the principle of limits on central power, it's an important discussion, to put it mildly. Some say that debate was over many years ago.
Until marriage is restored as the norm for child-rearing in the inner city, black and Hispanic crime rates and education failure will continue to be disproportionate. No government program can possibly compensate for the absence of fathers in the home and the absence of the cultural expectation that men will be responsible for their children.
Also,
The mayor is eager to talk about marriage for gays and lesbians, but he cannot bring himself to use the word when it comes to black and Hispanic heterosexual couples. His initiative proposes to ensure that both parents are “fully engaged . . . even if they don’t live together.” But men who have fathered several children by several different women—the dominant pattern of inner-city “multipartner fertility” today—are unlikely to be able to engage “fully” with all their children, even if such out-of-home engagement were an adequate substitute for a married father in the home.
Bloomberg, Soros, et al are insane. That's not a diagnosis: it means that they are not in reality. I doubt that either of them have ever sat down and talked to a 16 year-old single high school drop-out mother of three who happily and willingly consigned herself and her kids to a life of dependency and dysfunction. Have a kid? Get your own apartment! And a check from the city! And free medical care and food stamps! Why not? Their moms did the same thing. Normalization of dysfunction and dependency.
The government incentives are perverse, and it's on our nickel.
The other day, former Google employee Doug Edwards asked President Obama to 
John F. Kennedy did not say "Ask first what your country can do for you," but that's where Liberal/Socialist politics have taken us. Such politics appeal to our weakest, most dependent tendencies, weaken the spirit of the people, and have the wanted, or unintended, effect of making all dependents and/or serfs of the Almighty State.