Why bother rigging the vote; even the tea party supports unsustainable welfare, affirmative action, social security, and healthcare programs. I fear the vote rigging is merely over who gets the gravy, since the major function of government has become handing out the gravy to true believers.
Category: politics
After mass democracy
A couple of hundred years ago, the conventional wisdom was that democracy with broad voter participation was unstable, violent, ruinous, and short lived. A hundred years or so ago the world moved to mass democracy, universal franchise. Many people predicted that this would result in the masses trying to vote themselves rich, resulting in social and economic collapse Well guess what. The masses have been trying to vote themselves rich, …
The end is in sight
For the last hundred years or so, people have been predicting that the welfare and affirmative action state would collapse eventually. Well, it seems that “eventually†is getting close. Arnold Kling has a list of links showing that all the welfare state social democracies are going to hell in a handbasket, with everyone else in even worse trouble than the US. Arnold Kling predicts a US debt crisis between 2015 …
Atlas did not shrug
The cathedral has pursued a policy of compromising with and absorbing competing elites – thus it both allowed the big banks to capture the regulators (resulting in financial crisis, but consolidating the elite’s power over ordinary Americans) and allowed the Soviet Union to infiltrate the US government (thus causing wars and communist victories, but consolidating the elite’s power over ordinary Americans). As Dusk tells us: look at how much regulation …
Rush Limbaugh – smarter than ten thousand ecology PhDs
Back when BP’s oil was spouting into the gulf of Mexico, Rush told us: “The beach will fix itself†“More oil spilled every year in Africa, in Nigeria, than so far in the Gulf, so it’s not unique. It’s not exceptional. It’s not the largest. Mexico had a spill that larger than this, nobody talks about except apparently me†And behold: The beach has fixed itself. The reason that BP …
A solution to the gay marriage and the covenant marriage problem
The Other McCain agrees. Get the government out of the marriage business. Let each church decide for itself what marriage is, which views the government should ignore, and let people draw up what contracts they choose for living together. You have the right to contract. Let us have gay nuptial contracts, not gay marriages. And the same for heterosexual relationships: If a seventeen year old girl can contract for gigantic …
No democratic solution
Doctor Zero has a carefully thought out proposal to get 50% of the voters plus one behind the measures necessary to save America, behind measures that are carefully pruned to be the minimum possible measures that could save the country, measures that are as “moderate†as possible, which is not very moderate at all.
No way Jose. Democracy is doomed, or the country is doomed, or, quite likely, both.
“Diversityâ€
What academia means by “diversity†is people of all colors and all sexual preferences chanting their master’s words in unison. Steve Sailer found an interesting paper on admissions policy.
If you are not at the government’s table, you are on the government’s menu
Vox Populi: While the economic value of anything depends on sellers and buyers agreeing on that value as civil equals in the absence of force, modern government is about nothing if not tampering with civil equality. By endowing some in society with power to force others to sell cheaper than they would, and forcing others yet to buy at higher prices — even to buy in the first place — …
The ruling class
Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters – speaking the “in” language– serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats.