Governor Romneycare is, or was, the establishment Republican nominee. When his campaign turned out to be dead on arrival, Rick Perry was the emergency backup establishment republican nominee. But Herman Cain now leads 28% to 17%
Herman Cain has from the beginning been the main Republican Republican nominee. Back in May I said “It is a long, long way to the 2012 presidential elections, but they are Herman Cain’s to lose.â€Â  They still are.
It has often been said that social security is the third rail of US politics. Touch it, and you die. But this has more to do with establishment protectiveness of social security, that public attitudes. Observe that the number two candidate for republican presidential nominee has touched it, and the leading candidate appears to be sitting on it.
Herman Cain keeps saying that we should go to the Chilean retirement system. He could have said the Singaporean system, or the Australian system, both of which are variants on the Chilean model, but no, he chose Chile as the exemplar.
The core benefit of the Chilean model is that old folks do not become tax consumers, so tend to vote for secure private property rights.
“Instead of running huge deficits to fund the old “PayGo†system, private savings now exceed 50 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product.”
Puts Japan’s national debt into perspective, doesn’t it? Don’t miss that it is private only. Imagine if the whole ‘public’ sector were healthy.
But the interesting thing is that people keep saying “Chile”, when they could use some other example. It seems like a hint
I’m meta-interested that you’re interested. Is it something to do with Chile being poor? Cuz aside from that all I’ve got is that it’s fun to pronounce.
Chile’s retirement plan was introduced under Pinochet, the left’s Satan. It is the most controversial possible example.
In Chile, Allende was acting illegally and coercively – as the left routinely does, only more so. The parliament declared democracy dead due to left wing illegality, which it was, and called for a coup. Pinochet had been appointed as leader of the armed forces by Allende. Six hours before the coup, Pinochet got an offer he could not refuse: Either sign a piece of paper that the coupists would interpret as a general order for a coup, or the coup would go ahead without him and, if it went ahead without him this would “Undermine the discipline and unity of the armed forces”, which sounds to me like “sign or die”. Pinochet signed and disappeared, reappearing when the coup was over.
The left had remade Chilean society in various ways to ensure that left wingers got elected, and that even if not elected, left wing policies would be implemented regardless, and left wingers be in power and in government jobs regardless. The Chilean retirement plan was part of the military program to remake society so that they could hold elections on a universal franchise without the left winning.
Calling it “The Chilean Model” is as if Governor Walker was to call his program “Defunding the left”.
Oh wow. That is indeed amusing.
Though also a little /headdesk for nobody thinking to defund the left back when it was starting to fund itself. I’d have thought, “You just want teacher raises to funnel cash to [obviously leftist group]” would play well with voters, and if it doesn’t work the first time round, you show that the cash indeed ended up at [obviously leftist group] and auto-win.
Of course if that had happened I’d instead likely be /headdesking about nobody thinking to defund the right. Someone had to win and I despise all the contestants.
Something a little less /headdesk…in science, it’s well known you don’t get the right answer on the first try. In sociology, this doesn’t seem to be true, though. The leftists tried to remake Chile so they were guaranteed power, and it worked on the first try. The army tried to remake it so they weren’t, and it worked on the first try. (Similarly, Soviet/Gramscian propaganda apparently passed directly from theory to function without passing through glitchy prototype.)
Unfortunately that means the people who first promoted democracy likely knew what they were doing and thus are culpable for the results.
Social experiments usually fail. We just remember the successes. Lenin’s first two tries at socialism were utter disasters, and had he persisted would have been disastrous on the Pol Pot scale. They tried one thing, then they backed off and tried another thing. Stalin managed to get socialism working in a fashion that was not a total catastrophe. Depending on how you count the number of tries, there were at least three tries before Stalin style socialism, arguably five.
In the west, following World War II, many governments decided that war socialism had been a big success, and they would implement socialism in peace time. It was a total catastrophe. In Britain, famine loomed, the lights went off, and the lifts in the treasury building stopped working. So Attlee backed off from socialism in 1949, declaring that central planning was unBritish. In Australia, it was less disastrous, but still bad enough. At least Australian socialism left food alone, so that people were able to feed themselves. In 1949 Australians had a election on the issue: Socialism or Capitalism. Socialism lost overwhelmingly – largely because socialism could not provide fuel for people’s cars.
And I would say
OmamanismObamanism is also shaping up as a disaster. Business is being brought under state control by violence (Gibson Guitar) and handouts (General Motors). In both case the effect is that the business stops hiring and stops producing.Imagine a million-line program compiling and running on the third try.
Imagine a car engineer getting it working (mainly) as intended on the third try, by sitting at their desk and wondering what went wrong.
Sociology is epistemically easy, like shockingly so.
If by Omamism you mean Obamism, I suspect it’s working out swimmingly for Obama, just as it worked out swimmingly for the fund-the-leftists people. His presidency may be in the tank, but I doubt his career as a self-serving prat has taken any serious hits.
Wham bam thank you, ma’am, my qeutsoins are answered!
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“At tonight’s Republican debate, former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain was given the center seat. You can tell Cain was in the center because he was wearing one of those little plastic tables that protects the cheese.” –Jimmy Fallon