SHUTDOWN? PAY TO KEEP THEM HOME?
“…I’m willing to be taxed to pay for their salaries IF they promise to stay at home and not do their bureaucratic jobs. Sometimes it may be cheaper and safer to pay the extortionist to leave you alone in peace.” – Richard Ebeling
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-01 13:21:00 UTC
“GOVERNMENT IS ORGANIZED CRIME”
🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-01 03:10:00 UTC
I SUPPORT AND ENCOURAGE GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN 🙂
Belgium went without a government for, what? More than a year? It would be wonderful if we could keep the american government shut down for a year. Even six months.
Hopefully long enough to default.
A man can hope, can’t he? 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-01 02:53:00 UTC
THE STATE IS THE ENEMY OF CIVIL SOCIETY
“…a herd of timid and industrious animals of which government is the shepherd…”
QUOTE:
“It seems that if despotism came to be established in the democratic nations of our day, it would have other characteristics: it would be more extensive and milder, and it would degrade men without tormenting them. …
I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. …
Above these an immense … power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?
So it is that every day it renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of it from each citizen. …
Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than
…
I have always believed that this sort of regulated, mild, and peaceful servitude, whose picture I have just painted, could be combined better than one imagines with some of the external forms of freedom, and that it would not be impossible for it to be established in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people.”
–Alexis de Tocqueville
Source date (UTC): 2013-09-28 13:18:00 UTC
http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/7107CHANGES IN POWER AND WEAKNESS
It’s interesting to watch both sides collapse while they think the other is at fault. Over the past few months I have watched the left realize that they have failed to change economic policy because conservative morality reigns both here and in europe.
We have also seen conservatives and libertarians change their strategic objectives.
But we have not see western culture change it’s objectives quite yet – not at its institutional or spiritual level.
But our perception, our belief, our literature, our philosophy and our actions for the past 500 years at least, has been those of power.
And we’re adopting weakness.
Source date (UTC): 2013-09-27 11:01:00 UTC
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/lacking-all-conviction/KRUGMAN WATCH – FROM 2010
Every politician in Washington has a constituency. That constituency is profoundly either conservative and/or moderate. Liberals are, and likely always will be, a small minority of the population.
As a politician in a Democracy, when your constituents of all flavors start calling, contributing to others coffers, and reducing contribution to yours. When key contributors call with displeasure. When mail full of fury piles on your desk. When lobbyists start spending time with the opposing party. When the friends and allies you need to gain political support at home start abandoning you, then you have a certain perception of reality.
Democracy is not getting what you want. It’s getting what the majority of people want. Not even what the party in control wants. But what the majority of people want.
The political information system is not ideologically based except in the popular press. It is extraordinarily functional in practice – the construct of alliances of people of different desires and ideals. The political economy is run by donations and relationships. These people know what’s said in the popular press. But they live in the political economy of relationships and donations. That’s their ‘reality’. That is their ‘pricing system’: the information system that they rely upon.
They are not stupid. They are not cowards. They are pragmatic. And the voters are telling them what they think: that the country is center right. And voting against the previous administration was not voting for this one. And this administration did something few have done, and none should do: pass ideological legislation over the objection of the majority.
THis congress will fall. And the president will either move toward the center. Or he will be out in two years. And while he is a weak character, he is probably not stupid enough to stay so far left. And he has lost his legitimacy with the populace and as such, oratorical appeals to left agendas will only serve to undermine his power further.
Source date (UTC): 2013-09-25 20:45:00 UTC
Why on earth would one think that we could create an aristocratic society where everyone is an aristocrat? It’s a contradiction in terms.
Source date (UTC): 2013-09-25 14:13:00 UTC
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2013/09/when-should-we-interfere-in-another-countrys-internal-affairs-posner.htmlCONTRA POSNER ON US POLICY
@Posner
This breach of peace is because that lesson has atrophied into a moral conviction expressed as policy.
a) People have the right to self determination.
b) Self determination is limited to good citizenship in the pattern of production and trade.
c) That destabilization of the pattern of production and trade that influences commodities that could encourage warfare is equal to the waging of war against a neighbor.
d) That if a people choose a government that abridges a, b or c, then we, the USA, will punish that government and the citizenry for their poor choices.
We are not a peer nation. We are an empire. We act like an empire. We act like an empire in no small part because we must out of economic self interest, and in no small part, because our main trading, political, and cultural partners, actually WANT us to, so that they can participate in the reconstruction of Europe, after the first world war that destroyed human civilization as we know it, and from which we only begin to emerge in the present decade – albeit over a century behind what might have been.
So, in closing, I’m a little uncomfortable with harkening back to historical reference of equal states, when our empire is run pragmatically for pragmatic purposes, and our policy has been reduced to ideology
Curt Doolittle
THe Propertarian Institute
Source date (UTC): 2013-09-24 14:41:00 UTC
PRIOR WARNING TO MY FEMALE FRIENDS
I have to kill off the ideas of Universalism, Postmodernism and Democracy, not morally, but rationally and empirically. In doing so I must criticize feminism and democracy, and some of the emotions that women intuitively hold dear.
Unlike other reactionaries (aggressive conservatives) I don’t recommend returning to the past. Like a libertarian, I recommend freedom. But I also recognize the difference in reproductive strategies and moral sentiments between men and women.
Given that it is no longer necessary for women to be exclusively bound to home and child rearing, and that women both participate in the work force and dominate it’s middle ground, the past arrangement between men and women under agrarian society is no longer necessary even if it were preferable.
GIven this change from a male economy and a female homestead, to a pre-agrarian female homestead, with transitory males, now that he feminists have succeeded in destroying the family, by forcing economic cooperation between men and women via marriage, through the proxy of the state via taxation. It seems prudent to attempt to construct a social order that recognizes the heterogeneity of our interests as males and females.
One thing is deterministically certain. If we the long term monogamous family is indeed a dead or at least marginal institution, the current remnants of family (child support and spousal support) will disappear along with that institution. Largely because large members of men will continue to lack incentive to work and pay taxes, or to signal status by familial conformity. And the increasingly disturbing rate of single mother hood will continue to reduce the majority of women and children into single parent poverty, until the system of redistribution is perceived as not only unfair but destructive, and overwhelms both the tax system, the economy and the political system.
We see this slowly happening now. And the economic luxury we possessed when first the socialists, then the feminists, then the multi-culturalists, banded together, no longer exists and is no longer possible due to the flooding of the world workforce with billions of laborers after the fall of communism and the failure of the socialist project.
So what does this have to do with me? I think it’s possible to take what we have learned from the market and technology and to produce a political order that allows us to cooperate on means even if we have opposing ends.
But in order to make a new idea both understandable, and desirable, I must criticize and show the failure of the existing ideas.
I must criticize it so that I can replace it with something better.
Source date (UTC): 2013-09-23 00:50:00 UTC
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/09/the_colorado_recall_was_about_more_than_gun_control.htmlWHAT IF WE’VE HAD ENOUGH?
“What if voters have had enough of ineffective laws being passed just to show to talking heads that ambitious political leaders did something? What if voters have had enough of the political class dictating all the terms, always in pursuit of the media/political class agenda? What if voters have finally had it with bills becoming laws without a proper vetting in advance? What if the voters are tired of ill-informed legislators criminalizing common behavior among the country class because all they care about is the media narrative? What if voters are tired of bureaucratic obfuscation, technocrat double talk and misleading photo-ops in favor of common sense and plain speaking? “
Source date (UTC): 2013-09-17 23:40:00 UTC