Ageless Wisdom
#11
Once again, you seem to equate the failures of business with the total incompetence of government with respect to running a balanced budget. These are two entirely different matters.
Failures in the private sector may be influenced by poor economic policy of government, but the economic failures of government may never be blamed on the private sector.
Regardless of what you may think of those elected, they must always be held accountable for their actions. There is not, nor can there ever be, a free pass for bankrupting a state or the country.
Let's examine this from a purely economic basis and ignore meaningless debate or mention of individuals or party affiliation.
Failures in the private sector may be influenced by poor economic policy of government, but the economic failures of government may never be blamed on the private sector.
Regardless of what you may think of those elected, they must always be held accountable for their actions. There is not, nor can there ever be, a free pass for bankrupting a state or the country.
Let's examine this from a purely economic basis and ignore meaningless debate or mention of individuals or party affiliation.
It's not realistic to place blame for bankrupting a state or country on particular politicians. Sure you can say that certain policies increased our deficit, but frankly blame would have to be spread too wide in order for blame to be fairly given. Consider this: Politician A votes against a war but votes for a tax increase. Politician B votes for a war but against a tax increase. They voted the opposite, but technically both could be blamed for hurting our economy--taxes take money from people and businesses while war increases our deficit and often has other negative effects on the economy.
I dont advocate giving a "free pass" to politicians, but I feel that it is often unfair to place blame on politicians for economic woes. Your article seems to point out that many politicians look out for their own best interest. This may be true especially in the fact that many of them want to get reelected. With that said, if they were attempting to get reelected, dont you think that they would try to stear clear of bankrupting the state/country?
#12
Mencken's timeless insights
By Donald J. Boudreaux
Friday, December 26, 2008
L'affair Rod Blagojevich reminds me that if I could bring one person back to life for an evening of good food, stiff drink and sterling conversation, that person would unquestionably be H.L. Mencken (1880-1956).
Mencken was a newspaper reporter, magazine editor, literary critic and expert on what he called "the American language." But he was, in my view, above all this country's unmatched observer and recorder of politics. So sit back and feast on these intellectually nutritious and tasty tidbits of Mencken's political wisdom.
In Mencken's view, the typical politician is a "merchant of delusions," a "pumper-up of popular fears and rages.
The politician is never to be trusted:
"What is a political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better? The former assumption, I believe, is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For if experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar. His very existence, indeed, is a standing subversion of the public good in every rational sense. He is not one who serves the common weal; he is simply one who preys upon the commonwealth. It is to the interest of all the rest of us to hold down his powers to an irreducible minimum and to reduce his compensation to nothing; it is to his interest to augment his powers at all hazards, and to make his compensation all the traffic will bear."
But ours is a democratic republic where We the People choose our leaders freely in fair elections. Doesn't the need to secure a majority of votes ensure that only worthy candidates win?
Here is Mencken's answer:
"The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob. A candidate for office, even the highest, must either adopt its current manias en bloc or convince it hypocritically that he has done so while cherishing reservations in petto. The result is that only two sorts of men stand any chance whatever of getting into actual control of affairs -- first, glorified mob-men who genuinely believe what the mob believes, and secondly, shrewd fellows who are willing to make any sacrifice of conviction and self-respect in order to hold their jobs."
But some politicians are reformers -- or, to use the nom du jour, "change agents." And many others are professional policy wonks, devoted to the dull but important details of running government. Surely they are more nobly motivated than is the typical office-seeker.
Nope, says Mencken: "Politics, as hopeful men practice it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance."
And more emphatically:
"Reformers and professionals are alike politicians in search of jobs; both are trying to bilk the taxpayers. Neither ever has any other motive. If any genuinely honest and altruistic politician had come to the surface in America in my time I'd have heard of him, for I have always frequented newspaper offices, and in a newspaper office the news of such a marvel would cause a dreadful tumult. I can recall no such tumult."
Alas, though, we continue -- despite mountains of evidence that should scare us off -- to entrust our lives and riches to these frauds.
Mencken blamed this blind trust in government to "the survival into our enlightened age of a concept hatched in the black days of absolutism -- the concept, to wit, that government is something that is superior to and quite distinct from all other human institutions -- that it is, in essence, not a mere organization of ordinary men, like the Ku Klux Klan, the United States Steel Corporation or Columbia University, but a transcendental organism composed of aloof and impersonal powers, devoid wholly of self-interest and not to be measured by merely human standards."
Finally, I leave you with this truly deep insight -- one that, were it more widely seen, would save humankind from all manner of mischief:
"When we say that (government) has decided to do this or that, that it proposes or aspires to do this or that -- usually to the great cost and inconvenience of nine-tenths of us -- we simply say that a definite man or group of men has decided to do it, or proposes or aspires to do it; and when we examine this group of men realistically we almost invariably find that it is composed of individuals who are not only not superior to the general, but plainly and depressingly inferior, both in common sense and in common decency."
Donald J. Boudreaux is chairman of the Department of Economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. His column runs twice monthly. He can be reached at [email protected].
By Donald J. Boudreaux
Friday, December 26, 2008
L'affair Rod Blagojevich reminds me that if I could bring one person back to life for an evening of good food, stiff drink and sterling conversation, that person would unquestionably be H.L. Mencken (1880-1956).
Mencken was a newspaper reporter, magazine editor, literary critic and expert on what he called "the American language." But he was, in my view, above all this country's unmatched observer and recorder of politics. So sit back and feast on these intellectually nutritious and tasty tidbits of Mencken's political wisdom.
In Mencken's view, the typical politician is a "merchant of delusions," a "pumper-up of popular fears and rages.
The politician is never to be trusted:
"What is a political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better? The former assumption, I believe, is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For if experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar. His very existence, indeed, is a standing subversion of the public good in every rational sense. He is not one who serves the common weal; he is simply one who preys upon the commonwealth. It is to the interest of all the rest of us to hold down his powers to an irreducible minimum and to reduce his compensation to nothing; it is to his interest to augment his powers at all hazards, and to make his compensation all the traffic will bear."
But ours is a democratic republic where We the People choose our leaders freely in fair elections. Doesn't the need to secure a majority of votes ensure that only worthy candidates win?
Here is Mencken's answer:
"The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob. A candidate for office, even the highest, must either adopt its current manias en bloc or convince it hypocritically that he has done so while cherishing reservations in petto. The result is that only two sorts of men stand any chance whatever of getting into actual control of affairs -- first, glorified mob-men who genuinely believe what the mob believes, and secondly, shrewd fellows who are willing to make any sacrifice of conviction and self-respect in order to hold their jobs."
But some politicians are reformers -- or, to use the nom du jour, "change agents." And many others are professional policy wonks, devoted to the dull but important details of running government. Surely they are more nobly motivated than is the typical office-seeker.
Nope, says Mencken: "Politics, as hopeful men practice it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance."
And more emphatically:
"Reformers and professionals are alike politicians in search of jobs; both are trying to bilk the taxpayers. Neither ever has any other motive. If any genuinely honest and altruistic politician had come to the surface in America in my time I'd have heard of him, for I have always frequented newspaper offices, and in a newspaper office the news of such a marvel would cause a dreadful tumult. I can recall no such tumult."
Alas, though, we continue -- despite mountains of evidence that should scare us off -- to entrust our lives and riches to these frauds.
Mencken blamed this blind trust in government to "the survival into our enlightened age of a concept hatched in the black days of absolutism -- the concept, to wit, that government is something that is superior to and quite distinct from all other human institutions -- that it is, in essence, not a mere organization of ordinary men, like the Ku Klux Klan, the United States Steel Corporation or Columbia University, but a transcendental organism composed of aloof and impersonal powers, devoid wholly of self-interest and not to be measured by merely human standards."
Finally, I leave you with this truly deep insight -- one that, were it more widely seen, would save humankind from all manner of mischief:
"When we say that (government) has decided to do this or that, that it proposes or aspires to do this or that -- usually to the great cost and inconvenience of nine-tenths of us -- we simply say that a definite man or group of men has decided to do it, or proposes or aspires to do it; and when we examine this group of men realistically we almost invariably find that it is composed of individuals who are not only not superior to the general, but plainly and depressingly inferior, both in common sense and in common decency."
Donald J. Boudreaux is chairman of the Department of Economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. His column runs twice monthly. He can be reached at [email protected].
Okay, so I also finally figured out that this Boudreaux dude from George Mason (basically a community college up until the 90's when all the parents of the kids in the DC suburbs who could not get into UVA or VA Tech decided it were no such thing)(and raised the tuition a few hundred percent to prove it) has written an "article" which consisted of 95% quotes from somebody dead a long time ago.
What a joke.
The pontificating of somebody comfortably within the Beltway is no way to judge the REAL economic situation out there past the horizon.
Tons, and I mean Tons, of the people reading and studying BS like this trollop's "writing" at GMU are about to become pawns of the "movers and shakers" about 200 miles to the north of DC.
Paper pushing, gobble-de-gook speakin', regulation writing, leased BMW driving dirtbags who "crammed" to get higher SAT scores. Running our Federal Government based on parental GS-high up connections, Beltway cronyism, and soon to be becoming the junior "leaders" in the new age.
You want to contribute any more "freedom of thought" to this tribe of Beltway and Wall Street sleeze, Jungle? They're all incestuosly related.
F them.
Last edited by Kilgore Trout; 01-03-2009 at 01:16 AM. Reason: spelling ayers
#13
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Actually, Mencken did all the real writing in that article and it is a set of truths that somehow seems to escape most of us.
It can be reduced to a simple question without going through the many examples of fraud and abuse: Why can't they balance the budget?
Roll that one over for a while, it isn't complex math, just simple arithmetic.
In the end there is no valid excuse, never was, never will be.
It can be reduced to a simple question without going through the many examples of fraud and abuse: Why can't they balance the budget?
Roll that one over for a while, it isn't complex math, just simple arithmetic.
In the end there is no valid excuse, never was, never will be.
#14
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Position: Burning the Agitprop of the Apparat
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In other words they are more than willing to spend your income and that of your decendents in order to gain and maintain office.
#15
Actually, Mencken did all the real writing in that article and it is a set of truths that somehow seems to escape most of us.
It can be reduced to a simple question without going through the many examples of fraud and abuse: Why can't they balance the budget?
Roll that one over for a while, it isn't complex math, just simple arithmetic.
In the end there is no valid excuse, never was, never will be.
It can be reduced to a simple question without going through the many examples of fraud and abuse: Why can't they balance the budget?
Roll that one over for a while, it isn't complex math, just simple arithmetic.
In the end there is no valid excuse, never was, never will be.
#16
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Joined APC: Jan 2006
Position: Burning the Agitprop of the Apparat
Posts: 6,191
No dictator required, just a spine, and a sense of putting the health of the country ahead of reelection. Probably too much to ask.
Last edited by jungle; 01-03-2009 at 09:57 AM.
#17
Progress?
With Hillary vacating her seat in the Senate, the new face is Caroline Kennedy. Her qualifications? None really (except she is a Kennedy) but in her defense, her promoters say she is as qualified as most who already hold the office. That says as much about the current members of the House and Senate as much as it does about Caroline.
#18
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#19
Gets Weekends Off
Joined APC: Jun 2008
Posts: 357
You will never balance the budget until you fix one simple problem. Currently 40-50% (depending on which study you believe) of the households do not pay federal income taxes. They have no vested interest in where the money comes from and much interest in where it goes, as long as it goes to them.
The cure is simple, everyone needs to have a vested interest. Simply put, everyone should be paying federal income taxes. Then they will pay attention to where, how and who spends the money.
The cure is simple, everyone needs to have a vested interest. Simply put, everyone should be paying federal income taxes. Then they will pay attention to where, how and who spends the money.
#20
With The Resistance
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Joined APC: Jan 2006
Position: Burning the Agitprop of the Apparat
Posts: 6,191
You will never balance the budget until you fix one simple problem. Currently 40-50% (depending on which study you believe) of the households do not pay federal income taxes. They have no vested interest in where the money comes from and much interest in where it goes, as long as it goes to them.
The cure is simple, everyone needs to have a vested interest. Simply put, everyone should be paying federal income taxes. Then they will pay attention to where, how and who spends the money.
The cure is simple, everyone needs to have a vested interest. Simply put, everyone should be paying federal income taxes. Then they will pay attention to where, how and who spends the money.
Agreed, and I hope the idea that people should be taxed at different rates will someday be seen in the same light as slavery and other social injustice. There is a steady call for equality, but few call for equal responsibility.
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angelicm3
Leaving the Career
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10-22-2008 05:01 PM