If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

B.O.

Supposedly written by a 21 year old female in Texas;

Put me in charge of food stamps. I'd get rid of Lone Star cards (Food stamps in Texas); no cash for Ding Dongs or Ho Ho's, just money for 50-pound bags of rice and beans, blocks of cheese and all the powdered milk you can haul away. If you want steak and frozen pizza, then get a job.
Put me in charge of Medicaid. The first thing I'd do is to get women Norplant birth control implants or tubal ligations. Then, we'll test recipients for drugs, alcohol, and nicotine and document all tattoos and piercings. If you want to reproduce or use drugs, alcohol, smoke or get tats and piercings, then get a job.
Put me in charge of government housing. Ever live in a military barracks? You will maintain our property in a clean and good state of repair. Your "home" will be subject to inspections anytime and possessions will be inventoried. If you want a plasma TV or Xbox 360, then get a job and your own place.
In addition, you will either present a check stub from a job each week or you will report to a "government" job. It may be cleaning the roadways of trash, painting and repairing public housing, whatever we find for you. We will sell your 22 inch rims and low profile tires and your blasting stereo and speakers and put that money toward the "common good.."
Before you write that I've violated someone's rights, realize that all of the above is voluntary. If you want our money, accept our rules.. Before you say that this would be "demeaning" and ruin their "self-esteem," consider that it wasn't that long ago that taking someone else's money for doing absolutely nothing was demeaning and lowered self-esteem.
If we are expected to pay for other people's mistakes we should at least attempt to make them learn from their bad choices. The current system rewards them for continuing to make bad choices.
AND While you are on Gov't subsistence, you no longer can VOTE! Yes that is correct. For you to vote would be a conflict of interest. You will voluntarily remove yourself from voting while you are receiving a Gov't welfare check. If you want to vote, then get a job.

Sounds like a plan to me.

H.L Mencken accurately described what the state of American politics would become almost a century ago when he wrote:

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.


“In my youth, I, too, entertained some illusions; but I soon recovered from them. The great orators who rule the assemblies by the brilliancy of their eloquence are in general men of the most mediocre political talents: they should not be opposed in their own way; for they have always more noisy words at command than you. Their eloquence should be opposed by a serious and logical argument; their strength lies in vagueness; they should be brought back to the reality of facts; practical arguments destroy them. In the council, there were men possessed of much more eloquence than I was: I always defeated them by this simple argument; two and two makes four.”

-Napoleon

It's not what you look at that matters :it's what you see.

H.D.Thoreau

"True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us." -

Socrates

that dude schumpeter who came up w/ that phrase 'creative destruction'
i.e. that entrepreneurs power cultures forward

i remember getting a chill when i read he also predicted capitalism would eventually fall to socialism

when intellectuals - whose mindset is pretty much the exact opposite of entrepreneurs - finally gain sway in politics

i look around and can't help but think the dude was/is right

should make for some interesting 'muddle thru' in the years ahead

peace y'all

Interesting. In the end we are going to have to abandon primitive ideology and understand that accounting really rules. This is happening right now.

It is really a matter of what we can afford, not what we can dream up, and the primitive idea that capitalism or socialism hold all the answers is going to die. What we really need to learn is how to balance a budget and how to treat people as something more than an object to harvest.

Equality and the rule of law must apply to everyone and we must live with what we can produce. This means the end of exploitation and control based on arbitrary differences as the primary function of government.
This means the end of treating people in different ways and then calling it equality, and this stems primarily from economic treatment. Freedom does not mean much if your country is broke.

My friend Winged Wheeler dug up this little quote:--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"This is how the farce of modernism ends, with the anti-bourgeois rebel revealed to be a money-grubbing little fraud." (M.A. Signorelli and N.A. Salingaros)

It is about money and somehow "fair" has been twisted to mean that all animals are not equal. And they are never going to be equal in this world.

People work best when they are not coerced but rather free to enter situations or not based on their own judgement, but if you really want to control others you must coerce-otherwise nobody would buy into the plan. It would never sell on merit.

Sometimes I think of this as a good example of what the world is going through now, we are making all the "proper" motions and holding the ceremony, but we don't really understand what is going on and ideology and coercion cannot make it so the objects of our desire appear.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult

"The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others." Bertrand Russell



Ally

You can observe a lot just by watching.

--Yogi Berra

"All of human life is made up of a very complicated networking system of bridges crossing long spans of time and every one either crossed or abandoned in the past is super relevant to the one's yet to be discovered: for without them you will be lost forever. And that makes this seminal carnal knowledge a prime directive sacred knowledge of the human"