It seems inevitable that Republicans will clean up in the 2022 midterms, as the first chunk of the Biden presidency can be accurately described as a dumpster fire of monkey shit floating on a chunky sea of word vomit spewed from our lying media presstitutes.
Isn’t it the case that people who seek high office do so because they want power and control? Power and control and limited/small government are not natural bedfellows, so those who seek high office will not be inclined towards small, limited government.
Isn’t it also the case, that those who seek high office are unemployable in the competitive, private, wealth producing sector at any level that would give them similar status and reward, which is why they go into politics which requires no great skill-set just a high score on the psychopath/sociopath scale?
What’s the remedy? Move away from elected governments, restore sovereignty of the individual so each has equal power (which used to be democracy), power cannot be pooled, concentrated, so each is self-governing according to governance of Common Law, tradition, societal etiquette, with no government over them. An administrative non-tax raising, non-legislating body enforces law, upholds rule of law, due process and justice.
How to achieve the remedy is another matter. But.
Attributed to 19th Century jurist & author Alexander Fraser Tytler: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.”
I’d say we are past that, with near 50% of able people who get paid to do jobs that make no profit, and who vote themselves a share of plunder taken by the State from the rest who produce the wealth.
"largess from the public treasury." - Indeed. But we are quite close to discovering what happens to a bankrupt nation. Transfer payments (largess from the public treasury) now consume much more than half of federal outlays. While we have held interest rates on debt artificially low making capital essentially worthless but real assets retain wealth, as the debt exploded starting with Obama's discovery of the FDR time bomb Social Security. Now interest rates must rise to try to avoid the enviable climb of an inflation spiral. Servicing that debt will become a major outlay. In addition to the cruel inflation tax on the least of us,we all will be forced to pay more taxes. All those promises politicians made are not looking good. Given China's desires to own our productivity and innovation skills, we might need the one thing we are required to have - defenses.
That's the dilemma, alright. Without power you cannot see your ideas made real. So, power must be the goal no matter the ideas. And, once in power no matter how virtous you might be, you rule through others and if they, in every step of the from the pinnacle to the bottom is each one a little less virtous than you, at the end there might be unholy levels of corruption.
And seeing as information flowing to you does so through this corrupt chain of people, all woth a vested interest in more power and less culpapility, the entire system corrupts itself, because you only get told what the echelons around and beneath you need you to know to influence you in their direction, meaning that you may well think you make the right decisions and aren't shy of telling the people so, while said people see you for a liar and a fraud.
The only workarounds throughout history has been systems and circumstances where material physical factors by necessity has limited the actual influence of central governement - if someone could figure out a way to implement that in modern terms, and also limiting the reach of elected officials (say no raising of taxes/fees without a popular vote in each and every separate case, on city or county level) well, then we're golden.
Until then, we'll just have to try and keep nudging the system itself, sort of like army ants trying to steer a buffalo.
Local, local, local! Sheriffs, city councils, school boards. Elections where you can literally go to their house and knock on their door and ask, "WTF?" are the ones that truly matter. And, of course, finding your own posse and making the "need" to be "led" obsolete. Great post.
That's always been the dilemma for oppositional political movements (if you balk at th word movement, remeber it didn't use to mean a unified collective structure but a general trend among those parties non-affiliated with existing political hegemony):
Stay ideologically pure and virginal, or drop the knickers and get on with doing the dirty.
Seen it among alphabet-soup communists (we used to joke over here that commies breed by fission, seeing as their groups and parties were alwyas splitting in smaller and smaller sects, each one more and more puritanical in following one of their prophets or another).
Wasn't until they realised that they can't get any influence unless they make said influence the point.
Liberatarians and anarchists have always had the same problem. "Oh that guy? He denies the truth of Ludwig von Mises, so he must be a plant for Them", or "Her? No way, 35 years ago she voted for regulated parking in city, a sure sign of a Stalinist". Look at US libertarian debate and examples and tell me straight you've never seen that kind of stupid sectarianism and puritanism.
Want power to make your ideas real? Learn the game of the system. Never ever appear as to attack the system itself: it will defend itself. Learn to doublethink.
And accept that capitalism and communism are two paths leading to the same destination. Laissez faire-capitalism, an-cap ideas, and so on are flawed from the start being based on tabula rasa. Be very stern with your own philosophy and hammer it down to actual factual concrete suggestions - should you local town have parking meters or not? Loss/gain? Problems? Your principles must be weaved into concrete suggstions dealing with everyday local stuff if youare to convince enough people that you've actually have something going for you.
Appeal to emotion, symbolism, and GBa against the usual suspects are all well and good when venting, but isn't constructive and makes you look like a whiny loser in the eyes of voters, so avoiddoing it in public: be for goodm beter things and ways instea of only being against something.
All of the above may well be preaching to the pastor, but I'm no mindreader, and I have saw the swedish left wing extremists move from being an insignificant fringe to being parto f the mainstream in just two decades by simply integrating themselves into the system, and systematically promoting likeminded people in every party (they joined all the political parties), every agnecy, even in every organisation in civil society. And now they are inseparable from the governemental and societal fabric.
The Moslem Brotherhood works the same way. Peace, rights, poitivity, unity, integration, infiltration; accepting it may be decades or even a century or more until they are one and the same with the structure of power.
I believe libertarians have a problem preventig the from doing that, thus dooming them to forever being a rand phenomenon and just someones excuse and warning example:
Libertarianism is inherently and intrinsically egotist on an individual level. As long as that remains, any and all attempts will end like the one in Vermont a couple of years back. Note that the only defence of that experiment from pages like Reason and such, was rhetoric to the tune of "not real libertarians".
"And the GOP being the GOP, they couldn’t simply ‘replace’ it with a patient giving money to the doctor for services rendered like every successful industry in the country."
Including every INSURANCE industry OTHER THAN health insurance, the most heavily regulated and manipulated insurance industry by a country mile. Gee, I wonder if that could be why.
Yes, most Republicans are less bad than most Democrats. Why not step outside the politicians? Start with Dennis Kucinich for President, and Ron Paul for VP. Kucinich is a Democrat with genuinely libertarian tendencies. Ron Paul is the definition of libertarianism. Sure, Kucinich is old and may not live out his term. Unlike Joe Biden, that might be a good thing.
"Sure, Kucinich is old and may not live out his term. Unlike Joe Biden, that might be a good thing."
Right. And RON Paul is a spring chicken. (And if you meant RAND: Right. Rand Paul will run as DK's VP.)
If your "dream" ticket ran as third party, they would only pull enough otherwise-Republican votes to hand a 40% "landslide" to our current betters, the Statist Democrats.
If your "dream" ticket attempted to win a major party nomination, the Statist Party establishments would destroy them, one way or another.
If your "dream" ticket managed somehow to win the Republican nomination, they would lose in the biggest landslide in history. Kucinich has NO REPUBLICAN constituency.
I responded too sarcastically, M. Bill. I might be wrong and you might be right, also. Your thinking on finding libertarians to run has obvious merit, but I don't think it will succeed (yet). I think we need to support (not find) uncaptured, and uncapturable, libertarian FRIENDLY but (in '22 and '24, anyway) mainstream-politics-ready candidates. (We supported DJT in 2016 in desperation, and got lucky that he qualified as the former.)
I think having a Libertarian PARTY has backfired (pulled more anti-Dem votes than anti-Rep, giving the ANTI-libertarian party, the D's, an ironic advantage).
Libertarianism (today) needs to be a movement, not a Party.
Boycott leads ultimately to bloodshed. We will not save Constitutionally enshrined individual freedom by ignoring its forever enemy, the overbearing, rapacious State.
Boycott will only make permanent the Democrat-led State, the further death of the wealth-creating private sector, and the impoverishing/dis-enfranchising of we non-elitists. Our Democrat overlords will not care about, nor even make note of, a 20-30% voter participation rate, and those in-the-tank-for-State 20-30% will party like they've won the lottery...until they realize their store shelves and food pantries are as bare as their withering bodies and souls.
You think those fake things will miss YOUR participation, or go away because YOU did?
You boycott, and the next thing you know, the Democrat Police State will be knocking on your door, your pre-filled ballot ready for you to sign, you good citizen. You must have just "forgotten" to vote. Don't worry, esteemed citizen, there won't be a penalty...THIS time.
The insurance companies and every element of the medical industry from the corporatized hospital systems to the pharmaceutical behemoths love Obamacare. In other words, everyone who caused the problem benefitted from the so-called solution. That will be true for any problem the uni-party pretends to solve. We need to break up the parties.
The more a Government intervenes in the economy, the more it regulates, subsidises, taxes the more vested interests such as big corporations, organised labour will interact with Government to limit damaging regulation, help write it to their advantage, get a share of subsidies/tax breaks - this is known as Corporate capture and Corporate welfare.
The solution is deregulation of the economy. Keep Government out of the economy.
I'd agree with you except that this country wasn't all that pretty when our economy had no regulation. But I do understand the dangers of regulation. It always seems to miss the target.
Well we employ regulators to regulate. They do some fine work. But then they are out of work and must find more to regulate. Check Parkinson's laws. The Trump administration forced examination of regulations and was able to start to remove some. Perhaps we could hope that we only need regulators to maintain rather than create. Any look at the Federal Registry where they are published can see the growth over the years. The Federal Procurement code in order to reduce fraud is beyond understanding as are IRS rules. All of that reduces productivity. And employs a lot of people to find ways to evade them. Moreover, in today's corrupt world the regulators actually have created rules that prevent progress by eliminating competition. We built the system that now has gotten away from us.
Simplicity and consistency, that is really all that is needed and should guide every regulation. But then simplicity and consistency doesn't allow for those juicy loopholes.
I wish it was written in the Constitution that all laws expire every 10 years. Keep the politicians busy passing laws we already agreed at one point were necessary instead of thinking of new ways to screw us over.
Give an example. I guarantee any example you give will involve Government interference.
The Industrial Revolution - which gave the greatest surge in prosperity in the history of Mankind - started in Britain precisely because it was an unregulated economy. It could have started elsewhere, France, Germany both rich Countries, big populations, lots of clever people but regulated - France centrally by the King and interminable committees, Germany (as was then) by anti-industry land- owning class.
The USA’s economy surged ahead in the late 19th and early 20th Century because of a lack of regulation.
A fee market economy is inherently, internally regulated by reputation, competition and voluntary exchange. Nobody is forced to buy and does so on terms and conditions decided by the parties to it - if either party doesn’t like it, the exchange doesn’t take place.
Both parties have to receive in exchange something they perceive as being of higher value to them. In that case both parties are wealthier because of the exchange - that is how wealth is created. Reputation is vital to ensure existing customers are retained, new customers are attracted.
By regulation, subsidy, taxes, patronage, protectionism Government perverts free market regulation and makes us poorer, but enriches the political class and their cronies.
You do understand that there were incredible numbers of victims of the industrial revolution, right? Every idea can and will be abused. No regulation can be as bad as too much regulation.
One is bad caused by intentional intervention. This is bad.
The other is bad caused by us free people, a natural force of the universe, with far more beneficiaries than victims. Human's relationship to nature was a victim of the industrial revolution, but one only needs to look at population size to see that the industrial revolution was a net benefit to the species in survival terms.
I am afraid I have done a poor job of expressing that idea, but anyway.
I think I understand what you're saying, but while over time, the Industrial Revolution has been a boon, in the beginning it was a highly abusive system and for the people it chewed up and spit out (quite literally in some cases) it was not a good thing. Government made it kinder to the environment and to the working class, and it needed to be kinder. Only all of history will say whether or not the Industrial Revolution helped our species survive. It may have given us room to grow so that we overpopulate and kill ourselves out. But that's neither here nor there. That's something neither you nor I will be around to judge.
The brutal truth is we need a governing body to keep the strong from abusing the weak, as happened in the Industrial Revolution. We also need a government to keep the strong from creating a mess they don't have to live in, such as with pollution around industrial areas. In democracy, that "governing body" is made up of regular people representing regular people to make decisions about how to best balance the rights of the whole and the rights of individual.
What has happened in our system, which is arguably no longer a democracy, is that the government has become an entity itself, one that is only tenuously accountable to its original mission.
In order for a society to survive you need to walk a tightrope between a "free" system where the strongest, most aggressive, and most abusive, most self-serving individuals and corporations reign and a totalitarian system where a malignant, living entity called "government" made up of a different set of conniving, aggressive, abusive, and self-serving individuals reigns. It's ugly, but the sooner we recognize that we've drifted too far one way, the sooner we can drift back the other and look for that sweet spot.
But that would require antithetical, and therefore self-defeating, use of force. Individuals must have the freedom to choose for themselves what political parties to form, join, and especially vote for. The rest is education and persuasion, to include frustration that other individuals don't agree with you.
We must not attempt to break up any faction/party. We must, instead, regain control of them from their Statist establishments and capture.
ALL private-sector, non-captured (non-State-created/enforced) monopolies.
I disagree that monopolies require government (State) action to end. That is exactly the OPPOSITE of reality. They require State action to ENDURE. The free market, given time, utterly destroys ALL monopolies that are NOT State sanctioned.
I hadn't heard that, but it is spot on in illuminating the Statist/Socialists mindset that the individual (the precise meaning of People) and his/her/their rights are to be sublimated to the group/society/State and the whims of its elitist, hidden, and self-chosen leadership.
Well, I thought there was a general consensus across Substacks sharing the sensibilities of this one that we've got a Uniparty that strangles in the womb any candidate attempting to break for unpolluted territory.
I was enough of a moron to have voted twice for Bernie in the primaries, and he's proven as much a shill for the fetid swamp as any of 'em. Of course, joke's on me for thinking a "socialist" was a sensible choice under any circumstances.
I've said before somewhere, and will again, that the most important elections are at the micro-local level because they are the beginning of the journey for anyone really determined to have any sort of future in politics. The trick is to find, support and protect from smears and fake scandals genuinely independent candidates, starting with school boards, and ensure they can build a meaningful political resume so they needn't prostitute themselves to either party. This is a generation's work. Take your vitamins, guys.
it's all going to become more local, but only about three generations into the future once the current crashing and burning has faded into the past. The survivors won't be thinking about gender pronouns in Uganda
‘ Of course, joke's on me for thinking a "socialist"…’
Or on you for thinking any of the Parties are not socialist by any other name… Socialism (and Fascism) = elevation of the State over the individual; central economic planning and control. In which Party is that not policy?
Agreed. The GOP Is currently filled with uni-party candidates. Republicans are useless.
The only hope is people like Joe Kent (WA), JD Vance (OH), Royce White (MN). Let’s just hope and pray they win and aren’t consumed by the beast that is DC.
I've never felt more politically homeless. *le sigh* Story of my adult life.
its the same story as 'anyone but trump'
theyre all corrupted to the core and nothing but another revolution will fix it
Isn’t it the case that people who seek high office do so because they want power and control? Power and control and limited/small government are not natural bedfellows, so those who seek high office will not be inclined towards small, limited government.
Isn’t it also the case, that those who seek high office are unemployable in the competitive, private, wealth producing sector at any level that would give them similar status and reward, which is why they go into politics which requires no great skill-set just a high score on the psychopath/sociopath scale?
What’s the remedy? Move away from elected governments, restore sovereignty of the individual so each has equal power (which used to be democracy), power cannot be pooled, concentrated, so each is self-governing according to governance of Common Law, tradition, societal etiquette, with no government over them. An administrative non-tax raising, non-legislating body enforces law, upholds rule of law, due process and justice.
How to achieve the remedy is another matter. But.
Attributed to 19th Century jurist & author Alexander Fraser Tytler: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.”
I’d say we are past that, with near 50% of able people who get paid to do jobs that make no profit, and who vote themselves a share of plunder taken by the State from the rest who produce the wealth.
"largess from the public treasury." - Indeed. But we are quite close to discovering what happens to a bankrupt nation. Transfer payments (largess from the public treasury) now consume much more than half of federal outlays. While we have held interest rates on debt artificially low making capital essentially worthless but real assets retain wealth, as the debt exploded starting with Obama's discovery of the FDR time bomb Social Security. Now interest rates must rise to try to avoid the enviable climb of an inflation spiral. Servicing that debt will become a major outlay. In addition to the cruel inflation tax on the least of us,we all will be forced to pay more taxes. All those promises politicians made are not looking good. Given China's desires to own our productivity and innovation skills, we might need the one thing we are required to have - defenses.
That's the dilemma, alright. Without power you cannot see your ideas made real. So, power must be the goal no matter the ideas. And, once in power no matter how virtous you might be, you rule through others and if they, in every step of the from the pinnacle to the bottom is each one a little less virtous than you, at the end there might be unholy levels of corruption.
And seeing as information flowing to you does so through this corrupt chain of people, all woth a vested interest in more power and less culpapility, the entire system corrupts itself, because you only get told what the echelons around and beneath you need you to know to influence you in their direction, meaning that you may well think you make the right decisions and aren't shy of telling the people so, while said people see you for a liar and a fraud.
The only workarounds throughout history has been systems and circumstances where material physical factors by necessity has limited the actual influence of central governement - if someone could figure out a way to implement that in modern terms, and also limiting the reach of elected officials (say no raising of taxes/fees without a popular vote in each and every separate case, on city or county level) well, then we're golden.
Until then, we'll just have to try and keep nudging the system itself, sort of like army ants trying to steer a buffalo.
This may be a ripping point that starts to reverse the trend of routine corruption:
Doctors are now *expected* to give early treatment such as ivermectin in Kansas.
As Kansas goes, so goes the nation?
:https://colleenhuber.substack.com/p/covid-care-about-face
Local, local, local! Sheriffs, city councils, school boards. Elections where you can literally go to their house and knock on their door and ask, "WTF?" are the ones that truly matter. And, of course, finding your own posse and making the "need" to be "led" obsolete. Great post.
That's always been the dilemma for oppositional political movements (if you balk at th word movement, remeber it didn't use to mean a unified collective structure but a general trend among those parties non-affiliated with existing political hegemony):
Stay ideologically pure and virginal, or drop the knickers and get on with doing the dirty.
Seen it among alphabet-soup communists (we used to joke over here that commies breed by fission, seeing as their groups and parties were alwyas splitting in smaller and smaller sects, each one more and more puritanical in following one of their prophets or another).
Wasn't until they realised that they can't get any influence unless they make said influence the point.
Liberatarians and anarchists have always had the same problem. "Oh that guy? He denies the truth of Ludwig von Mises, so he must be a plant for Them", or "Her? No way, 35 years ago she voted for regulated parking in city, a sure sign of a Stalinist". Look at US libertarian debate and examples and tell me straight you've never seen that kind of stupid sectarianism and puritanism.
Want power to make your ideas real? Learn the game of the system. Never ever appear as to attack the system itself: it will defend itself. Learn to doublethink.
And accept that capitalism and communism are two paths leading to the same destination. Laissez faire-capitalism, an-cap ideas, and so on are flawed from the start being based on tabula rasa. Be very stern with your own philosophy and hammer it down to actual factual concrete suggestions - should you local town have parking meters or not? Loss/gain? Problems? Your principles must be weaved into concrete suggstions dealing with everyday local stuff if youare to convince enough people that you've actually have something going for you.
Appeal to emotion, symbolism, and GBa against the usual suspects are all well and good when venting, but isn't constructive and makes you look like a whiny loser in the eyes of voters, so avoiddoing it in public: be for goodm beter things and ways instea of only being against something.
All of the above may well be preaching to the pastor, but I'm no mindreader, and I have saw the swedish left wing extremists move from being an insignificant fringe to being parto f the mainstream in just two decades by simply integrating themselves into the system, and systematically promoting likeminded people in every party (they joined all the political parties), every agnecy, even in every organisation in civil society. And now they are inseparable from the governemental and societal fabric.
The Moslem Brotherhood works the same way. Peace, rights, poitivity, unity, integration, infiltration; accepting it may be decades or even a century or more until they are one and the same with the structure of power.
I believe libertarians have a problem preventig the from doing that, thus dooming them to forever being a rand phenomenon and just someones excuse and warning example:
Libertarianism is inherently and intrinsically egotist on an individual level. As long as that remains, any and all attempts will end like the one in Vermont a couple of years back. Note that the only defence of that experiment from pages like Reason and such, was rhetoric to the tune of "not real libertarians".
Heard that from commies 'til they wisened up.
Love your description of the Biden presidency! The imagery fits perfectly.
"And the GOP being the GOP, they couldn’t simply ‘replace’ it with a patient giving money to the doctor for services rendered like every successful industry in the country."
Including every INSURANCE industry OTHER THAN health insurance, the most heavily regulated and manipulated insurance industry by a country mile. Gee, I wonder if that could be why.
Yes, most Republicans are less bad than most Democrats. Why not step outside the politicians? Start with Dennis Kucinich for President, and Ron Paul for VP. Kucinich is a Democrat with genuinely libertarian tendencies. Ron Paul is the definition of libertarianism. Sure, Kucinich is old and may not live out his term. Unlike Joe Biden, that might be a good thing.
"Sure, Kucinich is old and may not live out his term. Unlike Joe Biden, that might be a good thing."
Right. And RON Paul is a spring chicken. (And if you meant RAND: Right. Rand Paul will run as DK's VP.)
If your "dream" ticket ran as third party, they would only pull enough otherwise-Republican votes to hand a 40% "landslide" to our current betters, the Statist Democrats.
If your "dream" ticket attempted to win a major party nomination, the Statist Party establishments would destroy them, one way or another.
If your "dream" ticket managed somehow to win the Republican nomination, they would lose in the biggest landslide in history. Kucinich has NO REPUBLICAN constituency.
You're probably right.
I responded too sarcastically, M. Bill. I might be wrong and you might be right, also. Your thinking on finding libertarians to run has obvious merit, but I don't think it will succeed (yet). I think we need to support (not find) uncaptured, and uncapturable, libertarian FRIENDLY but (in '22 and '24, anyway) mainstream-politics-ready candidates. (We supported DJT in 2016 in desperation, and got lucky that he qualified as the former.)
I think having a Libertarian PARTY has backfired (pulled more anti-Dem votes than anti-Rep, giving the ANTI-libertarian party, the D's, an ironic advantage).
Libertarianism (today) needs to be a movement, not a Party.
My problem is that establishing a viable third party has been on a continuous loop for decades: Yes, it's needed, just not yet.
Boycott. Fake elections and fake candidates in a fake Republic.
Boycott leads ultimately to bloodshed. We will not save Constitutionally enshrined individual freedom by ignoring its forever enemy, the overbearing, rapacious State.
Boycott will only make permanent the Democrat-led State, the further death of the wealth-creating private sector, and the impoverishing/dis-enfranchising of we non-elitists. Our Democrat overlords will not care about, nor even make note of, a 20-30% voter participation rate, and those in-the-tank-for-State 20-30% will party like they've won the lottery...until they realize their store shelves and food pantries are as bare as their withering bodies and souls.
You think those fake things will miss YOUR participation, or go away because YOU did?
You boycott, and the next thing you know, the Democrat Police State will be knocking on your door, your pre-filled ballot ready for you to sign, you good citizen. You must have just "forgotten" to vote. Don't worry, esteemed citizen, there won't be a penalty...THIS time.
I think Rob D might be on to it. Focus on local - if you can’t walk up to a candidate’s door and knock, it’s not worth your time.
Build up local autonomy as much as you can.
If the State comes for you over it, be ready to fight. Make it cost them dearly.
We know they can’t last forever. Just ask the Taliban.
But we’ve gotta get to work. No one will do it for us.
The insurance companies and every element of the medical industry from the corporatized hospital systems to the pharmaceutical behemoths love Obamacare. In other words, everyone who caused the problem benefitted from the so-called solution. That will be true for any problem the uni-party pretends to solve. We need to break up the parties.
The more a Government intervenes in the economy, the more it regulates, subsidises, taxes the more vested interests such as big corporations, organised labour will interact with Government to limit damaging regulation, help write it to their advantage, get a share of subsidies/tax breaks - this is known as Corporate capture and Corporate welfare.
The solution is deregulation of the economy. Keep Government out of the economy.
I'd agree with you except that this country wasn't all that pretty when our economy had no regulation. But I do understand the dangers of regulation. It always seems to miss the target.
Well we employ regulators to regulate. They do some fine work. But then they are out of work and must find more to regulate. Check Parkinson's laws. The Trump administration forced examination of regulations and was able to start to remove some. Perhaps we could hope that we only need regulators to maintain rather than create. Any look at the Federal Registry where they are published can see the growth over the years. The Federal Procurement code in order to reduce fraud is beyond understanding as are IRS rules. All of that reduces productivity. And employs a lot of people to find ways to evade them. Moreover, in today's corrupt world the regulators actually have created rules that prevent progress by eliminating competition. We built the system that now has gotten away from us.
Simplicity and consistency, that is really all that is needed and should guide every regulation. But then simplicity and consistency doesn't allow for those juicy loopholes.
I wish it was written in the Constitution that all laws expire every 10 years. Keep the politicians busy passing laws we already agreed at one point were necessary instead of thinking of new ways to screw us over.
True, but even when laws sunset, they renew them. Look at the Patriot Act.
I also think every law should be only a page long. If it can't be read in five minutes or less, it is automatically disqualified.
"...when our economy had no regulation."
Excuse me, when exactly was that?
well said
Give an example. I guarantee any example you give will involve Government interference.
The Industrial Revolution - which gave the greatest surge in prosperity in the history of Mankind - started in Britain precisely because it was an unregulated economy. It could have started elsewhere, France, Germany both rich Countries, big populations, lots of clever people but regulated - France centrally by the King and interminable committees, Germany (as was then) by anti-industry land- owning class.
The USA’s economy surged ahead in the late 19th and early 20th Century because of a lack of regulation.
A fee market economy is inherently, internally regulated by reputation, competition and voluntary exchange. Nobody is forced to buy and does so on terms and conditions decided by the parties to it - if either party doesn’t like it, the exchange doesn’t take place.
Both parties have to receive in exchange something they perceive as being of higher value to them. In that case both parties are wealthier because of the exchange - that is how wealth is created. Reputation is vital to ensure existing customers are retained, new customers are attracted.
By regulation, subsidy, taxes, patronage, protectionism Government perverts free market regulation and makes us poorer, but enriches the political class and their cronies.
You do understand that there were incredible numbers of victims of the industrial revolution, right? Every idea can and will be abused. No regulation can be as bad as too much regulation.
but you misunderstand the nature of bad.
One is bad caused by intentional intervention. This is bad.
The other is bad caused by us free people, a natural force of the universe, with far more beneficiaries than victims. Human's relationship to nature was a victim of the industrial revolution, but one only needs to look at population size to see that the industrial revolution was a net benefit to the species in survival terms.
I am afraid I have done a poor job of expressing that idea, but anyway.
I think I understand what you're saying, but while over time, the Industrial Revolution has been a boon, in the beginning it was a highly abusive system and for the people it chewed up and spit out (quite literally in some cases) it was not a good thing. Government made it kinder to the environment and to the working class, and it needed to be kinder. Only all of history will say whether or not the Industrial Revolution helped our species survive. It may have given us room to grow so that we overpopulate and kill ourselves out. But that's neither here nor there. That's something neither you nor I will be around to judge.
The brutal truth is we need a governing body to keep the strong from abusing the weak, as happened in the Industrial Revolution. We also need a government to keep the strong from creating a mess they don't have to live in, such as with pollution around industrial areas. In democracy, that "governing body" is made up of regular people representing regular people to make decisions about how to best balance the rights of the whole and the rights of individual.
What has happened in our system, which is arguably no longer a democracy, is that the government has become an entity itself, one that is only tenuously accountable to its original mission.
In order for a society to survive you need to walk a tightrope between a "free" system where the strongest, most aggressive, and most abusive, most self-serving individuals and corporations reign and a totalitarian system where a malignant, living entity called "government" made up of a different set of conniving, aggressive, abusive, and self-serving individuals reigns. It's ugly, but the sooner we recognize that we've drifted too far one way, the sooner we can drift back the other and look for that sweet spot.
"We need to break up the parties."
But that would require antithetical, and therefore self-defeating, use of force. Individuals must have the freedom to choose for themselves what political parties to form, join, and especially vote for. The rest is education and persuasion, to include frustration that other individuals don't agree with you.
We must not attempt to break up any faction/party. We must, instead, regain control of them from their Statist establishments and capture.
You're never going to "gain control." They are business monopolies, plain and simple.
Monopolies are inherently unstable, and therefore fleeting.
No offense intended, but your defeatist attitude is...well...self-defeating.
And which monopolies have been fleeting without government intervention?
ALL private-sector, non-captured (non-State-created/enforced) monopolies.
I disagree that monopolies require government (State) action to end. That is exactly the OPPOSITE of reality. They require State action to ENDURE. The free market, given time, utterly destroys ALL monopolies that are NOT State sanctioned.
Or as a cynic put it years back: dissolve the People and elect a new one.
I hadn't heard that, but it is spot on in illuminating the Statist/Socialists mindset that the individual (the precise meaning of People) and his/her/their rights are to be sublimated to the group/society/State and the whims of its elitist, hidden, and self-chosen leadership.
For 100+ years (with slight exceptions here and there) we get to choose between more-government and a little less more-government.
And here we are.
If we want freedom, why do we keep relying on leaders to give it to us?
Well, we shouldn't, but we have allowed the Federal Leviathan such growth that now we must.
trees don't grow to the sky, as someone much wiser than I am once observed
the "trees" of State, if left to their own devices, grow as high as they want.
i believe you misjudged that someone's wisdom.
maybe I did, or maybe the sky is higher than we thought
good one, but maybe the State trees are too
Take the long view. We won’t see it in our lifetime, but we can plant seeds.
And that little less is getting lesser and lesser.
The two parties and their never ending kabuki are the froth on the wave, the permanent unelected government *is* the wave. For details, see: https://fletcher.tufts.edu/sites/default/files/pubs_glennon-michael-national-security-double-government.pdf
Can any of you comment on Chip Roy and Louie Gohmert, both of Texas. They aren’t my own reps so I’m not sure but they both seem pretty solid.
Well, I thought there was a general consensus across Substacks sharing the sensibilities of this one that we've got a Uniparty that strangles in the womb any candidate attempting to break for unpolluted territory.
I was enough of a moron to have voted twice for Bernie in the primaries, and he's proven as much a shill for the fetid swamp as any of 'em. Of course, joke's on me for thinking a "socialist" was a sensible choice under any circumstances.
I've said before somewhere, and will again, that the most important elections are at the micro-local level because they are the beginning of the journey for anyone really determined to have any sort of future in politics. The trick is to find, support and protect from smears and fake scandals genuinely independent candidates, starting with school boards, and ensure they can build a meaningful political resume so they needn't prostitute themselves to either party. This is a generation's work. Take your vitamins, guys.
it's all going to become more local, but only about three generations into the future once the current crashing and burning has faded into the past. The survivors won't be thinking about gender pronouns in Uganda
‘ Of course, joke's on me for thinking a "socialist"…’
Or on you for thinking any of the Parties are not socialist by any other name… Socialism (and Fascism) = elevation of the State over the individual; central economic planning and control. In which Party is that not policy?
Agreed. The GOP Is currently filled with uni-party candidates. Republicans are useless.
The only hope is people like Joe Kent (WA), JD Vance (OH), Royce White (MN). Let’s just hope and pray they win and aren’t consumed by the beast that is DC.
There are others, but too few. Rand Paul needs more Rand Pauls to effect the change we need.
Perhaps we’re the Rand Pauls.
Sad but true!