This fairly famous quote has been kicking around my head for quite a while now:
This basic idea has been repeated in half a dozen forms throughout history, and generally I agree with the gist — when it comes to government, people will get whatever they put up with. But recently I’ve been wondering — what if we don’t actually elect the government? Do we still deserve it?
In America, government was designed to be incredibly limited — and for good reason. Mastery of a topic or industry is extremely difficult and takes thousands of hours of dedication. As a true master of your craft, you’re dealing with variables that ‘normies’ don’t even consider. And when you have total mastery over a subject, you can do the seemingly impossible…..
…….and when you don’t have the required mastery over a subject, your expensive equipment ends up at the bottom of the drink — or maybe abandoned on an Afghani airstrip.
By now it’s clear government has no mastery over anything. Just days after pledging support of money and weapons to Israel, Joe Biden (or whoever plays him on Twitter) was bragging about also supporting Palestine.
This is like declaring war on Germany but sending care packages to German citizens suffering from the effects of war instead of giving those care packages to American troops. And of course, the GOP is already lining up behind Biden and his insane desire to drag us into World War III. When I call the GOP the Washington Generals of the uniparty, this is EXACTLY the kind of stuff I’m talking about:
Of course McConnell views the issues as interconnected! With Ukraine spending becoming increasingly unpopular, McConnell knows the best chance of continuing to shovel good money after bad is to tie it to the popular Current Thing.
Even when American representatives are in Israel, the uniparty defends its own — this time in the form of Lindsey Graham deflecting attention from Rashida Tlaib’s public statements on the situation in the country he’s literally standing in, because the situation in Israel is somehow an American domestic issue?
“YOU’RE NOT GONNA SCREW THIS UP! GET THIS GUY OUT OF HERE!” - warmongering warmonger Lindsey Graham, defender of democracy.
The recent Speaker debacle is another example of the GOP donning that smelly Generals jersey. Jim Jordan got 200 public votes in an official vote, but behind closed doors and via secret ballot, the GOP gave him the boot. (Sure would be nice to get a list of the people who voted for Jordan publicly but against him privately!) The party then demanded more secret votes, as well as loyalty pledges to publicly support the person who wins the majority of a secret vote.
(That person was RINO Tom Emmer, who eventually dropped out of the race after Trump declared that voting for Emmer would be a ‘tragic mistake’. This is a turn of events I didn’t expect — I figured that Democrats would put Emmer over the line, if only to re-start the war funding ASAP.)
I often say that government is supposed to be the referees of America, not its rulers. To further the analogy, government has now decided it should also be in charge of concessions, security, cleaning, alcohol monitoring, and running the gift shops. Soon these things are built into entire industries (imagine the profit for your hot-dog-bun selling buddy when he gets an exclusive contract!), and nobody’s even learning how to be a referee any longer.
The worst part is because government ruins everything it touches, as it starts doing more, life gets worse. But because government has promised to “take care” of the people, it claims that by doing EVEN MORE, government can solve these new problems. But by doing EVEN MORE, they create new problems. Soon, the bathrooms are overflowing with trash, people are wandering in off the street without tickets, the hot dog stand is closed because it didn’t get the order of buns from the politically connected vendor (who got paid anyway), and nobody is even trying to referee the game.
Perhaps the most perfect example of government-led destruction involves the dollar. Government was not supposed to be able to create money on a whim. The founders knew from the implosion of the Continental dollar that politicians and bankers would ALWAYS collude to print the wealth out from under us — that’s why they said ONLY GOLD AND SILVER shall be money.
Well, government predictably ignored as much of that mandate as possible, fully severing the link between “hard money” and the US dollar in the early 1970s — with predictable consequences:
When the money is fake, the rest of the economy is doomed to follow. It’s easy to imagine a future in which the only way to survive is to rely on the very government that has ruined the value of your savings and labor.
But money isn’t the only example of government assuming the power to “solve” a problem and instead making it worse. The Department of Education has only been operating since 1980, and by nearly all accounts, education is worse today than the day it was started.
The housing market is another perfect example. Government regulations (including border regulations) drive up the cost of housing, often while other government regulations prevent building of new structures. Now rent is out of control as the industry suffers from price inflation as well as artificially reduced supply. (Perhaps if government did more????)
Want another example? How about the medical industry, especially since Obamacare? Remember when they promised health care costs would come down with this new system efficiently run by Super Serious government workers? Unsurprisingly, all those broken eggs never actually materialized into that delicious (and cheap!) omlette we were promised.
Making matters worse, the people covered in egg guts but failing to make breakfast repeatedly tell us how MORAL they are compared to those Evil People Over There. If you don’t like the Department of Education, you hate kids. If you want to close the border, you’re racist. If you doubt that adding government will make healthcare cheaper, you hate the poor.
We saw this in spades during covid. If you didn’t agree with covid restrictions, you were an anti-science grandma-killer — but if you followed along with whatever BS rules the political class came up with that week, you were a “Good Person.” This is a favorite play of the political class, because who doesn’t want to be a “Good Person”? For over a year, we were subjected to running case and death counts, with the unrelenting message of “we are doing this because we care about you.”
But now that the excess deaths are piling up, where are all those people who were mindlessly bleating “IF IT SAVES ONE LIFE”? They certainly aren’t interested in figuring out why people are dying at accelerated rates all around the globe, as evidenced by the “crowd” in British Parliament when Andrew Bridgen was (finally) allowed to discuss the matter publicly.
Golly Gee, it seems like all that virtue signaling about the health of English citizens was only a ruse! When push comes to shove, the politicians would rather cover their eyes and ears rather than face the consequences of their actions.
Speaking covid-era events, George Floyd is back in the news as some people have evidentially just learned that Floyd was on a lethal-level-dose of Fentanyl when he died (more likely, they saw Tucker’s recent episode regarding the story).
For the entire summer of 2020, America was aflame (literally) after “racist police” killed Floyd. The event sparked coast-to-coast protests (complete with pallets of bricks?) and led to the “BLMization” of nearly every corporation in America. The Floyd protests even overshadowed covid:
Part of me thinks the ‘authorities’ had to ‘sanction’ the Floyd protests because they knew protesters were NOT going to abide by covid rules — better to get in front of the situation and pretend you’re in charge and “allowing” the protests.
Of course, because this is CNN I have to point out that these health professionals didn’t actually say what the headline says they said. In fact, these people SPECIFICALLY mentioned that OTHER protests WERE NOT included in this letter:
In other words, Floyd protests were OK, but other protests were too dangerous because of covid — including protests against the covid measures themselves. (If you asked about the logic of this, you were shouted down.)
This in-your-face double standard serves to divide people further, and that divide was actively widened by a media terrified that Trump was on his way to cruising to a 2020 victory. So we got the “racist cop” story that led to “racist cop” protests — with the extra hilarity of mayors going out to protest their own “racist police forces”……..
But I noticed a funny thing during the trial — government never claimed Chauvin was racist. From what I saw of the trial (which was a lot but not everything), government never even insinuated the reason that Floyd’s skin color is the reason why he was killed.
Yet racism was prevailing narrative in the Floyd case (as it was in the Rittenhouse case), because it furthered the ball downfield. If a police officer killed a white dude who was off his meds by kneeling on his neck, most people would have a hard time coming up with the guy’s name — Tony Timpa. His case didn’t make national headlines. His family wasn’t given $27 million before the trial of the police officer who killed him. His death didn’t further the narrative, so it quietly went down the memory hole.
Sooner or later, these fake narratives take their toll on people trying to get real news, as evidenced by this chart of falling trust in media:
This data is REALLY bad, and SHOULD force some sort of self-reflection from the lying media that’s actively destroying its credibility. Instead, we get MORE lies DIRECTLY UNDER THE CHART!
Go ahead and look again at the chart above. Pay special attention to the period after Biden assumed office. Trust in media has been nosediving for Biden’s ENTIRE TERM — but here’s Axios telling us that Biden made “trust gains” with the industry. Yet from the partisan data also available in the article, it sure seems like any “trust gains” were simply hardcore Democrats who “trusted” media stories during the Trump years. (The vast majority of those stories being false, it should be said.)
The now-nosediving approval of Democrats suggests that even hardcore blue voters are starting to understand that the economy Biden touts is not the same economy they see when going to the grocery store. The only real question remains — will this lead to a return to sanity, or will people respond by demanding government DO MORE to curb prices, as in Canada? (I’m not sure, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for sanity.)
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> The government you elect is the government you deserve.
I get the government that other people deserve.
There's no better example of an institution purging credibility with the public than the medical community sanctioning "racial justice" protests while condemning anti-lockdown protests as "white nationalism."
https://www.euphoricrecall.net/p/the-crisis-of-mistrust-in-american