By now that’s the organs from a HUNDRED THOUSAND Chinese subjects, probably more as things have progressed. The clearing of the villages for the recent Olympic events and structures probably added to the harvest. Ditto for the ongoing flooding of various valleys as a very aggressive hydroelectric dam construction program goes forward. The Chinese well tolerated the murder, starvation, execution, or otherwise untimely deaths of some 20 Million citizens in Mao’s power consolidation, the various Great Five-Year Plans, the upheavals of the Great Leap Forward, and the cultural revolution of 1960’s. A few hundred thousand persons butchered to create actual cash income is clearly no hardship to the STATE. By now, it is probably institutionalized, with timetables, quotas, and incentives for the most productive managers.

On the other hand, as the De Beers diamond folk noted, an over-supply of product tends to depress the market price, so somewhere in the Celestial Courts there is probably an anonymous department charged with tracking demand and reckoning the futures market for human organs of various sorts. Those now include, by the way, bone tissue, ligaments, cartilage, and various membranes, arteries, veins, valves, etc., in addition to the internal organs.

Some folks have always argued that, well, that’s just the inscrutable Oriental mind for you. They have such a different way of looking at the value of life…

The Left has the same attitude. The proletariat are fodder for their mill. The Worker’s Paradise was a prison in every country that went Communist. It was death or decades in the prison labor camps for any who tried to escape. Guards with machine guns, barbed wire fences humming with lethal current, and vicious dogs, and still people desperate for freedom risked all those to get out.

Even after the Soviet Union set up a “puppet” Communist government in East Germany, tourist and commercial traffic moved freely east and west. But As Stalin became increasingly paranoid and determined to keep western agents out and stop the loss of citizens heading to the West (remember the Berlin Airlift?) several million East Germans crossed the border into West Germany.

In Berlin – with portions administered by Britain, France and the U.S. despite its location within East Germany – the cross-border escapes were dramatic and highly visible, taking place in full view of watching citizens and news reporters. It was a humiliating public rejection of Communist rule, and represented a serious economic drain of some of its best trained and most productive citizens.

Uncle Joe didn’t like it.

The East Germans cleared a corridor SURROUNDING West Berlin, Built high concrete walls, set up barbed wire entanglements, land mines on posts, guard towers with machine guns, floodlights, sirens, and loud hailers.

I remember seeing news film showing people shot and left to bleed to death as they tried to scramble across the “no-man’s land.

These are reminders of how an authoritarian government treats its subjects. Screw them, punish and kill them for trying to escape, then once they’ve become meek subjects, slaughter them like hogs for market.

More people have been murdered in the last century by their own governments than have been killed by invading armies.

If we aren’t careful, this is where we will end up with the Supremacist-State-trending Ezekiel, a platoon of unelected “czars”, and an administration steeped in the unashamed criminality of the Chicago Political Machine.

The totally crazoid thing about those pathetic losers from Chicago is that they really think they can get away with the same college pranks on the international stage as have worked for them in stealing elections and blackmailing judges on the take in the City of Broad Shoulders. Urkle and his crew of pick-pockets, swindlers, and petty larcenists will find their low cunning just doesn’t cut it with actual ruthless murdering bastards who haven’t hesitated to slaughter, butcher, bomb, eviscerate, gas, incinerate, defenestrate, de-ball, and generally kill hundreds of thousands of their own people just to be able to enjoy a good cigar in a quiet suite of oaken paneled rooms overlooking a sparkling lake.

People in Chicago can tolerate a fair amount of graft and corruption so long as they’re able to generally enjoy the freedom that being an American has historically allowed.

When O’Bumble’s cheap crooks try to apply the same methods to destroying the country beyond the city limits of Chicago, while simultaneously expecting the respect of real international butchers, the contrasts are going to heighten dramatically.

As to those who choose security over freedom, they should be aware that it is a false choice. Those who have given up their freedom in favor of a more ‘secure’ life, have also eventually had their security taken away. The platform of the fascists seemed to offer more security, taking away decision making from the populace, but how secure were these people after a few years, and concentration camps and all out war took hold? How secure were the inhabitants (I hesitate to call them citizens) of the Soviet Union?

You can even see this effect in the lighter forms of socialism practiced in Europe today. People gave up their freedom in order to make health care more secure. But how secure are they if they have to pull their own teeth?

You cannot have security without freedom.

I was pretty surprised, I wasn’t paying much attention and then the name caught my ear and he started talking about pulling teeth with pliers and using super glue!

Having noted that the movement was totally unconcerned with a nuked-up adversary-cum-potential enemy, he concluded that basic national security demanded that somehow the ‘ban-the-bomb’ folk must be provisionally disenfranchised unless & until such time as they were able to face national security as the fundamental existential reality.

It’s said, it was the “peace sign” that really got to him –at the time it wasn’t so much a broad ‘peace’ sign as a narrow ‘ban the bomb’ sign.

That’s a pretty good way to ensure the nation as a whole stays productive, but doesn’t do much for ensuring that the system isn’t abused. Perhaps in addition to owning shares, shareholders must also have served in the armed forces… hmmm… too restrictive, it seems.

I had a crazy idea about having some checks and balances, scrapping the CEO idea (how one can avoid the abuse of power in such a scenario is impossible) : shareholders wield political power in the form of being able to select members of a legislative lower house, in charge of passing bills, requiring a 2/3rds majority.

Military veterans who have completed their service, but still beholden to the constitution, whatever it might be, have the power to select members of a senate, who would have the power to strike down laws requiring only 1/3rds to succeed.

The franchise to elect a president with substantive powers would require a voter to have both military service AND being a shareholder.

The way I see voting nowadays is this: What gives a person the right to decide the fate of another, since that is essentially what voting is about? It’s not a born right; you have to earn it, through military service and personal wealth (may be inherited tho).

The upshot of this is that it automatically weeds out the unmotivated, the unproductive, the lazy (mostly). How the system may be abused by those who do have the power to vote may be a problem, though I think the shareholders and veterans will mostly be countervailing forces playing off each other.

Bingo, Wretchard. Bingo.

And as pathetic as these creatures seem to the rest of us, perhaps our mistake was to discount them, assume they were few in number and their concerns not important. But they are apparently large in number, and reeally all they’re doing is pursuing their own self interest as best they can. Unfortunately, the path they’ve taken creates a lot of collateral damage for the rest of us. But it
doesn’t have to be that way. If we rethink our voting rules, as Contrarian mentioned.

(warning, crackpot ideas ahead. Read with extreme caution)

Image if you will, a country that has a relatively generous welfareworkfare system, one that provides a safety net of food, clothing, shelter and medical care. It’s open to all citizens, but with one catch. You can’t vote if you’re receiving any public money. That includes government employees and government pension holders. Work for the government and you don’t get to vote (we make an exception for Military service). Take money out of the public treasury and you get no say in who runs the government – but you probably don’t want a say anyway, just the assurance you’ll be taken care of. Pay your own way in the world, taking all the risks and accepting the responsibilty associated with it, and you get to pick the government.

Now, some people may ask why would such an electorate have a generous welfare system? Why would the self-sufficient vote to tax themselves in order to support the dysfunctional?

Self-interest. We know now that the dysfunctional are larger in number than we thought. And really they’re not completely dysfunctional. They can be prefectly productive members of society as long as somebody else makes the more important decisions for them. They’re content, happy and valuable memebers of society with limited responsibility. Sure, it sounds horrible, proles or serfs, and in a way yes that’s what they are, but in the society I’m describing, it’s not an accident of birth that puts someone in one class or the other, it’s a personal choice everyone makes for themselves. And self-interest among those allowed to vote provides for them so as to avoid repeating the problems we’re going through now.

I think the last half century in the US proved that a large and prosperous economy can afford a generous welfare system. The problem is that if you let the welfare recepients become a political power block, they will eventually destroy the prosperity because of the corruption and pandering and exponential growth. If we could eliminate the corruption, pandering and growth but keep the welfare system, wouldn’t that be near-perfect? It would allow everyone to pursue happiness as they saw fit. If that involved striving for more, challenging yourself and shouldering responsibility, you’re the sort of person who should be included in decision making -you’ve shown that you take it seriously. If it involved avoiding responsibility as much as possible because that just isn’t something you’re good at, okay, there’s a place for you too, commensurate with your abilities, which means you’re not invited to the decision-making party, but that’s okay, you don’t wan’t or can’t handle the responsibility anyway.

The flaw in the old feudal system (which the Progressives would like to return to) is that it pigeonholed everyone as either a noble or a serf, regardless of what they wanted or what they were cut out for. Serfs who wanted more control over their lives were oppressed, and nobels who had no ability to handle responsibility ran society into the ground or let it wither away as manipulative con-men wormed their way into power. The flaw in the original American system that replaced it is that it made everyone nobles, even those who were better cut out to be serfs. Eventually the rent-seeking con-men found a way to exploit that, and that exploitation led us to the mess we have today.

Farfetched, isn’t it? But is it unthinkable? How many things that were unthinkable even 12 months ago are no longer so. Some eggs would have to be cracked to make that omlette, but I’m really worried that eggs are going to get cracked anyway.

I think Wretchard is on to something. There are millions of spoiled, middle age adolescents, living very self destructive lives, who yearn for a strong hand to keep them upright in the saddle. ‘ Life is just so hard” for these people, and they viscerally hate anyone who fully enjoys what freedom has to offer. It’s pure jealousy.

These people are the fodder for the authoritarian socialism that is driving the Western World into a totalitarian ditch.

Micro-fracture surgery recovery protocol calls for one month on crutches, so that there is no weight-bearing stress on the knee. A few weeks after surgery I got the go-ahead to drive my car, and my doctor gave me an application for a temporary handicap parking sticker from the DMV. I show up at the DMV on crutches- of course there’s no automatic door. I crutch over and get a number so that I can wait in the filthy, crowded waiting area. One hour and forty-five minutes later, I’m summoned to a window so that I can submit my application and pay my $5 processing fee. I received my temporary sticker, with a final “permanent” sticker to follow in the mail.

The private sector portion of my experience was effective, efficient, and the people were much more pleasant! The public sector portion of my experience was an annoying pain in the neck loaded with mind-numbing inefficiencies and indifferent state employees.

My favorite quote about government health insurance is from P.J. O’Rourke: “If you think your health care is expensive now, wait till you see how much it costs when it’s free!”