The Return of Class Struggle
Lord Mandelson, a pro-EU British politician, warned the European project could unravel if the poverty caused by the economic crisis spreads throughout the zone. “Now this goes to the heart of the EU’s political legitimacy because whether you are from an austerity member state or a bailout country, you are likely to be dissatisfied for a long time to come with the economic state of Europe and the price you are paying for Europe’s indebtedness and its relative failure to generate the wealth it needs to pay for its high standard of living.”
What unites the disparate classes and nationalities of the continent is money. The deal was ‘sign on to the EU and win a prize’. But the prizes have been running short lately. That means the class struggle is back. And this time the divide can no longer be portrayed as exclusively running between the capitalists and the workers. Super-sized bureaucracies have created a new division: between the the guys who spend the budget and the great unwashed whose taxes pay the budget.
The new divide is contaminating everything even in America. After the massacre of school children in Connecticut was being used to illustrate the dangers of the Second Amendment, a curious thing happened. It began to morph, unbidden, into a class struggle issue.
It may have started when Piers Morgan mocked a guest on his talk show as “an unbelievably stupid man” for disagreeing with him on the subject of gun control. However, his British accent worked its subliminally upper-class magic in American minds. Through this filter, Morgan didn’t come across as just another dude disagreeing on the subject of the Second Amendment on CNN but the high and mighty Lord Banastre Tarleton riding roughshod over some homesteaders in the New World. The thing about the Voice of Command is that you have to know when to use it. Morgan didn’t.
It led to a petition for his deportation which evoked a hilarious counterpetition from Britain saying that after spending so much effort getting rid of him they didn’t want him back. Then David Gregory pulled his now infamous high capacity magazine stunt on national TV. He brandished a 30-round capacity magazine on his show to illustrate how illegal it was — after the DC cops told his producers he couldn’t do it. When asked how the cops could tolerate a direct challenge the sheepish answer was: it’s David Gregory and besides, he wasn’t actually going to shoot anybody. He succeeded in reminding everyone, as Mark Steyn put it that “laws are for little people — and not for David Gregory”.
But Steyn makes a more subtle point. In an increasingly bureaucratic country so many laws are inevitably enacted that it’s impossible to live out a day without being in technical violation of something. Eventually society needs some way to grant tacit immunity otherwise it couldn’t function. Without special treatment Gregory wouldn’t be able to make it across the street without violating some obscure ordinance.
To Howard Kurtz & Co., it’s “obvious” that Gregory didn’t intend to commit a crime. But, in a land choked with laws, “obviousness” is one of the first casualties — and “obviously” innocent citizens have their “obviously” well-intentioned actions criminalized every minute of the day. Not far away from David Gregory, across the Virginia border, eleven-year-old Skylar Capo made the mistake of rescuing a woodpecker from the jaws of a cat and nursing him back to health for a couple of days. For her pains, a federal Fish & Wildlife gauleiter accompanied by state troopers descended on her house, charged her with illegal transportation of a protected species, issued her a $535 fine, and made her cry. Why is it so “obvious” that David Gregory deserves to be treated more leniently than a sixth grader? Because he’s got a TV show and she hasn’t?
I wouldn’t be too hard on Gregory. He wants to be able to breathe without picking up a rulebook. Why shouldn’t he live unfettered if he can? All he really did was show a metal box with a spring in it on TV. Without his special juice he probably couldn’t clean the soles on his shoes. Exemptions are the necessary flip side of the politically correct state. They are the price we pay for enacting showcase but unworkable rules.
Close Guantanamo and open a secret prison in Benghazi. Make Obamacare mandatory and issue a waiver. Forbid assassinations but run a drone program killing hundreds. Otherwise you might have another 9/11. Someone once remarked “I’m against torture but I hope that if some agent discovers they have a nuke hidden under New York City he’ll do the right thing.” Sure. Couldn’t have New York City going up in smoke could we?
A split level world is the necessary consequence of a split level society — we were on the subject of class warfare, weren’t we? Without exemptions nothing would work because without class distinctions a class society would never work.
But sometimes the disconnect shows up the official pious narrative. When Chicago’s John Kass was invited on TV to denounce gun violence on CNN after 500 persons were murdered in Obama’s hometown before the year was even out, he went off the script. When given an opening to denounce guns he said there had always been guns in Chicago. From way back in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Murder this year was up for one simple reason: the mayors of Chicago had stolen all the money and nobody knew what they did with it. Now there were a 1,000 fewer cops on the street, Kass said. What did you expect? Anyways, he said, who cares? Maybe one day Barack Obama would find the time to attend the funeral of one of the hundreds of black kids who routinely died in those parts, like he did in Connecticut, he suggested. Meanwhile, it was just another day in pair-o-dice. Kass can portray the “don’t mean nothing’” stare with perfection.
That blank stare is the mask behind which hides what Edwin Markham once called the “Man with the Hoe”. The toiling beast, the uncommunicative taxpayer, the guy who returns each day from work to a smaller and smaller world. One day his cherished Big Gulp softdrink is gone. The next day the transfats. The next day his gun. Littler and littler it gets — the paycheck too.
These are the people that Lord Mandelson is worried about. The giant bureaucratic state can only maintain its legitimacy if it can convince the man in the little room that despite of the obvious facts one day he will be just like the sublime beings on TV. The ones who can brandish a high capacity magazine on TV or hire bodyguards for their retinue of beautiful people. When that promise dims then the “gulfs between him and the seraphim” may become an issue. But not for the seraphim. Never for the seraphim. They’ll just float away.
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Just watched Batman “Dark Knight rising” and at the part where “Bain” stands in front of the Prison he gives a speech and it completely describes what 0bama is doing to a “T”. Of course most everyone here prophesied the coming dark days 6, 9 even 12 months ago, is this the Event Horizon, the plunge into the darkness we all spoke of, truly Evil is at work, its forces and delusions are everywhere.
CharlesWhite @ 1 – Here is your link to Youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzK97Aaj_U8
The fact so many innocuous and innocent behaviors can be illegal is a justification for strongly encrypting one’s data. Think your phones which if not locked hard (I purchased Tasker for this)can be searched willy nilly for no good cause.?
Speaking about “The Dark Knight Rising”, there still is no confirmation or denial that the fathers of both James Holmes and Adam Lanza are scheduled to be called to testify in the LIBOR scandal.
Will “Daddy made me do it?”, become the new “It’s Bush’s fault”?
The Rahmfather is in this up to his eyeballs, as a big fundraiser for Obama.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/videogallery/67666709/News/Stantis-evaluates-Rahmfather-painting
Wretchard: When that promise dims then the “gulf between him and the seraphim” may become an issue. But not for the seraphim. Never for the seraphim. They’ll just float away.
Wretchard, I think you might be mistaken on this one. In the end when push comes to shove, instead of floating away, the “seraphim” are more likely to end up killing as many people they deem necessary in order to maintain their seraphic position and power. For the time being, in their view, the little people need to be disarmed as much as possible. That way, further down the line, if a few of them get uppity only minimal actions need to be made “pour encourager les autres.“
Ignominuis, don’t sweat it too much. In a modern technological society, it is not possible to disarm the people. Put a shotgun shell in a steel pipe with a nail at the end, and you’ve got a gun. Mix two household cleaners together, and you’ve got chlorine gas in any amount you like. Mix diesel fuel and fertilizer together and you get explosives. Think about all the possibilities for making mischief with electricity. The list goes on. The seraphim would probably actually be safer leaving the people their guns, because without guns one has to actually think about making the hit …
For more on this theme, check out “America’s Ruling Class”
http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the
and of course, George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”
Make Obamacare mandatory and issue a waiver
Dr. Ferris enlightens Hank Rearden about this in Atlas Shrugged, “that’s what the rules are there for!” and now we’ve got you so play ball and you can be a winner. Not that different from 1984, I grant you.
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But Obambus tries to make it about class struggle as in the middle class and the Obamaphone class, but when he fails to prosecute the banksters, hangs with the glitteratti, and throws hundreds of millions to the VCs, we can see what class it is really all about. Where is Catwoman when you really need her?
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Kurtz is a moron, but I repeat myself. If you’re going to have a law you have to follow the law, the WHOLE IDEA is laws not men, so we don’t care what is “obvious” and what is not. If the laws no longer work without such mediation than the law is an ass, as has been pointed out, and once respect for The Law is gone, so is America and the western canon. Wave buh-bye.
THE HAVES AND THE HAVE-NOTS
The war between haves and have-nots never was
A fair fight twixt hoe and the lance
The contest was never an equal event
The have-nots had never a chance
The problems arose ‘tween the haves and the haves
Who jostled for women and gold
And land and fast horses and trade routes and such
A pastime that never grew old
Today we the have-nots have put away hoes
The haves keep their lances in vaults
They still steal the women, fast horses and gold
While dancing that old lancer’s waltz
I came to make the Dr. Floyd Ferris comment but Josh beat me to it. It’s almost like all those crazies who escaped Communism might have known something after all.
Seamless oil field pipe and the machinery used to manufacture it is quite similar to what is used to make smooth bore tank guns. An open ended large diameter pipe can be used for an improvised recoil-less cannon.
Often people will go for explosive action where time delayed flame will do a better job.
Actually, from what I’m seeing the mockery is causing blood loss from nose bleeds. Hillary’s painful rectal itch also comes to mind.
Wretchard:
“Super-sized bureaucracies have created a new division: between the the guys who spend the budget and the great unwashed whose taxes pay the budget.”
This struggle really is not between the haves and have-nots. It is between the producers and the “Clerisy”- the guys who spend the budget and who allegedly represent the have-nots but represent in reality only themselves.
The have-nots will get the shaft in the end, just like they have under Buraq. The have-nots are expendable and only useful as long as the Clerisy can use them to expand their own power, control and wealth.
I was thinking about the long term outcomes of the EU (and particularly southern Europe’s) return to the grinding poverty that marked life for many in Italy, Spain and Greece for generations. For one thing, and this is something that even somewhat well meaning folks like Thomas P.M. Barnett don’t consider, is that Russia will still have the natural resources, large amount of farmland and space available to absorb a fair number of immigrants.
Since taking in huge numbers of Chinese is probably a no-no (though if poor Tom had spent any time at MGU he’d probably assume the Russians were even now teaching Russian to their future Mandarin overlords), it only seems logical for Russia to look westward to immigrants and take in a considerable number from imploding EUrope, starting with their Orthodox brothers in Greece. As I’ve said many times, the ‘joy’ of neocons will be very shortlived at Russia being expelled from the Tartus when in the summer or autumn of 2013 Putin announces a fifteen to twenty year multi-billion euro lease for the Russian Navy at the Pireaus. After the Greeks Russia will probably start accepting more Italians and Spaniards (Catherine the Great’s finest architects were Italian) who lack the technical skills to be matched with the ever shrinking amount of jobs in German dominated Mitteleuropa and Scandinavia but still have strong backs and a willigness to farm the old collective farms of the steppe to feed hungry Chinese.
As I once told Dr. Barnett, it’s a shame he hasn’t apparently set foot in Moscow since the perestroika era, it would do wonders for his Russia outlook and Wikistrat to do so — hell he might even talk to a few Israelis who’ve gone back at least temporarily to take advantage of the Skolkovo/Silicon Wadi dealmaking.
Having been born into the lower strata of a class ridden society (WWII Britain) and having escaped from it, I’m not sure that we have a class struggle in the traditional sense. Rather, we have the case where the state insists on being master of its citizens instead of accepting its proper status as their servant.
The state should not tell its people whom they may protect, how they may protect them; what people are allowed to say, allowed to eat, allowed to drive, allowed to buy, allowed to own. The intrusions of bully government are not the actions of a servant of the people.
We might remember that in 19th century Britain the citizens often carried guns but Robert Peel’s British Police did not. In that respect at least, the Victorian British State was a servant not a master. I think we need to return to that feature of past societies where people looked after their own affairs. But we sure as hell don’t need the rigid class structure of past societies.
Why can’t we have people looking after their own affairs and at the same time having the economic freedom that inspires social mobility? Doesn’t seem like an impossible idea to have both does it?
Class or group struggle is not just a vulgar brawl or an isolated violent crisis. It is a process through which large masses find a common purpose. It must have some positive goal. This could be unobtainable or even Utopian but people have to believe in it or there is no movement.
The modern Seinfeld Left offer nothing beyond immediate gratification at the trough. There is no longer even a pretense of expertise or competency or decency, let alone an inclusive vision.
Marx offered a vision of equality where every worker would be a poet a painter and a critic. The Modern Left (Obama) offers nothing but cheap cheese and demands a payoff for free.
We can debate the relative effectiveness of positive and negative goals as long term mobilizers. Clearly antisemitism as a force of hate has staying power.
I just watched “The Omega Man” on Netflix, a sci-fi flick from 1970. Charlton Heston is the last man in LA. The “plague victim mutants” that surround him are not actual zombies. They are more like low information voters afraid of the light.
A Journalist turns activist and organizes the mutant community into a Luddite cult — the family. They all know the difference between right and wrong. It is just a very different right and wrong. The last man becomes their hate object. The leader wants to keep him around while attacking him every night. It is a ritual. That is until the Heston character develops a potential cure.
Interestingly the bio-agent that causes the plague was apparently not released by the US. That’s how old this movie is.
As if this needs to be said, the root cause of most of the homicides in Chicago this year are due to the illegal drug trade.
The Black gangs (Crips, Bloods?) versus the Latin Kings. The friction and killing are always on the edges of gang territories.
A lady I worked with son was shot in the middle of a drug skirmish in my town. Because he was an African American 18 year old, he was suspected of being in a gang by the cops when they came to the scene. They wanted his bicycle, an old piece of junk. Because.
By the way, this is not marijuana dealing. This is hard drugs – heroin, cocaine, crack. I don’t think anybody gets shot over marijuana, because it is everywhere.
And the heavy drugs are trafficked over the border by the drug cartels, among them the Sinola cartel, which was the beneficiary of the Fast and Furious gun walking caper. Hundreds of billions of dollars a year in trade, and they kill each other by the bucketfull south of the border over this. I think Rahm Emmanuel knows exactly what he is doing. He has his instructions.
Think it through. We should all be terrified.
“Government can be an unruly servant or a tyrannical master” George Washington
I think we are past the unruly servant part and we are in the tyrannical master stage.
It’s hilarious – and very frustrating – when these interlocking, overlapping Federal agencies start stepping on each other. But its not fun to be a mouse when the elephants start dancing.
When I lived in Oklahoma I recall an Indian explaining that they could request to be issued an eagle feather by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to be used in some of their rituals. And when they got the feather, another Federal agency would come take it away, since eagles were an endangered species and no one could have any of the feathers.
John Stossell described recently how chemical that has been used to kill germs in a variety of substances for over 40 years, including toothpaste, has been under study for virtually all of that time. The FDA says it is environmentally Okay but they are not sure if it is all right for humans. The EPA says they have concluded that the chemical is safe for humans but they are still studying its impact on the environment.
I already mentioned here how the Feds helped pay for a new library in a small town in Oklahoma, but that someone in the bureaucracy decided that separate male and female rest rooms constituted an unacceptable degree of discrimination. So the lcoals made sure that the bathrooms were kept locked up rather than make them coed.
This would all be funny were it not for the fact that we not only have to put up with all such crap but pay for it, too.
The United States government for the last 50 years is behaving like politicians of olde; Someone tell me where my people are running so i may lead them.
We are discussing effects of horrific mismanagement;
The U.S. Dollar is collapsing, the largest trading nations are abandoning the Dollar and moving to direct currency exchange. This is direct result of Petro-Dollar trading system instituted in 1971 and resulting dilution of its value, 90% in 40 years.
The NYSE was sold off for its Derivatives trading structure, equity trading did not factor into the price.
The largest global construction projects are all outside of the USA, financing and engineering completed without US involvement.
In the USA creation of wealth has been replaced with servicing wealth. In foreign lands servicing wealth has been replaced with creating wealth.
In foreign schools, students study and learn the basic tools of growing a society in disciplined environment ; Mathematics, Engineering, Medical, Manufacturing, Science and the basic trades.
Foreign nations are developing resources with selected joint ventures, fewer and fewer want the USA involved.
We have lost focus of what made our Nation strong; Domestic control of U.S. Dollar, constructive relationships with our trade partners, sound education system, fiscal discipline, accountability from both sides of the aisle.
Introductory quote for The Cowing of the Medical Profession by Dr. Richard N. Fogoros, at The Covert Rationing Blog.
Floyd Ferris, a bureaucrat in the novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand:
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Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed? We want them broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against.
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them.
One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone?
But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted and you create a nation of law-breakers.
=== ===
( My compliments to the famous line by the Mexican bandit leader in the film “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stinking_badges )
Probable cause? We don’t need no steenking probable cause. There are enough laws that you are always breaking some of them.
EPA Official explains its “crucify” enforcement policy
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[edited] In a 2010 video, EPA Region VI Administrator Al Armendariz explained his “philosophy of enforcement” to his staff, which he acknowledged being crude and perhaps inappropriate, but shared anyway: ”It is kind of like how the Romans conquered villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into a Turkish town, find the first five guys, and crucify ‘em. That little town was really easy to manage for the next few years.”
“You make examples out of people who are not complying with the law. You hit ‘em as hard as you can. There’s a deterrent effect. And companies that are smart see that. They decide that it’s time to clean up. And that won’t happen unless you have somebody out there making examples.”
=== ===
This might be excused if the EPA were enforcing a few laws with clearly beneficial results. But, this is the EPA enforcing thousands of vague laws, most with imperceptible results and huge fines.
President George Washington:
• Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. It is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
• Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance. They are the teeth of the people’s liberty.
There are a lot of tea leaves to read these days.
Just take CNN’s new tone for one. It is probing the Chicago team’s soft-spots for a change, and this betrayal ought to set the Obama White House to worrying.
Rush called CNN the “Clinton News Network” for a reason: CNN covered the Clinton’s butts for the full eight years of Clinton’s terms, and then continued to C their A’s for the entirety of Bush’s two terms to follow.
So, aside from ratings, why the sudden change? I’d like to hope that, after Benghazi, the Clinton’s got rattled enough to take a hard look at their Khalidi-Obama-Chicago partners in government, and that they’re recoiling from them now. These guys played Hillary and Bill for fools in Libya and Egypt: Hill got some credit for “reforming” the ME (and for promising billions of American taxpayers dollars to the region, heh!), but her bosses got the full Muslim Brotherhood agenda in both countries, AND Iran gets to keep its nukes!
So, maybe it’s payback time. Whether intentional or not, at a minimum CNN’s new tack must be sending signals to the apparatchiks that the easy ride is over. At the most, the change might be the Clinton’s figuratively sliding their knives between the ribs of America’s second “black” President.
Here’s hoping!
(The First Black President knee-capping the Second Black one: Oh, the irony it all! If the Democrats can keep this spat intramural the party’s brand may yet survive Obama.)
-S
Stevesmith has it right, it is government wallowing in it’s self importance. We shall see in the next months whether anyone will show up to actually pay for the thing.
This Gregory thing reminds me of Solzhenitsyn in his book the Oak and the Calf. Been a while, describes his fight with the soviet apparat. At one point he complains about the samizdat, the underground distribution of writings. It was done by the apparatchiks, who had typewriters and paper. They would carry out orders to hound and persecute these writers, then use the same to copy their writings to distribute, I suppose to enjoy the good writing and have the frisson of breaking the rules.
It is unfortunate that the realities of leftism applied seem to be forgotten. Not for long however. These fools can’t help themselves; the results will be identical.
Josh #8:
“But Obambus tries to make it about class struggle as in the middle class and the Obamaphone class, but when he fails to prosecute the banksters, hangs with the glitteratti, and throws hundreds of millions to the VCs, we can see what class it is really all about. Where is Catwoman when you really need her?”
As I read your passage here, Josh, I was reminded of something which has occurred to me often these last four years – the movie Brazil is no longer fiction but is a real-life description of life during the Obama years.
You know the part in the movie where people who were the protagonist’s childhood friends, but are now part of the autocratic collectivist bureaucracy’s fist, sit him down and torture him until he loses his mind and is broken forever? How much longer till then in our lives?
Larry Correia refutes the gun controllers once and for all!
Stevesmith @ 14: “I’m not sure that we have a class struggle in the traditional sense.”
Strong agreement! The point about a traditional European Lords & Commoners class system was that everyone knew his place — Upstairs or Downstairs — and for the most part accepted it. What we have developing now in the Fascist West is more like a criminal gang moving in & shaking down the marks. High Noon, if you will, where the marks are quite willing to pretend it is not happening for as long as possible. Membership in the criminal gang is not related to class at all — a priapic saxophonist is as welcome as an Indonesian slacker, as long as he brings something useful to the gang.
Of course, it all comes to an end. The criminals either win and then turn on each other, or stir up enough resentment among the marks that they hire the Magnificent Seven. The only question is how long it will take.
By the way, NUJ @ 13 has a point: Russia as the new frontier to which the world’s disaffected & ambitious gravitate. Stranger things have happened. Not to mention the additional draw of those Russian ladies!
This post should be read with ‘The N Commandments’ that you wrote back in 2010.
Sit down and shut up like good little girls and boys, opinions are for the ruling class only. Nice little life you got there, if you get out of line little peons in flyover country, it would be a shame if you got caught breaking a law you didn’t even know existed.
OT: Jonathan Karl did a much, much better job today running ABC’s This Week, than Stephanopoulos has done in the past couple of years, Steph has gone full Pravda mode and is now worse than useless. Too bad they didn’t give Tapper the show and keep him at ABC, he did a great job, too.
Still I find myself agreeing with Howard Dean and Marc Thiessen – let’s go over this “cliff”. People voted for Obambus, now let them pay for it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-not-let-taxes-rise-on-the-middle-class/2012/12/28/b7f69ace-50fe-11e2-8b49-64675006147f_story.html
Also, I recommend to ALL REPUBLICANS – if you talk to anyone who wants to preserve the BUSH tax cuts, please refer to them as the BUSH tax cuts. The more Obambus goes with BUSH and Republican ideas, the better we will all do. One of the reasons Romney lost is he did not stand up for Bush and Republicans, so he presented himself as lost and alone, and nobody likes that.
Exemptions are the necessary flip side of the politically correct state. They are the price we pay for enacting showcase but unworkable rules.
Bingo. And the exemptions are issued by the folks who are equaler than us.
Tumbrels, guillotines – or clear the legislative jungle. For every paragraph of new law, two old ones must be excised.
30. Insufficiently Sensitive
My fantasy for reducing the number of laws at all levels – Federal, State and Municipal – is to take a Texas sized red felt tip pen and arbitrarily but systematically strike out every second law on the books without any regard for their content. I call it “straight edge reform” because you would need a straight edge to do it neatly. After the fact, some major “oopsies” could be corrected but I’m hoping that arbitrarily striking out only half the laws would be a good start.
As a side benefit it would be fun to see which agencies disappeared along with their enabling legislation.
28- I think there should be chances for people to speak when the government isn’t helping with basic interests. Not as some sort of trick to find spies, but as a way to hear good ideas and listen to what people are saying.
Perhaps the most absurd example of obsolete laws hanging around like TSR programs (anybody remember them, from the days of computers with 4K of RAM?) is this milk price nonsense associated withe the fiscal cliff.
Back in 1949 there were Federal milk price supports that kept the price not low, but very high in order to benefit the farmers. This was not totally eliminated, either. I recall store owners in SC in the 60′s and 70′s being threatened with arrest because they were selling milk below the state-prescribed price. And Sen Jeffords jumped to the Dem party largely so he could protect the New England milke price supports regime – and that is one reason the cost of gasoline is so high, since Tom Dasche used Dem control of the Senate to prevent a vote on drilling in ANWAR from even coming to the floor.
Now, today, if a new AG bill is not passed we will go back to those thrilling days of yesteryear, and it is claimed the price of milk will double. Not, mind you, because we need the Feral Govt to keep the price of milk down, but because it will revert to its old evil ways and artificially jack it up.
In engineering we at times encounter specifications and requirements whose origins are lost in antiquity and which continue to impose costs and limitations that are no longer appropriate. I recall in particular a valve specification that made perfect sense when applied to the P-51 but merely caused cost and production delays when applied to jet fighters. At least we try to fix it when we find these things, but Congress never seems to. They just pile one absurdity atop another one.
Ah, but you must remember, WWII Britain didn’t arise fully-formed. It evolved from an earlier England where the State and the Upper Class were one and the same, where the Nobility used the State to extract a living from the sweat of the little guys. The early State was the master and not the servant because the early state was literally the Lord of the Manor. Most of a millenium later, Britain as wealthy enough it was a better deal for the Lords to temper their greed and avoid revolution. A nastly little incident with a guy on a horse and some nobles getting a dirt nap at the hands of the commoners helped convince them.
What we’re seeing today is an attempt to create a new class of Lords of the Manor. Wealth is running short, and we’ve gone long enough without hanging any of our “servants” that they’ve lost their fear of it. It will get ugly.
34. JMH
Agreed that pre WWII Britain, not least the Victorian era, had a more rigid and often brutal class structure than that of the 1940′s. Even so the early Metropolitan Police are an example (admittedly a rare example) where the state acted as a servant of its citizens in a way that would be unthinkable for our modern “caring” governments.
Yesterday I was watching the usual concerned, hand wringing female news anchor and marveled at the huge industry that the professionally and perpetually concerned have built for themselves. They have raised exploitation of other peoples grief and trouble to a highly lucrative art form. Our eternally “caring” governments and their employees have achieved a similar feat at our expense.
That’s not the way the expression of a genuine social conscience started out. One thing led to another until the whole thing became corrupted. That seems to be the theme of wretchard’s latest blog post after this one.
Andrew M. Garland @21, Old Russian proverb Byla byi spina, nakhoditsya i vina. If there is a back (to be flogged) a crime can be found.
To Rurik,
That fits. Ayn Rand was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on February 2, 1905, and went to the US on a visitor’s visa in 1925, determined not to return.
( http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_ayn_rand_aynrand_biography )
@25 – 1389 AD
Add another voice to the mix:
http://victorygirlsblog.com/?p=9191
“No Ma’am: letter from Cpl Joshua Boston to Senator Dianne Feinstein”
I used to be disgusted at the excesses of the French Revolution. No more. Sic Semper Tyrranis.