Monday, January 02, 2012

TRUST GOVERNMENT - ARE YOU CRAZY?

"Are you better off today than you were $4 trillion ago?" Rick Perry asked, a grin of satisfaction creasing his face. Within hours a bumper sticker with the quote was on sale on Amazon.com; in what other time or place could an entrepreneur spring into action so quickly and produce a product and have it for sale.

From page 190 of the 1955 edition of the Stuart Gilbert translation of Alexis de Tocqueville’s masterpiece The Old Regime and the French Revolution:
Thus every small holder had learned by personal experience how little heed was given to the rights of individuals when it was in the public interest to ride roughshod over them – a lesson he took care to keep in mind when it was a question of applying it to others for his own benefit.

… is from pages 83-84 of the 1973 reissue of Albert Jay Nock’s little 1935 masterpiece, Our Enemy, the State; Nock distinguished “social power” – voluntary choices and actions, such as occur in markets and in mutual-aid societies – from “state power”:
It is a curious anomaly. State power has an unbroken record of inability to do anything efficiently, economically, disinterestedly or honestly; yet when the slightest dissatisfaction arises over any exercise of social power, the aid of the agent least qualified to give aid is immediately called for. Does social power mismanage banking-practice in this-or-that special instance — then let the State, which never has shown itself able to keep its own finances from sinking promptly into the slough of misfeasance, wastefulness and corruption, intervene to “supervise” or “regulate” the whole body of banking-practice, or even take it over entire.


DAILY MAIL Sadly, there seems little point in looking across the Atlantic for inspiration. In 1932, President Herbert Hoover, beleaguered by rising unemployment and tumbling ratings, flailed and floundered towards election defeat.
Today, Barack Obama cuts a similarly impotent, indecisive and isolationist figure. The difference is that in 1932, one of the greatest statesmen of the century, the Democratic politician Franklin D. Roosevelt, was waiting in the wings.
Today, American voters looking for alternatives are confronted only with a bizarre gaggle of has-beens, inadequates and weirdos, otherwise known as the Republican presidential field. And to anybody who cares about the future of the Western world, the prospect of President Ron Paul or President Newt Gingrich is frankly spine-chilling

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home