We will know what it stands for. New Feudalism?

View 737 Monday, August 13, 2012

We’re home and all’s well, if you can call a heat wave ‘well’. It’s about 100 outside the house, and the municipal power people are begging us to be sparing with the air conditioning because there’s a chance of power shortages. Given what we pay the various public service union people in Los Angeles you’d think they’d have seen this coming and come up with a way to do something about it, but I don’t know what that is. On the other hand I don’t get paid what the public service people get paid.

I note that we are moving toward feudalism. In feudal times people paid what they had to to the local knights, who undertook to defend them from the barbarians. In those times the barbarians came from outside the city gates, although I expect they had some inside also. In our case we are raising cultures of barbarians, some in the cities, some in California’s Central Valley. So we pay $150,000 to $300,000 a year with full pensions after 20 years to police officers, the new Blue Knights. Knighthood was never hereditary although the chance to become a knight was much higher for the children of knights than for the peasantry, and over time the social classes became something like a caste system. Could we be going that way in the US?

In any event, we are home, and the election proceeds. Those who think that the best chance for America lies in fooling or deceiving the electorate believe that the choice of Ryan was a drastic mistake, because it will make it clear that this will be a crucial election, responsibility vs. entitlement. My own view is that if the country chooses the road to serfdom we need to rethink the whole concept of Constitutional government – which, by the way, will be inevitable in any event. Think about the difficulty of getting Germans to work 40 hour weeks so that Greek civil servants can have 30 hour weeks with 13 week vacations, and apply that to the US, substituting whomever you choose for Greek civil servants and hard working Germans. The point is that eventually those who produce the wealth will demand a say in its distribution, and those who distribute will find themselves running short of something to distribute, and those who contribute nothing to the economy but their progeny will find that everyone has decided the services of the proletariat are overvalued. Or so things have always been. Perhaps it will be different in these United States.

Or, perhaps, we will turn back from the road to serfdom and quite deliberately choose liberty and responsibility. It will be interesting to see. But I do recall the elections of 2010.

Government is too big. Hope and Change were chosen over what was thought to be the path by which government got too big, and the result was a doubling of the debt while unemployment remained high. Hope and Change didn’t work, and all we are offered is more of what doubled the debt.

OMG!

We all know what CNN’s take was going to be no matter who Romney picked because it’s CNN’s daily job to sew fear and panic about Republican actions.

So isn’t it absolutely absurd for Frum to pretend Romney wasn’t going to be tied to House Republicans by the media — starting with CNN? The only real question is whether Ryan helps Romney more than any of the alternatives.

–Mike

http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/13/opinion/frum-romney-ryan/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

Opinion: By picking Paul Ryan as his running mate, Mitt Romney is tying himself to House Republicans, to the benefit of the Obama campaign, David Frum says.

I am no longer surprised by anything the egregious Frum says. Thanks.

Adding Ryan to the ticket does little for Romney among various cliques and factions, but that wasn’t the point. Justice Roberts has said that the Supreme Court can hold out against the will of the legislative and executive branches for only so long, and we are at the edge now. Romney’s choice of Ryan will make it clear what this election means. One way or another.