Remember when Bill Clinton lied his way into office in 1992, claiming that it was the “worst economy in fifty years” when in fact it hadn’t been that bad and the recession had actually ended? Well, it really really is the worst economy in seventy years now, and it’s due to the kind of government interference in the economy and war on business that caused it the last time, in the Roosevelt administration:
It seems rather perplexing that the Los Angeles Times could try to creatively rename unemployed millennials trying to survive by working a bunch of “off-the-books jobs for cash to survive as ‘freelancing’”. But the simple facts are that businesses have adapted to the Obama Administration’s taxes, regulations, and the “Affordable Care Act.” Add the burden of Governor Brown’s tax increase to the highest level in the nation, and California millennials are rewarded, according to the Times, with “16.2% of Californians — or about 6.2 million — were either jobless, too discouraged to seek work, working less than they’d like, or in off-the-books jobs.”
It’s not actually perplexing at all, of course.
[Update a few minutes later]
Three quarters of Americans think that their childrens’ lives will be worse than theirs.
They will, if we don’t get a huge change in direction, back to the Republic and liberty.
[Update a few more minutes later]
From apathy to dependence:
Tyler went on to suggest that democracies tended to go through the following sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage.
It’s ironic that it was Joe Biden who said that it was the Republicans who “wanted to put y’all back in chains.”
[Update a while later]
First link was wrong. Fixed now.
[Update a couple minutes later]
A glimmer of hope from the generation that has been the most abused by these little tyrants:
“An overwhelming majority of these Millennial-aged voters actually think government aid does more harm than good, that the government is at its max when it comes to helping the poor, and – get this – that people on the government dole have it way too easy.”
Being underemployed and underpaid while having to support people who don’t work at all will have that effect.
Bad link in the post–you’re pointing at the WW I Jonah Goldberg story.
Put a twist on Rousseau for the new Democrat Party slogan: For Man to be free, we must put him in chains. IOW, coercion is necessary for all to be free. Just look at the staggering number of regulations and entitlement programs.
IngSoc said it more pithily: freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength.
Some think we live in cycles which we often do. But sometimes it’s the end of an age.
A slot machine may pay off occasionally but it always makes money for the house.
These are not two unrelated thoughts. They are both on topic.
I can imagine the usual gang of State-fellators who post here reading that Tyler quote and getting to the end thinking, “‘From dependence back into bondage’–like that’s a bad thing???”
Bondage, security, what’s the diff?
Bilwick,
Please consider: if I commented about “tea-baggers” half as often as you comment about “state-fellators” and otherwise add as little value to the conversation as you do, Rand would ban me. Think about why DN-Guy was banned. That’s all I plan to say about your comment, but I’m asking you: please say something more substantial and less insulting. I know from reading your other sorts of comments that you have a lot more to offer than what you posted above.
“as you do” –> “as you did above”. Sorry about that.
Bob, my guess is that we probably run the risk of banishment if we perpetually offer snark and post simply for the purpose of inflaming the group and derailing the thread.
“DN-Guy” was banned for a lot more than that, though it was part of it.
I would think making serial unprovoked snarky assaults on the site host saying crap like he hopes he loses his lawsuit I would wager strongly contributed to that.
Bob-1: As I challenged Baghdad Jim, tell me why “State-fellators” is an inaccurate description of today’s pseudo-liberals and “progressives.” It’s funny to me how people who obviously love the State and would bear its children if that were physically possible (people like, for example, Thomas Frank, the Linda Lovelace of State-fellators) object to the term. I only came up with it after hearing you people whine about being called “socialists” and even “statists.” Obviously you’d prefer some other description like “enlightened people who only reluctantly pick your pocket–and only for your own good;” but I believe in calling a small hand-held gardening implement a small hand-held gardening implement.
Bilwick hit a bit too close to home.
Indeed. “Love the State–want more of the State–I kneel before the State . . . drool, drool, slurp slurp . . .’ but hey, don’t call me ‘State-fellator.’ That’s offensive.” (You know what’s offensive? Coercion, buster.)
It’s pretty bad. And the stats don’t show how bad things are until you dig into them. Overall there haven’t been any new jobs created relative to population growth since 2008. Worse, there has been sharp job loss in the under 25 age range. That’s huge because early participation in the workforce sets up your entire career trajectory, and your wealth as well. Given the ballooning costs and participation in higher education that loss hits extra hard. Today’s generation are being saddled with worthless public school educations, questionably valuable college educations, massive debt, and delayed careers.
The economy is going to take a very, very, very long time to get over the damage that’s been done to it in the past half decade.
“The economy is going to take a very, very, very long time to get over the damage that’s been done to it in the past” three decades. (or century if you want to drag the Fed into it)
FTFY
“Tyler went on to suggest that democracies tended to go through the following sequence…”
Is there any historical precedent here? If so, it is really a common trend?
(Lets just get this out of the way: Roger Kimball provides a link that explains why Tyler may not be the author of what Rand quoted: http://www.lorencollins.net/tytler.html But I suggest focusing on the idea rather than the author.)
Supposedly, Tyler used Athenian democracy as an example. I’m sure there are people here who are more informed than I am about Athenian democracies, and maybe one of them can tell me: wasn’t military domination by the Macedonia what caused the end of democracy in Athens? And in the other democratic Greek city states as well?
Supposedly, Tyler’s quote is from 1887. I think (but could be mistaken) that since that year, we’ve seen more democracies arise than had ever existed before that year. So, lets take all the democracies that have ever existed into account, not just the ones that existed before 1887. My question: have we ever seen Tyler’s progression occur in the fall of a democracy?
A similar and related question: have we ever actually seen an example of a democracy reverting to a non-democratic government after doing the following:
“A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse over loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship.”
Also, it would be interesting to see a list of democracies which failed along with a quick summing up of why they failed. My guess is that it would be a short list because democracy is rather robust. but maybe I’m not recalling enough history. Thanks for any insights, links, suggestions, etc.
Isn’t Venezuela a democracy? Wasn’t the Weimar Republic? How about modern Greece?
Modern Greece remains a democracy – a dictator hasn’t taken power. I have nothing nice to say about Chavez or, obviously, Hitler(!), but is Tytler’s pattern evident in either Venezuela or Germany?
I apologize if the answers seem obvious to you, and I’m happy to do my own reading on the two situations.
Meanwhile, I did find David Brin’s take on the subject of Tytler. I find Brin’s tone in arguments to be frustratingly strident (to say the least) even when I agree with his politics, but I hope someone will find this interesting regardless of Brin’s tone. I haven’t made my way through more than a few of the comments, but some of them look interesting:
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-tytler-insult-is-democracy-hopeless.html
The very short version: he thinks it is one of the biggest lies ever told, and y’all should be ashamed of yourselves.
Modern Greece remains a democracy – a dictator hasn’t taken power.
Really? A dictator took power years ago.
Tytler’s pattern evident in either Venezuela or Germany?
It’s not evident if you choose to not see it.
And it wouldn’t be the first time David has told me I should be ashamed of myself. I doubt it will be the last. I’m sorry that I don’t have the exquisite sense of shame that he thinks I should.
OK, not really.
For Greece, I hope you’ll politely hide your smirk behind your hand as I quote wikipedia:
After liberation, Greece experienced a polarising civil war between communist and anticommunist forces, which led to economic devastation and severe social tensions between rightists and largely communist leftists for the next thirty years.[76] The next twenty years were characterized by marginalisation of the left in the political and social spheres but also by rapid economic growth, propelled in part by the Marshall Plan.
King Constantine II’s dismissal of George Papandreou’s centrist government in July 1965 prompted a prolonged period of political turbulence which culminated in a coup d’état on 21 April 1967 by the Regime of the Colonels. The brutal suppression of the Athens Polytechnic uprising on 17 November 1973 sent shockwaves through the regime, and a counter-coup established Brigadier Dimitrios Ioannidis as dictator. On 20 July 1974, as Turkey invaded the island of Cyprus, the regime collapsed.
Is that period what you’re referring to? I don’t see Tytler’s pattern there. I thought you were referring to today’s Greece with its economic problems but with a robust democracy.
For Venezuela, do you consider it to be an example of a democracy, or a dictatorship that was formerly a democracy? Either way, Brin’s take is that it is not a case poor people voting their entire country into debt and poverty, but rather Chavez redistributing oil wealth (and presumably he believes it is in a way that the country can sustain.)
I think the Wiemer Republic and Hitler’s rise is complicated, but I don’t think it is an example of the country voting itself into debt. Are you saying it is?
The question I really care about: have you met David Brin? I think he’d be a really interesting conversation partner.
Rand is correct in that Greece, and Italy for that matter, recently had their elected governments replaced by ’emergency governments’ headed by bankers picked by the EU Commission. They have had elections since so the government is not headed by these people anymore but still it proves the democracy in these countries is anything but.
Argentina under the Juntas(and again now), Phillipines under Marcos.
Boy, Brin sure is full of himself. How many dim-witted statements can the guy make? First, he uses a straw man argument by saying, “Lookie, the right believes this!” Seriously? That’s like me saying, “Lookie, the left believes islands can turn over if too many people stand on them.”
Then he goes on to brag about the wonders of the past 300 years of democracy, as if there is some sort of progressive success. I can easily show that Europe has produced almost nothing of value since WW2, and that its glory days are far behind. Brin will probably point to the LHC, as if a massive bureaucratic scientific apparatus can replace innovation and entrepreneurial spirit (which was crushed, at least in England, by the socialists.)
And Clinton held off the banksters? Seriously? When was the repeal of Glass-Steagall! Hint, it was before 2000, before Clinton left.
That whole piece is literally, a piece. A piece of excrement.
Europe has produced nothing of value since WW2. Hah.
Next time you speak on your GSM compatible phone consider your words carefully. I can give more examples like giant magnetoresistance (GMR) , CD-ROM, World Wide Web.
Of course things are completely different from when Europe had vast colonial resources to command. Back then more capital could be invested in the economy and research as a result. The fact is the national economies no longer have the scale to compete properly in the modern world. Just like the US has been losing industrial manufacturing capacity to China and eventually will start to lose the research race as well.
Actually, the share of the USes industrial base has been pretty steady. Just because China has made gains does not mean the US has lost out.
And due to things like 3D Printing, Local Fab and cheap Natural Gas, the US stands to gain a lot of industry at the expense of places like Europe..
Anyone who doubts the surpassingly peculiar nature of Mr. Brin’s politics, or the snotty and supercilious tone with which he propounds them, is not one of those who has read ‘The Postman’ or one of the perhaps two dozen people who saw its big-screen version, starring Kevin Costner, in theaters. (Given that it’s the anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing today, it’s an appropriate day to be mentioning other bombs.)
It’s post-apocalyptic America and has been for years. For some reason, there is no trace remaining of the U.S. military. The people are all sunk in a slough of despond and doing nothing much by way of restoring pre-Apocalypse America. They all seem, instead, to be waiting for… The Postman. A guy wearing a postal service uniform and carrying a mailbag, both of which he took off a corpse, is hailed by all as the avatar of the return of the long-pined for national government.
Except for heavily armed survivalists, of course. They’re the neo-barbarians.
Right.
What can you really say about the political opinions of someone who thinks the USPS is widely regarded by Americans as the apotheosis of benevolent central government, security and normalcy?
I would say that any democracy is vulnerable to a variety of threats. At the time of the Constitution, Madison had studied every democracy and concluded that they all fell to factions. This is why there are so many checks and balances in our government. They are firewalls that protect against factions. In fact, a representative democracy was used because one of the greatest threats to a democracy is the people themselves. As you probably know, democracy can be translated as mob rule.
A lot of the talk against Athenian Democracy is based on slanted remarks by Romans, the comments of Plato who had his own agenda being a noble and seeing his teacher getting killed and whatnot, or Xenophon.
You are correct that the Democracy only ended with the Macedonian invasion. A lot of these Romans actually preferred the Spartan system of government which in fact ended way before the Athenian Democracy’s final collapse. The Athenian Democratic system was unique in a lot of ways and a lot of the rules have been forgotten with time. In particular the rules of the Athenian Constitution by Solon survive only in fragments by secondary sources.
Next time you speak on your GSM compatible phone consider your words carefully. I can give more examples like giant magnetoresistance (GMR) , CD-ROM, World Wide Web.
GSM, a modification of cellular? HTML, a modification of the internet? CD ROM, a modification of the Laserdisk? I’ll give infinitely more credit to Japan than Europe on innovation.
GMR, okay. I’ll also give credit to Deutsch on quantum computing.
Of course things are completely different from when Europe had vast colonial resources to command. Back then more capital could be invested in the economy and research as a result. The fact is the national economies no longer have the scale to compete properly in the modern world. Just like the US has been losing industrial manufacturing capacity to China and eventually will start to lose the research race as well.
Maybe taxation and regulation could be squeezing these companies in Europe? Rather than blame decolonization, how about blaming the EU for slowly suffocating European business. The US has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world. Businesses are beginning to flee America. It has nothing to do with competition. We have a very productive workforce, too bad we can’t use it.
Here’s my point. When you think of major changes in science and technology, do you really think of Europe? Crick comes to mind, along with very few others, but post-WW2 Europe is a yawn fest. Europeans haven’t changed, their governments have. Nothing sucks the soul of a civilization more than an overreaching government.