12-08-2016, 06:30 PM
(12-08-2016, 09:10 AM)Warren Dew Wrote:(12-07-2016, 08:14 AM)Odin Wrote:(12-06-2016, 11:09 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(12-06-2016, 04:41 PM)Odin Wrote: A strong government is a necessary protector of the masses against elites wishing to create an outright oligarchy.
Oh come on. GHWBush then GWBush then Jeb? Bill then Hillary then Chelsea? The government was already an outright oligarchy, hereditary no less.
LOL, Bill was born Arkansas white trash, he would have never become president in the first place if the US were a full-blown oligarchy.
I'm not saying we were already an oligarchy in 1992; that was a long time ago. We are now, though.
Putting government in charge of protecting the people from the economic elites is definitely a fox guarding the hen house situation.
Yes.. We no longer have a representative democracy. Gerrymandering has made a mockery of the idea that the People be represented, as shown by an election in which the Democrats won a majority of the total vote for Congressional offices and the Republicans maintained a decisive majority of the House. Most of our Congressional Representatives take their instructions from lobbyists responsible only to their paymasters and largely neglect their constituents who don't agree with the lobbyists.
There were about ten countries of which I would rather be a citizen at the start of the year and about forty now.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.