12-15-2016, 12:08 AM
(12-14-2016, 07:56 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Sorry you can't see it.
Here it is on you tube
worth sharing..........
Some consequences...
1. These people utterly exclude basically the center-right to the Left. Not only have they no room for a John Kennedy in the system -- they have no room for a Gerald Ford. A government by extremists does crazy things... like starting wars for spreading the extremist gospel where that gospel is unwelcome.
2. An extremist regime leaves outsiders with no role in the political processor simply a sham. Sell-outs who agree to some power-sharing arrangement that allows survival of their faction to survive may wax fat and get to put up a show of token and ineffective opposition for getting to be the Washington Generals to the Harlem Globetrotters. But the Globetrotters play to entertain and life is rarely like that. The token opposition may even have its own nomenklatura that lives very well. But that token opposition has no chance of winning, and people who might like the agenda of the token opposition get nothing.
That's how East Germany operated, and that is how China operates today. There are opposition parties that together have about 30% representation in the national legislature that serves as a rubber-stamp. America could be headed that way, perhaps with the Democrats splintered into factions separated by ethnicity and occupational group (let us say a party that is effectively a party for Blacks, one for Hispanics, one for Asian-Americans, one for craft unions, one for 'educators' -- many Parties that can never form an effective coalition .
3. People on the outside get the shaft-- hard. They find their wages kept down. Although insiders get favorable tax treatment, outsiders get to pay heavy taxes and get monopoly prices. There is no economic justice. Such economic growth as there is comes at a great price, and it never trickles down.
4. It is not good for domestic tranquility. Outsiders may have the alternatives of selling out, emigrating, submitting, or rebelling. Rebellion against a dictatorial regime usually gets one killed -- or worse. As regimes like Stalin's Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Baathist Iraq, ISIS, and North Korea show, there are fates worse than death.
Emigrate? You probably can't sell what you have, you probably lose your bank account, your chance of collecting Social Security, and of course whatever economic network you ever had. You end up elsewhere -- penniless, and with few opportunities for work. Sell out? You must betray people who depended upon you for their welfare, which is easy enough -- if you are a sociopath and have people to betray. If you are not a sociopath and lack the people to betray, you cannot do it. Submission? You have just accepted some new form of peonage that can end only with the downfall of the regime.
5. It promotes extremism on the Other Side. Think of all those people who graduated from "Teacher's State University" who took a political theory class in which they experienced a short discussion of Karl Marx and why he was irrelevant in a consumer society in which working people get cars, refrigerators, televisions, furniture, electricity, cable TV, and two weeks' vacation. When all that outsiders get is exhausting toil under brutal conditions for near-starvation pay, then Karl Marx becomes almost attractive when free elections are strictly an antique.
I can imagine the Left pushing much the same fear about a government that it dislikes. That pushes people to the Hard Left... if the State hasn't shutdown all media hostile to the Government.
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.