07-15-2020, 12:06 PM
(07-15-2020, 02:32 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(07-14-2020, 12:58 PM)David Horn Wrote:(07-14-2020, 01:03 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: I don't see a dictator. I see an American President being hampered by a bunch of petty liberal dictators. You're right, America can't function with a bunch of petty liberal dictators hampering it and undermining its authority. So, what do you think is going to happen to all those petty dictators of yours when the gloves come off and the country takes a necessary step backwards to what we refer to as the good Wild West? A time when liberal smack or bullshit ended with an idiot peering down the gun barrel of a skeptic who is more interested in learning the truth. Dictators don't often have honorable deaths?
Yes, you really do hate democracy and pray for an iron-gloved savior. Here's a hint: Trump is a wimp of the worst kind and fully incapable of being the leader you seem to want so desperately.
Are you speaking for yourself or speaking to me? I don't need a white knight or a liberal Democratic sugar daddy or mommy either. I'm quite capable of fending for myself as I've proven many times over the years. I hope that your not foolish enough to still think that you're speaking to a fake person who couldn't stand up to you or defeat you or kill you or accept your death or demise if needed at this point. Have you ever met one of us who are incapable of fending for ourselves? I don't mind Democracy. I've been a participant in Democracy for a long time. You seem to hate it more than me. You don't seem to like the idea of people being allowed to vote against you and the Left or vote to keep their money or vote to have more their money be used for securing borders or the military or vote for tax cuts to stimulate or revitalize the economy or vote to change trade deals that were eliminating jobs or voting to abolish abortion or school choice and so forth.
The best top leaders of a country either get monumental sacrifices on behalf of some high principle to save something noble and sustainable -- think at the extreme of Lincoln, Juarez, Gandhi, FDR, Churchill, de Gaulle, or Mannerheim who are excellent people in charge in extraordinary circumstances -- or those who in more normal times encourage people to do their best, getting out of the way except to clamp down on bad behavior that mucks things up. In normal-to-somewhat difficult times that could be a Theodore Roosevelt, a JFK, or an Obama as President of the United States. Maybe there is a significant reform and perhaps a crusade against corruption or extremism... or an effort to reach for the stars.
Ideally we elect people better than ourselves, for we are far from perfect... and to succeed in a largely market economy we must accept narrow roles in life that limit what we can do and even know. One can do much good as a nurse, a letter-carrier, a diesel mechanic, a K-12 teacher, or an accountant -- but I doubt that we would want someone from one of those career paths as President. A market economy is no better than its ability to get people to take specialized roles and do well in them. Plato figured that out over two millennia ago, presaging Adam Smith about a quarter-millennium ago.
Fending for oneself in the backwoods is the best choice for many people... but such is not a rewarding life intellectually or economically. Success depends upon specialization in a market economy that honestly rewards work well done more effectively than it rewards people for having the right birth or connections -- or outright force. Speak for yourself about fending for yourself; you would not fare as well as "Jed Clampett" as a "poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed". Nobody does. You are far better off specializing as an HVAC installer and repairman.
From an economic standpoint, I envy your career choice. You made a good one. It may be luck, but in a good system much that people do well looks like luck. This said, I do not want your ideology allowing others to lord it over me. You have political blinders, and you fail to recognize that although taxes cut into your potential for sybaritic indulgence, what the taxes support make your economic activity possible.
Let's start with law enforcement. Someone pays you in cash, and before you get to the bank someone pulls a gun on you and tells you "your money or your life". Bye, bye cash -- or risk death or crippling injury by gunshot wounds. Cash is the life-blood of your business. So what keeps people from mugging you? A society that creates the impression that whatever one does, one must not be a criminal. If one does not learn that from family and schooling, then one needs fear the police and courts of law. If the system is primitive enough it might hang armed robbers. If it is more sophisticated it makes examples of them. Twenty-five years on the State Prison Farm? Who wants that? Maybe a few years of poverty while working at a fast-food place or working in a sweat-shop factory isn't so bad after all.
OK, the courts of law. Ideally you don't need them, but someone pays games with you, saying that he doesn't have cash but will pay you on an invoice, which is the norm in commerce. Paying people for debts owed is the norm. Some people just don't. So what do you do? You sue them for non-payment. That takes a court of law. Courts enforcing contracts, including promises to pay. Know well that you would not stay in business if your suppliers did not trust you to pay them.
OK. Roads. If you can't get where you meed to go, then you can't do your job there. If the roads are bad enough, then you will find the pot-holes will mess up your tires, mufflers, and shock absorbers. The repairs would be costly and frequent. Because we do not have self-driving vehicles yet we need to have some traffic-law enforcement so that people drive at reasonable speeds, yield right of way, and look out for vulnerable people. The state trooper with a radar gun on I-35 or I-94 just out of the Twin Cities might catch someone driving 90 or higher... and it may amaze you that a quarter of all speeders are drunk. Drunk and driving too fast? Talk about a menace!
Schools. Most likely you can thank some K-12 teacher for being able to read a technical manual, a road map, and a contract and that you are able to write orders and requisitions. You are able to read the checks that you sign. You got the preparation for technical school and have some idea of how the social order works. Maybe you did fall asleep in civics class because it was dull and you didn't recognize its importance. Too bad! You missed something important as your posts show.
Recognize also that many people attended land-grant colleges at which they learned mechanical engineering that allows people to design HVAC machines that you work on. People often get their legal education in such places, so that may allow us to have the lawyers and judges who enforce contracts necessary for keeping money flowing in ways that allow you to function as a businessman.
Obviously the vote is no guarantee that the common man will use it wisely. Heck, there is no guarantee that someone will use his money wisely! It is easy for many of us to fall for some marketing ploy, whether it is a play for our primitive drives (as Al "Married with Children" Bundy calls it, 'the nudie bar'), gratuitous display of success in buying luxuries, or perhaps the illusion that one is an astute manager of assets. OK, our economic system depends upon people making unwise decisions and not looking at something that we buy as either a bare necessity of existence or only for what we can get out of it once we are through with it. OK, spending money on listening to a concert of Mozart's forty-first symphony and Brahms' Second Piano Concerto... or getting a box set of the fifteen string quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich isn't 100% rational, but nobody -- not even someone on the autistic spectrum -- can live a fully-rational life.
If it takes a junket to the strip club to keep you from having a Valium-and-vodka cocktail, then by all means go to the strip club and stuff dollar bills into the cleavage of the bar-maids.
...as for trade deals -- some people gave us a very raw deal that looked good at the time. You have probably seen one of my favorite videos explaining how that works: cheap imports give us the illusion that we are doing well until we lose the manufacturing jobs and end up having to work for "Big Box Mart" (a composite of Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and Target) for a pittance, having sold out our dreams for a house full of questionable merchandise. This said, the Chinese could just as easily be making AK-47 machine guns and Stinger missiles that they use in aggression to get captive markets and bleed assets of conquered countries. Pick your poison.
I am tempted to believe that we are at the end of the era in which manufacturing more stuff will itself create more prosperity and happiness. I have more formal education than you do in economics and more informal education (through reading) in philosophy and psychology. (I should have been a philosophy major and psychology minor in college ... or vice-versa -- but few people know that at 18 or so). It might have been good preparation for law school. I'd probably be an ambulance-chasing attorney (drive drunk, hit a motorcyclist, and pay up!) or some liberal politician in a Blue State... maybe yours.
President? How could I do worse than Trump? First of all I know enough to respect expert knowledge to not contradict it because a contradiction of such knowledge is convenient at the moment. At this point... you can imagine me treating COVID-19 as an enemy on par with at least Osama bin Laden, if not Hitler or Tojo.
Knowing that leadership relates heavily to communicating needful messages as simply and clearly as possible but also as completely as necessary, you can just imagine how I would tell people to live with the threat of COVID-19:
My fellow Americans. We face a dangerous enemy, no matter what we look like, where our ancestors came from, how we pray or do not pray, no matter what our economic condition, and no matter what part of this nation in which we live. We are at war with an enemy as cruel and effective as any enemy that we have ever faced in our history, but an enemy with no human characteristics. It is a virus, and you have every right to hate that virus.
We have become complacent about respiratory diseases, as they seem to hit poor people in poor countries hard and usually leave us alone. This one strikes people who seem safe. It has killed the mayor of a large city in China. It has killed an Iranian general. It has killed an Italian judge. Those people lived well until this virus took them down. We are all vulnerable.
Religious and business leaders have already taken steps that they see necessary to thwart this virus. If the Catholic Church can close its churches to prevent the spread of this virus, then we can do so. If professional hockey and basketball leagues can shut down seasons because they are more scared of the loss of players, coaches, and fans due to this disease than of profits from ticket sales and television revenue, then we receive a message that we must all heed.
Stay home; there really is no place to go outside of your community. Stay clean; soap is a mild chemical to you but it has been proved deadly to the virus. Work at home if possible. If you must go out to meet your needs, then wear masks or scarves that cover your mouth and nose. But just because you must stay at home, you will need to stay connected and find meaning in life. This is a good time to listen to great music, to read great books, to watch fine movies, and to do a hobby. If you can paint, sculpt, write, or compose, then do so. Stay home -- but stay connected. Stay clean. Wear a mask when out in public. Avoid person-to-person contact with vulnerable people, but keep in touch by phone and the Web.
And, yes, I would be delivering this message through a mask. I might even sing to show that one can sing through the mask.
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.