Comment by DC Sunsets that deserved its own post
I live in IL. Had I voted, Senator Durban would still be Senator Durbin.
Had I voted, would I have chosen to “tell” Rauner to tell me what do to? I don’t need him or any other asshole to tell me what to do.
When you vote, do you recognize openly that you are consenting to have whoever “wins” the election tell you what to do and what not to do, on pain of being robbed (a fine) or caged (imprisoned) or murdered (cops carry guns, after all)?
I don’t consent to any of this. Metaphorically, I live on a block controlled by a vicious criminal gang. My neighbors support the gang and the gang extorts money from me to “protect” me from arsonists and competitors from other gangs. They send someone around to sweep my street once in a while, but overall the extortion I pay is multiples of what I could pay someone in a competitive, free marketplace to do what it is I need done (like pave the roads, educated the kids, and suppress the muggers, rapists and robbers who DON’T wear gang-insignia badges.)
You want me to “vote” for who runs the criminal gang, as if I can actually choose someone who will threaten me less and extort fewer funds from me annually.
Remember one definition of insanity: “doing the same thing time after time and expecting different results.”
Bastiat wrote it 150 years ago. There are TWO and only TWO ways to obtain what you need to live, production and trade (the market) or what Bastiat called “The Political Means,” i.e., THEFT.
Just because I’m surrounded by ignorant masses who lack the intelligence to understand this does not change its reality. I choose to skip voting because both philosophically and mathematically it makes no sense whatsoever.
And yes, that makes me an anarchist, if you define anarchism as the absence of POLITICAL order. Politics is organized, stylized violence while the market is characterized by peaceful cooperation.
I’m sorry for you if you choose to remain ignorant of the distinction. There is reality, which is that most people are born slaves and choose slavery when given any choice at all, and there is reality that this is a phenomenally stupid, impractical and cyclically suicidal way to organize society.
For this reason, I choose the Voluntaryist approach as described by Carl Watner. It would require me to write a book to explain to you both the theory and practicality of a society organized by open and competitive markets as opposed to a monopoly system of ultimate decision-making (the political system), and you wouldn’t read it anyway because others have already written them yet here we are with you deriding “anarchism.”
The world goes by itself.
The future is already written in large part; only the specifics have yet to be revealed. There is a reason that human social outcomes are cyclical. They emerge from the hardwired biological processes of human social behavior, and our current obsession with “voting” is but part of the silly sine wave curve.
Utopia is not an option.
Relax, Bruce has got it covered he will protect you from the Madigan / Cullerton cabal.
The Trouble With Mass Delusions
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 11/05/2014 09:35 -0500
Excerpted from Paul Singer’s Elliott Management letter to investors,
MASS DELUSIONS
The trouble with mass delusions is that they are recognized as such only when they are over – when the dazzling absurdity of certain widely held beliefs is unmasked by subsequent events. Interestingly, many delusions relate to war. At the beginning of World War I, there was a widespread misconception that the war would be over in months. In hindsight, this delusion was fueled by a deep misunderstanding, among citizens and military experts alike, of the impact that evolving technology would have on modern warfare. Parenthetically, we would argue that the current drawdown of military capability throughout the developed world is based on a delusion that ignores thousands of years of immutable, or at least always repeating, human history of almost continuous (in the grand scheme of things) warfare.
Economics also provides its share of delusions, including the debt-fueled bubbles of both the 1920s stock market and the first dotcom boom. The real estate boom of the 2000s was another one, as excess demand was fueled by the combination of near-free money, the most marginal financial products ever invented, and the frenetic selling of houses to people who could not afford them and did not actually own them in any meaningful sense of the word.
These examples are easy, because they were mass beliefs that were unreasonable in the extreme at the time they were held. Of course, at the time not everyone held the same deluded views, but the disbelievers were (and always are) discredited, demoralized and ignored while the delusions were alive. The problem is that while the delusions remain intact there is no proof available to convince the believers of their folly. Simply repeating that a mass belief is crazy does not make it so (nor convince anyone else that it is nuts). Furthermore, the amount of time necessary to reveal the truth is sometimes too long for nonbelievers to bear, so they just stop trying.
There is a current set of delusions that is powerful and dangerous:
that monetary debasement can be infinitely pursued without negative consequences; that the financial system is now solid and sound; that the low volatility and high prices of stocks, high-end real estate and bonds are real; that bonds are a safe haven; and that large financial institutions which get into trouble in the future can be unwound in a much safer way than they could be in 2008.
We have discussed each of these elements in the pages of this report and previous ones in an attempt to reveal the fallacy and unsustainability of such beliefs. But, as stated above, they will only enter the history books as mass delusions if they are unmasked in the future as unjustifiable and erroneous beliefs at the time they were held.
We think that test will be met, perhaps soon.
But who will protect me from Bruce? (I know, you were just kidding.)
Thanks, Admin, for posting this separately. I kind of got on a roll.
And while I’m generally a glass-half-empty kind of guy, I really do think me and mine will do okay, come what may.
Why? Because stupid people over-populate the statistics when bad things happen to large numbers of people, and I don’t think me and mine are stupid, so….
Today’s difficulties were baked into the cake decades ago via stupid collective decisions. Those stupid collective decisions were animated by conditions at that time, which themselves were baked into the cake in prior periods.
All of this is just one big rolling locomotive, powered by the social behavior systems coded into our DNA as human beings. It cannot be changed any more than a man can be turned into a woman by cutting off his genitals and injecting him with female hormones. We are what our DNA says we are, and that means we get both the good and the bad (or the stuff we enjoy and the stuff we wish we could change, but can’t.)
At a time of Peak Politics (also called Peak Collectivism) I think the individuals among us should recognize that we’re not entirely doomed to experience all the pitfalls our neighbors will encounter.
We CAN choose, when there are forks in the road. The road is like an Interstate Highway, we can’t just get off it or on it whenever we wish, we have to await an interchange. My point is that most people will ride that single route no matter where it takes them, even if it takes them off a bridge and into a deep and deadly ocean.
We can choose, however, when there’s an interchange. That’s what TBP and sites like it are all about, discussion and exchange of ideas to help those of us seeking the Best, Safest and most Enjoyable Route to map out our lives as best we can, given the roads available.
The larger mass delusion in place for 150 years is that the state (the political system), holding as it does a monopoly on using force against anyone deemed in need of it, can be an agent of positive change for humanity.
Since the dawn of the Progressive Era, people have believed that every human problem can be solved by the judicious use of violence (or its threat) by well-intentioned and wise government “experts.”
That this system is a monopoly, and obeys the iron axioms of all monopolies, never troubles true believers. They embrace the notion that coercion, threats and violence can achieve goodness. In this they are truly fools, but we are surrounded by them.
This is by far the dominant religion of all humans living today.
Interstate analogy.
An interstate is a “freeway” – [not all freeways are interstates] – and it literally means your way is free. Free of impediments of any kind – just blast on down the road as if nothing else matters up and until you come to a pre-arranged exit of someone else’s design.
I don’t think life was meant to be that way – the jostling and interaction that is required when not on a freeway implies one must take into consideration what others are about – not necessarily approve but if the network is to achieve some level of efficiency then others’ goals, capabilities and agendas need to be considered. A stopped school bus, a combine moving from one farm to another, backing up so the semi can make the turn, pulling over for an emergency vehicle, looking out for incapacitated pedestrians.
I think TPTB intentionally appeal to the “freeway” mentality in all of us – promoting our personal goals without also having to consider how our goals fit into the bigger picture. Placing the exits to best suit themselves and then littering them with crap and distractions that keep us from thinking.
We can stay off the freeways and still get to where we want to be – it takes longer but it keeps us in touch with humanity and it’s generally more scenic.
Admin’s 30 blocks of squalor is a good example – how many Americans in their gated lives and interstate travels are exposed to such a scene? And that exposure can actually induce some contemplation – the act of pondering that is also a lost art. Thirty different people might come up with 30 different causes and 30 different solutions but it’s far more thoughtfulness created when compared to the person who never gets off the freeway.
When I close my eyes and envision the interstate system I see an interconnected web that is removed from the fabric of the nation – that rests on top, separate and with only limited connectivity. Kind of like our over lords.
Throughout all human history there have existed systems to keep the rulers in their place and the ruled in theirs.
Divine right of kings was one way. From thousands of years ago, the ruler was overtly deemed either a god himself or demigod. The rabble were expected to sweat and toil and above all, PAY TAXES.
Theocracy is a form of this, too.
Totalitarian governments work, too, but people who are overt slaves (and see themselves as such) don’t produce half as much as people who THINK they are free.
Democracy is THE best solution to keeping the slaves sweating away most productively to pay for the largest criminal enterprise, modern political government, in human history.
By giving the slaves a choice among Plantation-owner-approved candidates for overseer, the slaves believe themselves free, and “buy into” their servitude. They then consent to taxation rates far higher than even those applied to Medieval Serfs.
Today we have an underclass bought off by the social safety net crumbs cast before them, a shrinking middle class whose jobs are overwhelmingly dependent on spending from the Central Political State (e.g., people working for defense, construction and medical industries) and a tiny elite consolidating ownership of 98% of the entire planet via their control of the machinery of political systems.
Everyone is in on the gang’s activities. No one is against the gang, everyone is for the gang. This is a paraphrase of Mussolini’s description of Italy’s Fascist State.
And we wonder why things are SNAFU.
No free people would ever consent to tax rates and the current regulatory Leviathan.
This alone informs us that voting, as a means of inculcating obedience among weak-minded people, is brilliant and evil.
Er, sorry. No one would consent to our current, extortionate, permanent tax rates. No one would consent to having to inform the tax collector of every single thing one produces or trades.
We are truly surrounded by humans as farm animals.
And sadly, because our neighbors consent to being farmed like sheep, the few of us who prefer non-slavery have no choice in the matter. We get the government to which our neighbors consent, no matter how bad, evil, murderous, or rapacious it becomes.
Opinion: Did Wall Street buy this election?
By David Weidner
Published: Nov 5, 2014 1:16 p.m. ET
Wall Street spent $306 million on 2014 midterms
With Republicans taking control of the Senate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren will be restricted in her ability to go after big banks.
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Wall Street had a lot riding on this election. So with the results in, did it get what it paid for?
Forget for a moment about the political parties and ideology. Yes, Republicans have been traditionally been viewed as business friendly, but many of them were against the bank bailouts. Some argued that the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 was too weak and didn’t end a too-big-to-fail system that put a burden on taxpayers.
Democrats controlled Congress and the Oval Office immediately after the financial crisis, but no one from Wall Street has gone to jail and there have been no meaningful criminal charges directly stemming from bad behavior in the lead up to the crisis. And Dodd-Frank? It was a watered down law, that hasn’t been fully implemented.
Five Tax Breaks on Congress’s New Agenda
(2:21)
So, when it comes to political spending, there isn’t a clear divide. Some Republicans help Wall Street. Some Democrats do too. Money flows in both directions. And boy did it flow. Wall Street spent $169 million this election cycle, more than any other industry. And if you expand the definition to include real estate and insurance, the number swells to $306 million. By contrast, public-sector unions spent $44 million, according to OpenSecrets.org.
John J. and Marlene Ricketts, founders of TD Ameritrade, spent $6.7 million. George Soros of Soros Fund Management spent $3.79 million. Hedge-fund manager Ken Griffin of Citadel Investment Group spent $3.47 million.
That’s just a few of the well-known names. The top individual contributors’ list is made up of mostly investment managers, real-estate moguls and lawyers with deep ties to Wall Street.
Their contributions came on top of money from organizations that include employees and companies. Koch Industries doled out $7.8 million, the AFL-CIO, $8.08 million. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. BRK.A, +0.40% BRK.B, +0.25% forked over $3.3 million. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. GS, -0.07% spent $3.2 million. And none of this includes donations made through 501(c) organizations, which don’t have to disclose their contributors.
These dollars basically financed a long list of candidates favorable to the donors’ interests. Hedge-fund and private-equity managers are interested in the carried-interest tax loophole that allows them to pay a lower rate on income. That issue hasn’t really budged, but it’s certain to die now with Republican control of both houses.
Banks should be encouraged on two fronts. With more than 40% of Dodd-Frank’s final rules yet to be written, there’s a greater chance new restrictions will ease. Two big areas left unfinished include derivatives laws and mortgage reforms. And as Paul Brandus noted in his column Wednesday, there could be potential roll backs to Obamacare and student-loan reforms.
Maybe the biggest victory for Wall Street will come in the Senate shift. The Senate Banking Committee is now led by South Dakota Sen. Tim Johnson. Under the Democrat, the committee has given a long leash to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat who has been critical of Wall Street influence in Washington and is seen as a potential presidential nominee by more liberal voters in the party. Another key Democrat, Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, may also be reined in.
With a shift in control, the banking committee will get a new chairman. The ranking member is Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho, but Sen. Richard Shelby (R., Ala.), served as committee chairman from 2003 to 2007. Sens. Bob Corker of Tennessee and Mark Kirk of Illinois also could get a bigger role.
Republican leadership will set the agenda for the committee, which has held hearings on multiple Wall Street transgressions including high-frequency trading, systemic risk, student-loan debt and consumer protections in financial services. Later this month, the lame-duck committee will review Wall Street’s influence at the New York Federal Reserve Bank.
Ultimately, given the gridlock and bickering that has characterized Capitol Hill for the last few election cycles, Wall Street probably wasn’t getting a bad deal. With Tuesday’s results in the books, however, the financial-services industry probably added some insurance. Rules may be softer and the embarrassment of public hearings will likely subside.
If you’re an advocate of a safe banking system and fair markets and are wary of Wall Street’s intentions, stop complaining. You can spend your own $306 million in two years.
The best government money can buy.
Didn’t PJ O’Rourke say that when Congress regulates buying and selling, the first things to be bought and sold are congressmen?