you keep telling me that things were settled then,but were they?
The things that were on the agenda to be settled, were settled. The country was less than 1/10th its current population, the vast majority still living a rural/agricultural existence. So, no reason to expect everything to be settled forever. It's been twice as long in years from Civil War to 2010 as from 1787 to Civil War. In both human and material terms the differences are much greater and more profound.
On the narrow issue of your Divorce plan, it's just a terrible as well as fantastical idea, and, whenever you bring it up, I naturally assume you're joking to make a point. Now, if Conrad Black turns out to be a cockeyed optimist, and a bunch of other bad things happen, sure, the vast inland empire could break up, but I doubt that it would be a clean, non-violent, fair, and cost-efficient Rooseveltland vs Randland operation. In the meantime, no one has the right to give up some section of the country and designate it for Free Market Libertarian Absolutists, without regard to the rights, investments, expectations of all the people who happen to be living there already, arent FMLAists, and don't feel like moving, not to mention the rest of us who've been investing in the FMLA-area for generations.
@ Rex Caruthers:
I presume they pay JRub just to be her very special self, loving her to pieces whatever she does. As little as I care for JPod, I wouldn't insult him with the suggestion that he's actually aware of her writing.
As for Conrad Black's piece, I wouldn't endorse every word of his analysis. I'd like to believe that his diagnosis is correct, and that the rot is only skin deep, but, even if I could, I see no, none, zero sign that his prescription could be administered under the current terms of our national political debate.
@ CK MacLeod:
Doesn’t much matter if the emphasis is on business. Tax cuts for people who take the extra funds and buy property in Ulan Bator, powdered rhino horn, or take advantage of a price dip on Zimbabwean diamonds ain’t gonna help as much as a tax cut for people with fewer options and more unmet needs.
We're mainly in the realm of faith here. Conservatives begin with the presumption that all taxation and regulation are objective reductions in ideal free market efficiency. Where they establish their baseline of necessary spending varies, but they're mainly convinced that taxes are already too high. Where people put their money is skewed by other factors, which on the way to the neo-Reaganite libertarian small-state would increasingly be in red white and blue we're number one job-creating business of America is business, not rhino horns.
@ Fuster:
It depends on how you define "the economy." For free market true believers, "the economy" means "business," and everything that stands in the way of business is "inefficient." Where each neo-Reaganite stops on the way to totalized libertarianism is impossible to guess. They're not worried about such details. They're too busy dreaming about the gay work of destruction ahead, on the way to a republic of virtue.
@ miguel cervantes:
We already know that you're a hardcore ideological conservative. I suspect we could list 50 Tea Party Republican platform points, and you'd come down on the right side on every single one.
@ miguel cervantes:
Yes, I know, the big argument for the right is "we're no worse than they are!" based on the usual political MRE - chicken tetrazzini and the "cap n trade fraud."
Palin, Beck, and the rest of the Tea Party wing speak a utopian language, as do their main boosters. Sure, it's largely meaningless, but that doesn't prevent large crowds from imagining the defeat and destruction of the evil progressives and their evil regulatory and entitlement-disbursing administrative state. Many on the right have even co-opted revolutionary language, and can be found going on in the Standard and National Review about the "ruling class," as though the insurrection lies somewhere around the corner.
As to what they would actually do if given power, that's another question. You seem to believe that they're just the demagogues they seem to be, and that all of the "Don't Tread on Me," "Take Our Country Back," "Social Security is unconstitutional," "Woodrow Wilson is the son of Satan" stuff is for the easily led.
Their unity position is tax cuts and they claim to be in favor of attacking entitlements. So, they could be expected to give that a try, at least for a while. If it didn't work big-time and relatively fast, then things might start to get interesting, especially since the conservative foreign policy establishment is dominated by traditional hawks, and since what otherwise unites the right is cultural revanchism and populist xenophobia. Amidst whatever economic, security, or combined emergency, a lot of that small state constitutionalism might disappear, or at most provide a cover. Alternatively, they could just turn out to be ineffective, and we could muddle along amidst continued erosion of the economy and state, punctuated by occasional crises, eventually swinging left again as a weary and frightened populace seeks meaning and security within the loving arms of the strong state. Judt called it the "social democracy of fear," and you might add "pain" to it, though it also has a positive aspect.
We could head there in any number of ways, however. I'm far from convinced that the right is on the way back to full control - even of itself, much less of the government.
@ miguel cervantes:
From South to North, between 1776 and 1787, there was broad and wide-ranging experimentation in all 13 former colonies. The Pennsylvania Constitution was much different from the Massachusetts Constitution, and both were very different from the South Carolina Constitution, and not everyone was so sure that any constitution was better than no constitution, or any state better than no state (above, say, township level). Shay's Rebellion was the result of one set of peculiar circumstances, though its origins were typical in some ways of the disagreements being thought, worked, and fought out during those years in diverse locales. The willingness to adopt a relatively strong and limitedly democratic-popular state under the 1787 Constitution came about as a reaction to disruption, chaos, violence, and disillusionment, even despite generally improving economic circumstances.
I take this largely from my reading of Wood (THE CREATION OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC) and a little bit Huyler (LOCKE IN AMERICA).
That would have been Louis XIV, "L'eta c'est moi." By the time things rolled around to Louis XVI ("he was the worst, since Louis the First!"), it's was more "L'etat, say whuh?" Though maybe not a great example for Rex's thesis - unless he's thinking two or three breakdowns ahead... Other examples can be found from the period between 1776 and 1787, when virtually every thought about relationship between government and individual/family/people was thought, and a very wide range were tried out, right here in the future USA, including some that look forward to council communism and anarchism (also soviet communism before it went bigtime). But trying to imagine what would take place under a successful and continued relatively controlled major devolution of power from the central government is difficult. It's easier to imagine a great deal of disruption and destruction being done on the way to some reactive version of corporatism or socialism (is that what Rex is hinting at?). I get the sense that a lot of people are already practicing to call it whatever their eventual masters require them to call it.
@ Rex Caruthers:
Mighta stayed a commie.
Rex Caruthers wrote:
The things that were on the agenda to be settled, were settled. The country was less than 1/10th its current population, the vast majority still living a rural/agricultural existence. So, no reason to expect everything to be settled forever. It's been twice as long in years from Civil War to 2010 as from 1787 to Civil War. In both human and material terms the differences are much greater and more profound.
On the narrow issue of your Divorce plan, it's just a terrible as well as fantastical idea, and, whenever you bring it up, I naturally assume you're joking to make a point. Now, if Conrad Black turns out to be a cockeyed optimist, and a bunch of other bad things happen, sure, the vast inland empire could break up, but I doubt that it would be a clean, non-violent, fair, and cost-efficient Rooseveltland vs Randland operation. In the meantime, no one has the right to give up some section of the country and designate it for Free Market Libertarian Absolutists, without regard to the rights, investments, expectations of all the people who happen to be living there already, arent FMLAists, and don't feel like moving, not to mention the rest of us who've been investing in the FMLA-area for generations.
@ Rex Caruthers:
I presume they pay JRub just to be her very special self, loving her to pieces whatever she does. As little as I care for JPod, I wouldn't insult him with the suggestion that he's actually aware of her writing.
As for Conrad Black's piece, I wouldn't endorse every word of his analysis. I'd like to believe that his diagnosis is correct, and that the rot is only skin deep, but, even if I could, I see no, none, zero sign that his prescription could be administered under the current terms of our national political debate.
Fuster wrote:
We're mainly in the realm of faith here. Conservatives begin with the presumption that all taxation and regulation are objective reductions in ideal free market efficiency. Where they establish their baseline of necessary spending varies, but they're mainly convinced that taxes are already too high. Where people put their money is skewed by other factors, which on the way to the neo-Reaganite libertarian small-state would increasingly be in red white and blue we're number one job-creating business of America is business, not rhino horns.
miguel cervantes wrote:
Thanks for the laugh.
@ Fuster:
It depends on how you define "the economy." For free market true believers, "the economy" means "business," and everything that stands in the way of business is "inefficient." Where each neo-Reaganite stops on the way to totalized libertarianism is impossible to guess. They're not worried about such details. They're too busy dreaming about the gay work of destruction ahead, on the way to a republic of virtue.
@ miguel cervantes:
We already know that you're a hardcore ideological conservative. I suspect we could list 50 Tea Party Republican platform points, and you'd come down on the right side on every single one.
@ miguel cervantes:
Yes, I know, the big argument for the right is "we're no worse than they are!" based on the usual political MRE - chicken tetrazzini and the "cap n trade fraud."
miguel cervantes wrote:
Palin, Beck, and the rest of the Tea Party wing speak a utopian language, as do their main boosters. Sure, it's largely meaningless, but that doesn't prevent large crowds from imagining the defeat and destruction of the evil progressives and their evil regulatory and entitlement-disbursing administrative state. Many on the right have even co-opted revolutionary language, and can be found going on in the Standard and National Review about the "ruling class," as though the insurrection lies somewhere around the corner.
As to what they would actually do if given power, that's another question. You seem to believe that they're just the demagogues they seem to be, and that all of the "Don't Tread on Me," "Take Our Country Back," "Social Security is unconstitutional," "Woodrow Wilson is the son of Satan" stuff is for the easily led.
Their unity position is tax cuts and they claim to be in favor of attacking entitlements. So, they could be expected to give that a try, at least for a while. If it didn't work big-time and relatively fast, then things might start to get interesting, especially since the conservative foreign policy establishment is dominated by traditional hawks, and since what otherwise unites the right is cultural revanchism and populist xenophobia. Amidst whatever economic, security, or combined emergency, a lot of that small state constitutionalism might disappear, or at most provide a cover. Alternatively, they could just turn out to be ineffective, and we could muddle along amidst continued erosion of the economy and state, punctuated by occasional crises, eventually swinging left again as a weary and frightened populace seeks meaning and security within the loving arms of the strong state. Judt called it the "social democracy of fear," and you might add "pain" to it, though it also has a positive aspect.
We could head there in any number of ways, however. I'm far from convinced that the right is on the way back to full control - even of itself, much less of the government.
@ miguel cervantes:
From South to North, between 1776 and 1787, there was broad and wide-ranging experimentation in all 13 former colonies. The Pennsylvania Constitution was much different from the Massachusetts Constitution, and both were very different from the South Carolina Constitution, and not everyone was so sure that any constitution was better than no constitution, or any state better than no state (above, say, township level). Shay's Rebellion was the result of one set of peculiar circumstances, though its origins were typical in some ways of the disagreements being thought, worked, and fought out during those years in diverse locales. The willingness to adopt a relatively strong and limitedly democratic-popular state under the 1787 Constitution came about as a reaction to disruption, chaos, violence, and disillusionment, even despite generally improving economic circumstances.
I take this largely from my reading of Wood (THE CREATION OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC) and a little bit Huyler (LOCKE IN AMERICA).
That would have been Louis XIV, "L'eta c'est moi." By the time things rolled around to Louis XVI ("he was the worst, since Louis the First!"), it's was more "L'etat, say whuh?" Though maybe not a great example for Rex's thesis - unless he's thinking two or three breakdowns ahead... Other examples can be found from the period between 1776 and 1787, when virtually every thought about relationship between government and individual/family/people was thought, and a very wide range were tried out, right here in the future USA, including some that look forward to council communism and anarchism (also soviet communism before it went bigtime). But trying to imagine what would take place under a successful and continued relatively controlled major devolution of power from the central government is difficult. It's easier to imagine a great deal of disruption and destruction being done on the way to some reactive version of corporatism or socialism (is that what Rex is hinting at?). I get the sense that a lot of people are already practicing to call it whatever their eventual masters require them to call it.
@ Rex Caruthers:
Had a big argument about that already, 150 years ago, though it was the other side trying to force the issue. The good guys won.
The 2nd BOR wasn't up for discussion, of course, but most of the same arguments apply.