Posts tagged ‘ruling class’
It is disconcerting for the citizen to be faced so starkly by the fact that ambitious mediocrity is now the main characteristic of those who rule him.
Unleashing Arrogance, Complacency, and Mediocrity
Our Ruling Class and the Clerisy
Ozymandias
Tags: Clerisy, Ozymandias, Philosopher Kings, ruling class
Mrs. Clinton’s nomination will have a similarly negligible effect on the lives of American women. It isn’t exactly a Muppet News Flash that women can run for high office in these United States: You can be Sarah Palin and be on a major-party ticket and be called a “c**t” by all the nice people who will be urging you to vote for Mrs. Clinton as a show of solidarity with women. You can be a woman and do a hell of a lot better job running PepsiCo than Mrs. Clinton did running the State Department. You can be a woman and be seriously considered for the Republican nomination in spite of a slightly short political curriculum vitae. You can be a woman and be a Marine.
If your daughter didn’t already know that she could grow up and make of her life whatever her dreams and abilities allow, and learned otherwise only upon seeing a dreadful politician take the next step in her dreadful career, that isn’t a failure of a patriarchal society. You’re just a bad father.
. . .
If you think Mrs. Clinton “cares about women,” ask Juanita Broaddrick or Gennifer Flowers.
Making hay out of ‘making history’
Ozymandias
Tags: bamboozle, Clerisy, elections, Ozymandias, political class, ruling class
Maybe one needs to be sick to run for office. [Anthony] Weiner is a disciple of New York senator Chuck Schumer.
Schumer famously said, “I was born to legislate.” This goes to the heart of the political sickness—the need to tell others how to live. As economist Walter Williams puts it, “I respect ordinary thieves more than I respect politicians. Ordinary thieves take my money without pretense. (They don’t) insult my intelligence by proclaiming that they’ll use the money that they steal from me to make my life better.”
In the next weeks, as cameras record every utterance burped up by politicians at the political conventions, I’ll take comfort knowing that when politicians can’t force us to do things, people often ignore them (remember, government is force; this is why politicians are important, and dangerous).
Ozymandias
Tags: Anthony Weiner, Chuck Schumer, Clerisy, Ozymandias, political class, ruling class, Walter Williams
The revolving door is in large measure how the ruling class, the Leviathan, the Cult of the Philosopher Kings, has turned the Republic into a crony capitalist haven of mutually reinforcing money and power. And the price of admission is often a degree from an Ivy League school.
Michael Paese used to be chief of staff to House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, until Paese became a lobbyist. When former Tom Daschle intimate Mark Patterson left Goldman Sachs’ lobby shop to become Tim Geithner’s chief of staff at Treasury, Paese took the helm at Goldman’s lobby shop.
Continue reading ‘Government Ethics and the Revolving Door (cont’d), Crony Capitalism at Work’ »
Tags: 6291QBYArqE, Amy Overton, Citigroup, congressional ethics, crony capitalism, cronyism, David Stockman, DC Revolving door, Dodd-Frank, Fannie Mae, GE, General Electric, Goldman Sachs, Jack Lew, K Street, lobbying disclosure, Michael Paese, minimalism, minimalist living, Ozymandias, pJVDTA0uHsA, plutocracy, QzNYeC_b2Kw, rent seeking, revolving door, revolving door tax, ruling class, Tim Geithner, TurboTax Tim Geithner, Wall Street
Karl Popper blamed Plato for the rise of totalitarianism in the 20th century, seeing Plato’s philosopher kings, with their dreams of ‘social engineering’ and ‘idealism’, as leading directly to Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler (via Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx). In addition, Ayatollah Khomeini is said to have been inspired by the Platonic vision of the philosopher king while in Qum in the 1920s when he became interested in Islamic mysticism and Plato’s Republic. As such, it has been speculated that he was inspired by Plato’s philosopher king, and subsequently based elements of his Islamic Republic on it.
Philosopher king – Wikipedia, footnotes omitted
Continue reading ‘“Irish Democracy” and the Cult of the Philosopher Kings’ »
Tags: -jxJv5Gebeo, Irish Democracy, Ozymandias, Philosopher King, Philosopher Kings, ruling class, Statolatry, XV4fQyW8gcU
Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
The real conflict in political theory … is not between individualism and community. It’s between voluntary association and coerced association.
David Boaz
Continue reading ‘The Ruling Class and America’s New Mandarins’ »
Tags: 5u03KAcEbEo, America's New Mandarins, Angelo Codevilla, Beadledom, Better Than Plowing, Controlling Leviathan, crony capitalism, cronyism, Dan Mitchell, dIS6uN-cRtQ, enjoy the decline, House of Cards, James M. Buchanan, jEjBqRt5lDk, kERt0ZTGGM8, Leviathan, Matt Welch, Ozymandias, Philosopher King, Philosopher Kings, pLDfnQVns7E, plutocrat, plutocrats, public choice, pySpeWcu-30, QbuEiRacYQ8, qSco-xFnrpg, ruling class, Sycophantic 4th Estate, Term limits
