I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

"For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope." - Jeremiah 29:11

 

As has been alluded to Keynesian economics has never been practiced. It is real simple: As far as can be determined there is no such thing as a politician that will actually implement the side of the policy equation which calls for paying doown debt in good times so you can incur some in tmes of economic distress.

This country, and many others, not only lets the good times roll but incurs debt to make those good times seem like great times without thought to the consequences. We are led by madmen who, while mad in the macro sense, act quite sanely in their own micro world. The budgets at every level of government are priorized to buy votes not to wring value for the taxpayers.

 

I can understand your disdain for public sector unions but surely you don't believe that all unions that give employees a shot to bargain collectively are despicable?

 

She has a job with a market value of $8.25/hr. If she needs more money then she should be looking for a job that pays more. Why should McDonalds pay her more? An hour of flipping burgers is only worth so much.

My first job was at a hamburger joint. I was paid $1/hr., the minimum wage at the time. Young and dumb as I was, even then I knew this gig was temporary.

 

Actually I do. Unions are merely an excuse for legalized extortion.... with other evils, to boot.

Unions had a different purpose in the early days of our industrial revolution, but now they're mostly about greed... and my father was a union man. I was even in one for a while in the early years of my working career.

 

CORRECTAMUNDO! And exactly why we should have a balanced budget amendment to the US Constitution.

 

We had the Graham-Ruddman act in the Reagan years. It led to balanced budgets. Were it an amendment to the Constitution it might be a lot harder to get rid of, good idea really. Some Democrats took the Graham-Ruddman to the Supremes and got it tossed out... so where does that leave fiscal conservatives? Standing around with a big "L" on their foreheads essentially. Any money they don't spend the Democrats will spend. Conservatives might as well waste money as rapidly as they can because Democrats are going to spend the country right off the cliff anyhow.

 

Nicely put Tandh.

The problem is universal and unending. The External balanced by the internal.

Excerpt from Martin Luther King "Street Sweeper" speech

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What I’m saying to you this morning, my friends, even if it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, go on out and sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures; sweep streets like Handel and Beethoven composed music; sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry; (Go ahead) sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, “Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.”

If you can’t be a pine on the top of a hill

Be a scrub in the valley—but be

The best little scrub on the side of the hill,

Be a bush if you can’t be a tree.

If you can’t be a highway just be a trail

If you can’t be the sun be a star;

It isn’t by size that you win or fail—

Be the best of whatever you are.

And when you do this, when you do this, you’ve mastered the length of life. (Yes)

This onward push to the end of self-fulfillment is the end of a person’s life. Now don’t stop here, though. You know, a lot of people get no further in life than the length. They develop their inner powers; they do their jobs well. But do you know, they try to live as if nobody else lives in the world but themselves? (Yes) And they use everybody as mere tools to get to where they’re going. (Yes) They don’t love anybody but themselves. And the only kind of love that they really have for other people is utilitarian love. You know, they just love people that they can use. (Well)

A lot of people never get beyond the first dimension of life. They use other people as mere steps by which they can climb to their goals and their ambitions. These people don’t work out well in life. They may go for awhile, they may think they’re making it all right, but there is a law. (Oh yeah) They call it the law of gravitation in the physical universe, and it works, it’s final, it’s inexorable: whatever goes up can come down. You shall reap what you sow. (Yeah) God has structured the universe that way. (Yeah) And he who goes through life not concerned about others will be a subject, victim of this law.

So I move on and say that it is necessary to add breadth to length. Now the breadth of life is the outward concern for the welfare of others, as I said. (Yeah) And a man has not begun to live until he can rise above the narrow confines of his own individual concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

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The numbers who could do this have always been few. But they were examples for the rest.

The problem is in the stream of life we are presently rowing FEWER even WANT to make the effort.

 

If only it were that simple. There are actually 1000 people on the island and the guy with the net and a pile of fish hires a gang of lazy thugs to subdue and enslave everybody else. Thus, the concentration of wealth destroys an egalitarian society.
In a democracy power is vested in the people. Wealth is power. Great wealth is great power. Great wealth is anti-democratic. From whom does Washington take its orders - the people or the super-wealthy? The linking of democracy to unrestrained capitalism is the most naïve political nonsense ever conceived.

 

The unions in this country today are as useless as tits on a bull both for their members and society; you'll get no argument from me on that point. But when you say they are all about greed -- which is largely an accurate statement -- how does that differentiate unions from most of our society?

I don't see unions (and their greed) as any worse then the greed that permeates our society ... top to bottom. Maybe that is simply mankind's nature. I don't know that is the case but at every rodeo I've ever been to it was the one thing you could count on -- copious levels of greed. Given my life and how much I have taken compared to how much of put back in I can't absolve myself. It is just so much easier put in the half measure and take out a full one.