populism 4

Well I suppose like any two things, business and govt are alike in some ways and unlike in others. But one way they are not alike is that the aim of the government is to provide services and the aim of business is to make money. Maybe the government is a little like a nonprofit business, but you never see anybody saying they will run the government like a nonprofit business. In fact what these guys who are going to run the government like a business generally brag about is how much money their business made, and now that I think about it most of them seem to come from one of those companies where they toss money from hand to hand real quick so average Joe can’t tell exactly what is going on, but when it’s all done they have way more than when they started out, and they assure us that it was all created by them and none of it came out of our pocket. You never see somebody who came from a business where they made something, like crossbows or accordions, and they brag about how fine their products are and how happy their users are, it is all about how much money they made.

So what does it mean when they say that they are going to run the gov like a business, or more importantly what do they think the voter thinks they mean when they say they are going to run the gov like a business? What do you think they mean?

I was going to be objective about populism, contrasting the tea party with the left of the turn of the century, and maybe Huey Long who was vaguely left, and George Wallace who was vaguely right, but then I got into the subject of the tea party, who are obviously the populists of the right, and I just kind of went into a rant.

I do like certain aspects of populism, I do like the empowerment of the downtrodden. People on top, well some of them have just inherited it, but some have worked hard to get there, but once you get to the top you kind of want to stay there, you want you to keep what you have, you don’t want anybody else to have it, you don’t want to fund programs to help the poor, you don’t want to fund public schools when you are sending your kids to private schools. We’re all born equally into the world, but some are born into wealth and some are born into nothing. Is that fair? Should life be fair? The universe certainly doesn’t care, but we are humans, we know of the concept of fair, it feels like the right thing, we ought to do it.

There, that is my argument that the rise of the downtrodden is a good thing.   They should look at the landscape, see that they are being exploited, and vote the rascals out. That’s the good thing about populism.

But because they are downtrodden, they haven’t received much education, and they don’t know that much and their thinking is simple, but the world is complicated. And the rhetoric is so simple anybody can spout it, and they run the risk of following cranks and crooks. It’s kind of an odd thing the way we can love the talk so much that we don’t pay much attention to who is this guy who is doing the talking.

Back in hippie days there would be some guy who was talking for love and against the war, and so you assumed he had to be a good guy, but then he turned out to be burning you on dope deals and trying to steal your woman, and how could a person who said the right things be doing the wrong things?

This is a bit scattered but I will return to the subject in the next post.

I did want to say I agree with you about our loss of interest in the downtrodden. I can’t imagine a rep or a dem of today proposing a war on poverty.  And it used to be something to be proud of to be a working man, to come back from the mill and put food on the table for your family, anymore the mill workers have been pushed down so far that they are almost in poverty, and who anymore cares what happens to the poor?