populism 5

I think it’s the law that all states have to have balanced budgets, though there is generally a lot of legerdemain to accomplish that. I’m just going to guess without looking it up, that your current gov balanced his budget by cutting taxes and services, that’s what the term balanced budget is usually code for. The reps were big on a balanced budget for years, then lost interest in it when they had the presidency, and now are interested in it again, though I have yet to hear them talk of the balanced budget amendment.

I don’t think anybody wants to make everybody receive the same income, but I think most people would like to make the poor less poor. How less poor is a matter of debate. But surely one percent of the population owning half the money is wrong (I’m not sure of the exact numbers, since they are becoming more extreme all the time, but I think this is close enough). I guess this is just my opinion, but I will stand by it.

So I’m okay with taking money from the rich to give to the poor, and to just even out things generally. I’m not sure how that can be done, because the rich, because they are rich, have a lot of power, and they don’t want to give up any of their money.

I’ve been reading a book, Through the Eye of a Needle, about the Roman Empire about the time the Christians were beginning to take it over. The Romans themselves had no problem with wealth, and they brought this attitude with them when they became Christians. The Romans also had a different definition for poor, they didn’t mean the rabble, but more like the unconnected, people who had no influence and didn’t have any influential people to advocate for them.

The original Christians were pretty poor, but as the religion spread out, richer and richer people were drawn into its net, and then these people came into it with all their money, and what were they to do with it. Traditionally a rich Roman was expected to share his wealth by building bathhouses and gardens and whatnot, and then the question when they entered into Christianity was would they build big churches or feed the rabble. I think this discussion is still going on today.

But I’m supposed to be talking about populism. I guess the thing that interested me about the tea party was the element of populism in it. On the left we had that Occupy movement which got a lot of press, but I always thought it was stupid because it thought it was above politics, and never really took a stand on anything specific.

The tea party however went right to politics, but still it’s kind of amorphous, it’s hard to tell who is in it and isn’t, and I suspect people are dropping in and out of it all the time, and politically some are libertarians and some are bible thumpers, and some are rich and some are poor. I suspect that their income is probably less than the national average, but not a lot less. And I am just guessing this because I don’t know of any demographic statistics on them. Some of them want to push the reps to the right and some of them say fuck the reps, we will force them to give us what we want, and if we get the chance we will take over the whole party. They call the establishment reps RINOs when in fact, they are the RINOs, because if the party doesn’t do their bidding they are all screw the party.

I guess what surprised me was that in some instances tea party types have come out against the chamber of commerce, indeed even against big business, and here is the heady whiff of populism.

Roughly we can say that as government is the institution of the dems, business is the institution of the reps. Mainline reps and dems may have different agendas but they respect their institutions. In my hippie days, the populist new left was anti government, and now we see elements of the tea party that are anti big business.