Raise the Debt Ceiling!
A Republic cannot survive once half its citizens become convinced that the other half are irredeemably evil when they are merely good-natured and reasonable patriots.
But, again, a Republic cannot survive once half its citizens, convinced that they are merely good-natured and reasonable patriots, become irredeemably evil.
Please peruse this tidbit from the Anchoress:
http://www.patheos.com/community/theanchoress/2011/08/01/the-veep-goes-vile/
My comment:
My father once told me a story which haunted me for years. I forget the details, but remember the gist. It seems a large and successful concern in New York had decided, for idealist reasons, to include all employees as stockholder in the company, so that it was entirely democratic, entirely employee-owned and run.
A time came when the democratic body of all employees, the great and the small, had to decide whether to vote themselves a pay-raise or buy the needed stock necessary to stay in business for the next six months. Rather shortsightedly, the majority voted for the payraise, and when the days of waiting were completed, like a farmer who consumes rather than plants he seedcorn, the company went out of business, payraise and all.
The dismal idea that rational men, acting as a group, would become so selfish as to place short-term and personal interest over the long-term and public interest to the degree that it was destroyed both personal and public, long and short, was shocking to me then.
Now, older and more cynical, I still nonetheless find it shocking.
Governments, as a rule, have only two issues to debate. Whether to go to war, and how to spend the public funds. In the last administration, we saw, thanks to the overheated rhetoric of the Left, that the first issue could not be debated in a civil fashion. In this administration, we see, thanks again to the Left, the second issue likewise.
Suppose a citizen who asks for the public expenditures to be accountable to Constitutional and legal strictures, and not to be irrational or hidden or placed in service to crony capitalism (all points any honest Democrat would be eager to support, as a champion of the Little Man against Wall Street and the Military Industrial Complex). If the reply to that citizen is to call him a terrorist and a racist, and to continue so to call him long after any possible evidence supporting such a claim has been debunked, then the Republic has failed in essence.
The Roman Republic continued for many years to call itself a Republic even after it lost first the inner and then the outer forms of Republican government.
But you may ask — surely I am dismayed at the barbarism which has eaten away the brains and souls of the Democrat Party, surely I am aghast at the ongoing holocaust of unborn infants in the zillion-dollar-a-year taxpayer funded Aborticide Industry, surely I am bemused at the folly of socializing the finest health care system in the world in order to plunge the nation so far into debt that not even astronomers have names for the numbers involved, surely I am exasperated at the economic illiterates and socialists who assert that rationing good and services produces surpluses rather than shortages, surely I am bewildered by the claims that they way to get out of national debt is to increase the national debt. But what do I really think of the debate over raising the debt ceiling?
Words fail me. Therefore sing! Or if you cannot sing, rap!
You may also ask: but surely the mainstream media, the respectable news organizations, all call this a victory for the Tea Party Republicans? Why do you not rejoice?
I reply with a weary shake of my old gray head that if it were true, the mainstream media would not say it. The news organizations have since the Clinton administration departed from their antique mission of investigative journalism, and they are now devout and entire anti-journalists.
Their mission is to keep the truth from the American public. This was no victory. It is a disaster.
The result of the debt ceiling debate has been a debacle, and a proof, if any further proof is needed, that a virtuous people can indeed govern themselves democratically, but a men without virtue, once they learn they can vote themselves largess from the public coffers, become a mob, and the rule becomes mob rule.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
