“Joe Biden, as I’ve written before, is a radical president. Especially when it comes to the role government can and should play in the lives of everyday Americans.Biden’s policy agenda — from the $1 trillion “hard” infrastructure bill to the as-yet-unpriced social safety net package — would, if passed, fundamentally alter the relationship we have with government.In short: The era of small government (such as it ever existed) would be over. The era of expansive government would begin.
Except that a majority of Americans don’t want more government in their lives, according to new data from Gallup.”
Comment: Perhaps we are not so “daft” as I had feared. pl
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/14/politics/gallup-poll-big-government-biden/index.html
“The era of small government”????
Not sure when that was. Maybe in the 19th century. At least since the mid-70s the growth in government has been on a tear. Going asymptotic when one looks at debt growth of the federal, state and local governments. Even other metrics like employment including contractors show huge increases.
When one looks at even qualitative metrics like the interference in citizen’s lives, again we see untrammeled growth in government. We have warrantless surveillance of citizens, civil forfeiture with no grand jury indictment necessary and now lockdown & shutdown of the economy as well as public services like schools and the free movement of citizens on dubious public health grounds. There continues to be no evidence that lockdowns actually work.
The fact is that Big Government and Big Business who have had several decades to concentrate market power have evolved into a mutually reinforcing symbiotic relationship ushering in an era of fascism.
This has happened under both Democrats and Republicans. Biden is just continuing the acceleration in Big Government. Trump took it up a notch compared to Obama who took it up a notch compared to Dubya who took it up a notch compared to Slick Willy who took it up a notch compared to HW Bush who took it up a notch compared to Reagan and so on. We’ve been on a course of big and bigger government arguably for a century!
blue peacock
I don’t accept the idea that Trump was equally guilty/ he did his best to reduce regulation and government function but the overseas stupidity, COVID and the deep state swamp defeated him.
Col. Lang
You’re spot on. Trump had good instincts on many policy issues including the threat of the CCP. However, he was weak from the get-go. He never had the courage or the decisiveness to strike a blow on the Deep State. He had the opportunity with the Russia Collusion hoax. Instead he got steamrolled. IMO because he just didn’t have the management skills. He has always been a hustler. He never developed the know-how or the temperament to be an executive manager of a complex bureaucracy.
Trump would have been awesome in a second term, or even better in a 2024 second term now that we all got to watch how the inside game is really played.
Deep state threw him loops from the beginning. Even before the beginning as we are learning now.
Bannon knew what was happening, but the world and the rest of the emerging Trump team was not ready for Bannon to be the Trump hatchet man. Ultimately it was a better mover for Bannon to operate outside of the scrutiny of public office.
The POTUS job has limits – we don’t do dictators, and the Obama courts shut him down every time he did act with more spontaneously. Were you really around during those early days?
There is only so much the new kid on the block can do, particularly when 99% of the political establishment and media was out to ensure he failed and make sure NO ONE would survive working for his administration. It is tough for an outsider to break in.
I can’t fault him on this at all. And am amazed he got as much done as it did – but he did have a gift of keeping the media out of his hair as they spent 24/7 frothing about his early morning tweets, leaving him free to carry out his promises made to his voters during the rest of the day.
Biden is proving there is only so much even an old insider hand can get done too. I think most Americans like it this way – we deep down don’t like or trust heavy handed “government”.
A lot of people who “don’t like or trust heavy handed “government” voted for the Democrat-media party – the epitome of heavy handed government and now, that’s what we’ve got.
And don’t forget the lemming-like reaction to the covid scamdemic.
BP
You had mentioned Matt Stoller in one of your posts on market consolidation. Here’s another one – this time on the beef industry. Yup. The “mutually reinforcing symbiotic relationship” between Big Government and Big Business screwing ordinary Americans.
https://twitter.com/giladedelman/status/1449022427011239942?s=21
The perfect graphic of the current revolving door – Big Pharma/Big Media edition. This is what fascism looks like. Most get caught up in the Left-Right frame and miss the reality.
https://twitter.com/fjrecktenwald/status/1449149577047822338?s=21
Another example of revolving door. Big Defense Contractor edition.
https://twitter.com/mideastxmidwest/status/1449007779520331777?s=21
The people’s relationship with government was long ago fundamentally altered by the Mussolini admirer, FDR.
The People can alter it back, if they have the will to do so.
Absolutely, and amen to this.
PJ
Ah, you are in Bucharest. You should stay there. Romania, my god, and you dare to lecture us about government? Which of your governments do you remember with more fondness, Vlad the Impaler or Ceausescu?
The days of small government officially ended with the 16th Amendment passed in 1913:
….WIKI: The Sixteenth Amendment (Amendment XVI) to the United States Constitution allows Congress to levy an income tax without apportioning it among the states on the basis of population.
Can’t have Big Government if you don’t have a way to fund it – consider this a done deal now for over 100 years. “Allowing Congress to levy and income tax” still remains in the hands of we the people, through those we elect to Congress who do this to us.
The socialist approach to government also included the 17th Amend. The 17th removed the states as a balance to the growth of the federal government as envisioned in 1787. The 16th fundamentally changed the relationship of citizen to government from state to federal and the 17th ended the serious chance of states doing anything about it. The “roll of the states” in political conventions is today just a show. Was a time when the federal gov’t presented itself as a guarantor of a citizen’s rights from state governments. Has that been changed. Federal funds for state repair of roads, education, heath care, state law, and environment have eroded legitimate state powers. Unless a state governor “grows a set” there is no effective push back. But then, most of them want to be the federal President! Its high time to return to Philadelphia and see just what America wants these days. Maybe Americans do want to be slaves to the state? If that’s the case there’s no sense pissin agin the wind.
“a majority of Americans don’t want more government in their lives, according to new data from Gallup”
But they prefer that over mean tweets.
Most don’t really know what they want – voting is shooting darts wearing a blindfold.
Well I’m probably gonna upset some people here on SST, but I don’t think government is all bad and terrible. Yes it is leviathan, the necessary evil, whether we like it or not we have signed a contract with it; it is forced on every person around the world without his will and consent at the very moment of birth, but why do “we” hate government so much? why do we despise arguably ‘the’ icon of human civilization, self-preservation and potential that is government? wouldn’t it be bizarre to be repelled by an institution that is essentially the collective representation of “us”? Wouldn’t it mean that we have grown/told/deceived to hate each other so much and that can’t even put up with our own ‘creation’, let alone helping each other out and cultivating each other’s potentials?
I don’t want to live where there are no reasonable rules, order and creativity. There’s a reason why they call crap-holes…crap-holes because they are pure chaos, disorder, pillage, murder and all the nasty stuff that we understand as terrible and unacceptable.
Col. Lang served in the military, didn’t he? Isn’t the military a branch of government, arguably the most orderly, ‘natural’, hierarchical, responsive, and responsible government corpus that the majority of the lunatic right since the 60s and 70s have declared war on? I don’t hate government and don’t want to live in the state of chaos or in a lawless crap-hole, and since it is the most important institution that you and I put in power through our votes, then why in the world would anyone ever want to lose this valuable agency and access? The elites, live in gated communities, enjoy their own private protection, stash their money in Cayman and Lichtenstein, don’t share the same social domain as the rest of us do and are as alien to us as an Inuit to a Moroccan Berber, and do whatever they want with us and no doubt would love to rob us from our right to cultivate government, wouldn’t they? Therefore the only leftover power for us ‘the downtrodden’ is by way of government agency and it would be utterly stupid and counterintuitive to leave it to rot by itself or at the hands of the elites (both liberal and conservative).
The problem with government arises when and where people leave this powerful institution to the hands of the sub-human elites to run/decide/experiment their lives for them. Government is like a hammer, hand it over to the selfish and sub-human elites and everything will look like a nail, crap will ensue no doubt about it; but take it back and more importantly build it back and things will start to change for the better. Government that was once upon a time ran by responsible elites, gave us the internet, railroads and highways, disease-free food packaging and distribution system, Medicare and Medicaid. Nonetheless, it has done and continues to screw up with terrible ideas that almost exclusively come from coastal elites with miserable consequences and always end up up limiting citizens’ rights, but that doesn’t mean it needs to go for good, I least I don’t believe so.
Instead of eliminating government, people should take government back into their own custody.
PJ
SST is long dead. Nobody here wants to abolish government but most of us know that government is inherently tyrannical and constantly grasping for power. Our republic was founded on the principle that government will constantly grow to benefit itself at the expense of citizens. My vocation as a soldier is actually none of your business. What sort of foreigner are you?
What sort of foreigner are you?
Maybe he isn’t one to start with? A foreigner that is.
Seemingly sent from Romania. … We once dwelled on that topic years and years back on SST in a rare turcopolier-LeaNder-Fred exchange. Remember???
He does not sound like an American. Most people do not use a VPN.
Nobody here wants to abolish government but most of us know that government is inherently tyrannical and constantly grasping for power. Our republic was founded on the principle that government will constantly grow to benefit itself at the expense of citizens.
A merciful accident of Taiwan’s history is that a relatively authoritarian party, the KMT, lost power to a relatively non-authoritarian party, the DPP. I cannot calculate how much of this was due to thoughtful economic policy and how much due to external circumstances. Mesquita and Smith might argue that the KMT had few key supporters, the DPP has many, and thus the DPP is more conducive to economic growth. However, I don’t trust economic considerations to inevitably lead to increased human rights. Thus, in Taiwan and in every country, I try to argue for the human rights of citizens first, mentioning any legitimacy of government as an afterthought. I try to get everyone excited in minimizing government power to maximize human rights. I try to hold out hope that economic growth and human rights can coexist, not just in Taiwan, but everywhere.
Unfortunately, it is not clear that my theories of Taiwan’s history match its reality; it is possible that the KMT could have retained power even longer if they had been ambitious enough and clever enough.
Context:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan)
Mesquita and Smith taken from Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dictator%27s_Handbook
“Instead of eliminating government, people should take government back into their own custody.”
What is your plan to do so. We tried by electing someone besides a career politician who shortly found out the un-elected bureaucracy had more influence than he did.
Your memory on the subject of government in America is both short and inaccurate. The lunatic right, as you call them, were not the advocates of government overthrow in the 60’s and 70’s but a violent, lazy, and sometimes smelly, left. That those who encouraged the young to “let their freak flag fly” and “turn on, tune in, and drop out” should now be the gov’t leaders advocating obedience to the state is “The world Turned Upside Down”. Americans have always had a healthy debate over the role of gov’t. Liberty vs Order was always the question. In a “new world” we could ask that question once more. Many Libertarians, like me, proudly and voluntarily served the state, obey its laws, pay its taxes, and acknowledge their responsibility to keep an orderly enough society to have civilization. I know of no responsible citizens who wish the anarchy you insinuate. I don’t agree w/you that gov’t has given us the modernities you mention. I suggest you pay a visit to Menlo Park. BTW Edison died during Hoovers administration, not Roosevelt’s. American medicine brought improvements to health b/f a CDC was ever thought of. You might be right about the internet though, if I am not mistaken Al Gore did invent that. P.J., balance has been the key since Jamestown and Plymouth. Many Americans fear that the balance has gone much too far in the direction of state control over individual liberty. Once that tipping point is breached what recourse do those favoring individual liberty have for redress against the state. That’s the issue.
PJ: Big government is lumpish, wasteful and creates a self-protective class of apparatchiks, always hungry for more tax dollars and even less accountability. Limited government is the appropriate foundation for civilizations. We the people have lost touch with our “government”.
Trump was trying to downsize government, both in numbers and in reach. Bless his soul. But in doing so, he did touch the third rail that stirred the beast. And the beast when stirred (Big Government) scares us all.
Where is the sweet spot between Big Government and Limited Government – we passed it because now we have a self-perpetuating “government class” that reached critical mass and we no longer control.
Let’s go, Brandon.
When this President decided to fire people who work for companies larger than 100 people who refused the vaccine is the day he crossed the Rubicon for me. This is the most radical act I’ve seen a President make in my lifetime. People will be forced to take a risky vaccine or not be able to feed their families. He has no idea what rage he is creating in many parts of the nation. I believe in many locations in the US the nullification of the mandate will take place. People will ignore it or actively lie to cover for their employees. Unfortunately, this demented fool will continue to press and press until he gets a reaction which may be the desired effect his shadow cabal is aiming for.
If you listened to JB today it sounded like he thinks collective farms run by the feds would be a good idea.
Although I am a constant reader of Turcopolier I rarely comment. Wow three times in a matter of minutes! You have hit my hot button. My mother’s family were Ukrainian farmers from Halychnia. They immigrated to New York and Pennsy around 1900. But they knew through relatives what was happening in Ukraine in ’30-’32. The state can be frighteningly powerful. I think few correspondents on this blog are New Yorker’s, so I beg their trust. About two years ago D’Blasio publicly stated if he could he would eliminate all private reality and turn it over to the city. The new NYS Governor Hochul, is firing nurses from hospitals who have not been vaccinated. Other public employees are also in line to be canned. New Yorker’s have not been req’d to “show their papers” yet but restaurants in the city are tasked w/checking covid vaccination cards b/f seating diners. Perhaps the European soul is ok with submission to the state. Maybe the American mind is also becoming equally comfortable.
No fan of public sector unions here, but I am surprised how many of the government unions are choosing to walk out, rather than submit to forced medical experimentation.
Huge numbers of them remain unvaxxed. Even Chicago’s mayor finally had to back down when half her police force threatened to walk out. 45% of TSA, even Fauci’s NIH had large numbers of unvaxxed not that long ago.
Of course, who knows if this large percentage is made up of highly skeptical blacks, who inside or outside of government employment are rejecting this injection anyway – forced to take it or not.
And Deap,
As you know the USPS (and very likely soon the TSA too) have been allowed to “option out” as the saying goes.
Off-topic some … I’ve mentioned hereabouts having nearby Amish neighbors? Maybe there is another third rail …
https://commoncts.blogspot.com/2021/10/they-did-it-without-masks-mandates-or.html
(True those are Pennsylvanian Amish and so their horses and mules have even-lengthed-legs rather than the up-downhilled legs Arkansas Amish have so recently evolved.)
No comment on the ‘rona and the Amish is complete without the meme.
https://twitter.com/RudyHavenstein/status/1423375544192626689
Heh heh Barbara Ann, sometime in early summer of last year (June? ’20) it was precisely that explanation given to [us] by one of the local elders when the subject came up during a propane refilling when a group of us ‘English’ were visiting one of their places of business.
So I’d, rhetorically of course ask ‘Which came first’ the truth of the matter or the meme?
Deap,
The unions are not walking out, the rank and file members are. This should tell you just how corrupted the leadership has become. If they were actually doing the will of the membership they would have stopped supporting democratic congressional campaigns a long time ago.
He will have to rescind the mandate. The crony economy has coin and power but what good is money and power if it can’t be spent or applied in the real economy. It slowly starts being devalued.
Whoever is in charge of Biden better start simmering this situation down. It’s not a phony economy game out here. It’s real people with real money and real other things but above all real skin in the game; their own.
Colonel Lang – there can to my mind be no other conclusion – “Nobody here wants to abolish government but most of us know that government is inherently tyrannical and constantly grasping for power.”
So why do so very many of us patiently, sometimes enthusiastically, allow the swamp to drain us instead of the other way round. Why aren’t “we the people” voting against the swamp en masse, instead of so many of us voting for it? Because the Framers did recognise the dangers of government becoming the swamp, and did try to guard against it.
I used to think that the major division between us in the West was that some of us recognised the truth you set out bleakly above and some of us didn’t. Maybe more in the States than in Europe because, after all, the Americans had to put together a constitution in a hurry. The Framers had to reach deep into constitutional considerations and could not take them for granted. They reached very deep. They had to articulate explicitly what was often merely comfortably implicit in English and continental constitutional experience.
But implicit or explicit, and certainly in the Anglosphere on both sides of the Atlantic, there was an underlying consensus on how we view government. We view it as you put it in that sentence above. Government is a dangerous brute. We need it, can’t do without it, but if we don’t look sharp it’ll run our affairs for itself and not for us.
And as said, I used to think that we were divided between those who knew that and those who didn’t. I used to think also that that division explained the difference between the Anglosphere and the Continentals. They, more trusting, more conformist, and far more inclined to get behind “them”. Us, more sceptical and knowing that “they” were a constant danger to us if we did not take care.
Too superficial, that view, I now think. I don’t think that’s the main division at all and the distinction is not between the trusting and the sceptical. I reckon we all know, Anglosphere or not, that government can get dangerously powerful. The division is between those of us who want to do what the Framers explicitly attempted to do – keep it under control. And those of us who wish, not to limit, but to use that dangerous power to force our fellows into our own way of thinking.
I don’t think the Framers thought much about that. They knew government could become insolent and overbearing. Of course they did. They’d just got rid of such a government. They knew government could easily serve its own interests instead of the interests of “we the people”. They sought to guard against that. They did not foresee a time when one ideological faction in “we the people” saw government, and preferably a government as powerful as possible, as a means of imposing their values on the rest of us.
Might explain that odd alliance of the progressives and the cronies that has been so marked recently. Clinton and Biden are the epitome of “crony” and the interest groups the cronies serve. Why would so many of “we the people” vote for such? What’s in it for us, in these intrusive and overbearing governments we all in the West are now subject to?
It’s an inevitable symbiosis. “They”, the cronies and the interest groups they work with, are serving the interests they’ve always served. Their own as ever. And a dangerously powerful government, opaque to scrutiny, will do that as the Framers foresaw. The progressives are more than happy with a dangerously powerful government because they hope that powerful government will force on all the millenarian fantasies they hold so dear.
Explains too why Trump got such a kicking. The cronies would always hate someone who cheerfully announced he proposed to drain the swamp. The progressives, though most not swamp dwellers themselves and pretty much as drained by the swamp as the rest of us, would always hate someone so “non-woke”, so patently uninterested in their millenarian fantasies.
20 million in America now work for the government. They have spouses, friends and family.
That is a solid, highly self-interested voting base which can easily reach 40-60 million with nothing other than Democrat gaurantees for self-preservation of the public sector union buzzword “working families”.
Macron on the contrary seems quite confident, celebrating at Elisium, at the rythm of “I will Survive” a football victory, without masks, social distancing, Covid Passports, or terror of any kind he imposses on the French working masses…
https://twitter.com/N_Trastamara/status/1449020728502804483
This privledged caste currenlty openly peeing on us and stating it´s raining, will end worst than Marie Antoinette, at least that unconnected woman, living in her own reality, advised the masses to eat cakes instead of absent bread, now they want us to eat worms….
Masks´ VAT will go from 4% to 21% starting new year… announced by governments in Europe, after health ministers stated masks will remain with us while there are viruses on Earth…
Viruses are part of human bioma….just saying…
Masks´ VAT will go from 4% to 21% starting new year… announced by governments in Europe, after health ministers stated masks will remain with us while there are viruses on Earth…
That’s a curious way to convey what happend:
The European Commission had already in April 2020 published a decision helping Member States affected by the coronavirus pandemic to temporarily suspend customs duties and VAT on protective equipment, testing kits or medical devices such as ventilators. This made it easier financially to get the medical equipment that doctors, nurses and patients desperately need. While the initial measure applied for six months, the exemption was subsequently extended three times, with the current provisions due to expire on 31 December 2021.
https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/covid-19-taxud-response/covid-19-waiving-vat-and-customs-duties-vital-medical-equipment_de
Yeah.. but the thing is that thye keep´em mandatory…even when there is no emergency any more…
Italy on the verge of national general strike..1 million workers on general strike already to oposse Dragui´s globalist policy on impossing Covid Pass for to be able to work and feed your family….
https://twitter.com/Devils_Iawyer/status/1447603874009952266
Evading government regulations or taxation is high art in Italy.
I recall the days being a camp follower stationed in with the USAF in Italy, where local gas stations had backrooms that looked like Walmart distribution centers – stacked to the ceiling with bicycles, lawn furniture, BBQ’s, etc to he traded for the tax-free gas coupons issued to US military stationed in Italy.
That was only one small part of the large barter economy, set up to avoid any government regulations. Battling wits and evading authorities is/was a way of life – Luigi Barzini wrote about this cultural pre-occupation in this book The Italians.
Can confirm it still is high art in Italy. We went fishing one day and had an excellent catch……… most of which ends up at the kitchen door of a local resort hotel and finds its way onto their (very expensive) menu.
…..and a week later we are “ honored guests” at a huge Sunday lunch at the hotel.
Walrus
Did they really kill all those police dogs? If so, you are less than men.
Well, when they are disposesing working people from their fundamental rights, amongst them, access to culture, you can not blame the people if they go underground….for everything…
Currently, even vegetables have more rights than Italians, Spaniards, Francoises, and so on…
https://twitter.com/Daniel7Sa/status/1448747264869031945
P.S: ma cos´è a “camp follower”, maam?
OT: If you don’t get the Fauci-Ouchie jab, USN now makes you separate from service, plus pay back for all specialized training you received. Heckuva way to make a personal “medical” decision. Can allegedly run over one million dollars, if trained as a Navy Seal.
https://redstate.com/jimthompson/2021/10/16/new-orders-take-the-jab-or-the-navy-will-ruin-you-n457755
Considering how many military trained pilots are now needed by commercial airlines, USAF must be considering something similar – enlist, get trained, refuse the jab and go on immediately to a lucrative private sector job.
Way to go, Biden. Too bad this mandate was never about “health”, but always about power and control. You lost your way.
Can that debt be discharged in bankruptcy?
Bankruptcy is federal law, probably won’t be dischargeable under this administration and legislature. That is a tough call – the training was expensive and taxpayer prudence does want a return on the investment.
Better course – stop mandating the fool things. This is more brinksmanship, or rather megalomaniac extortion by dear leader at this time.
And, it perhaps ought be kept in mind, “Biden” authored the latest iteration of bankruptcy law so my guess is for individuals and businesses of fewer than 100 employees, most likely not.
But I’d allow as I’d reckon, we’ll probably just have to wait for OSHA to promulgate how the statutes are to be interpreted.
It´s happening…we have achieved the point of turning planet Earth into “The Exorcist”´s girl…
Massive vomiting from the underworld due the odour emitting from the outside by the massive sold out of the people at the hands of the caste of corrupt governments and unions to corrupt corporations….
https://twitter.com/involcan/status/1448653285175410702
A in A
Oh bullshit. Have you ever had a real job?
This is also happening…in Germany, October 2021…
The “Green Pass” was just to break the ice…one guesses….No wonder we were finding it way too similar to that “Arian pass” of obnoxious memory..and full condemnation…in the past….
https://twitter.com/ciudadfutura/status/1448630891580903429
Forty minutes – at least – in, ought be taken into all these “specifics” And after that forty minutes – Walrus – it might all be considered:
https://odysee.com/@BretWeinstein:f/EvoLens100:8
Some good insights, English Outsider. I’d like to drop this quote from C.S. Lewis in here:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
The merely rich might be equivalent to the robber barons, but our “Woke” rich combine the worst of both worlds. Being both greedy and sanctimoniously cocksure of their rectitude, they also consider themselves to be free of the shackles of morality; self-aggrandizement comes naturally to them, but added to this baseline sociopathy is their sense that they possess a superior vision that justifies the imposition of a social order that takes no consideration of the values of others.
Then throw in the spiteful mutants of the radical left with whom they are (somewhat tenuously, perhaps) allied, who seemingly wholeheatedly, if malevolently, believe the nonsense that they have latched onto in order to serve their tribal interests, and the picture is completed.
It’s a right regular Luciferian jamboree, it is.