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Quote of the Day: Government
“I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.” – H.L. Mencken
We have certainly seen several illustrations this week demonstrating Mencken was a man ahead of his time.
Consider the actions of Michigan’s governor, threatening to extend Michigan’s lockdown, not for medical reasons but to punish those who dare oppose her. You can just hear her keening in an Eric Cartman voice, “Respect my authoritah.” Or politicians with $30,000 refrigerators stuffed with designer ice cream trying to push pork in the guise of relief.
It is not just politicians, that have demonstrated their evil. The Justice Department and the FBI are not composed of elected officials. Rather they are government bureaucrats. This week it was revealed they railroad an innocent man to overturn an election. That is not just wrong. It is evil.
To compound the evil, the judge administering the case is refusing to drop a case against an obviously innocent man, flouting both precedent and Supreme Court decisions in yet another attempt to demonstrate Lavrentiy Beria is alive and well in the United States and wearing judicial robes.
Trying to improve government is largely a waste of time. Our efforts should be aimed at reducing it and minimizing its influence on our lives.
What is your favorite recent example of evil government? Put them in the comments.
Published in Politics
You want a recall, Gretch? Because this is how you get a recall.
She prefers the title, “Dear Leader.”
He was not wrong then. He is not wrong now. He will continue to be correct for as long as humans are human. Or, as another great author put it:
This is the Quote of the Day. We still have five openings if you would like to share a favored quotation with us. Sign up here.
Please Sign: https://www.change.org/p/michigan-state-house-impeach-governor-whitmer
Not sure if the online petition has any legal basis to initiate a Recall, or if it just gets you on a Grifter Fundraising list.
I signed anyway.
I’m surprised you failed to mention the evil contributions of the intelligence community component of the federal government. This is the primary driver for all of what has been done to General Flynn and President Trump. It may also have had a residual impact on our national failure to recognize in a timely manner the Chinese government duplicity that led to the pandemic. An additional informative piece that reveals the deliberateness of the evil is the high level of awareness expressed by Senator Schumer regarding the retaliatory capabilities of the intelligence agencies. Schumer seems to approve of that since there’s been no action against it.
LA working hard to make sure its taxpayers do not.
tyr•an•ny tĭr′ə-nē► n.Unjust or oppressive governmental power.
This particular response to the County of LA “rat on your neighbor” hotline announcement had me doing Rocky fist pumps accompanied by a rather vigorous, “Yes!”:
If only they were alone in doing so.
We are learning a lot about state and local government.
You know those really annoying folks running your homeowners’ association? When they get tired of tyranny on a petty scale they graduate to city and county government.
We’ve allowed government to tell us that they are always necessary and not even a necessary evil because, unlike the rest of us have no tendency to be evil even though they are less accountable than all of us. We have to have Defense because most humans are organized under states and some threaten. The rest we can work out and where vastly superior, city streets and such for instance, we can elect folks to do necessary collective activities, but even in such instances choice exercised through prices, such as schools, is vastly superior. So we see local government as chaotic and corrupt, and the Federal government as orderly and less corrupt. but that’ s what make them so scary. They’re serious and we don’t control them.
HOAs are a breeding ground for authoritarians . . .
A brief line from the West Wing TV series has always stuck in my head, since it’s entirely wrong-headed, but so broadly accepted as to be truly terrifying:
President (Martin Sheen), complimenting his chief of staff: “You run the country”. He was having some sort of conversation around his chief not leaving the position, I forget the details – it’s the line that stuck with me.
As if it’s their job, or within their capability, to “run” a country. I realize this is a TV show, but the default to authoritarianism, especially in the last 60-90 days, is more than uncomfortable. There’s a certain component of the population that is looking for someone to tell them how to live, or are OK with elected or un-elected “leaders” doing so, whether it’s truly within their Constitutional brief to actually do that. I have trouble wrapping my head around people defaulting to those who have repeatedly demonstrated a significant level of incompetence in executing literally anything. (I always give the example of roads, people say “well the gov’t builds roads for us”, and I say “No, they don’t – they hire contractors to do the work, largely, and towns and states have some maintenance capability, etc – and they do that because we tell them that’s what we want them to do for us, not the other way around”, but this usually elicits quizzical looks).
When someone tells me I can’t do something, I instantly rebel against it – my physical response is tension and an immediate desire to push back. I’m not a tough guy, it’s just how I feel.
Others seem to be more easily pacified. I don’t know if it’s learned or inherent, maybe it’s both, and based on experience, but our country was founded upon rebellion and refusing to be told what to do by people we did not give any authority to whatsoever – they just assumed it was their authority to wield by dint of birth or assignment of a lofty title.
We have millions of people in government “service”, at federal/state/county/local levels, every one of whom has a lofty title that they feel gives them all the authority they need, at any time, to dictate to the proletarian lumps what they can or cannot do, or must do. Or else.
I’m pretty sure this is not what was intended. The accretion of gov’t continues apace, barnacles upon the hull of the ship, slowing its progress, and ultimately undermining its integrity to the point where it becomes irretrievably compromised.
I seem to recall “ If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor.”🤔
QUOTE OF THE MONTH BY H.L. MENCKEN
We should move on to June
We have already:
http://ricochet.com/759819/june-2020-qotd-sign-up-sheet/
Try to keep up.
We should close the rest of May
My point is no need to read the rest of May
You never know. Someone else still might come up with something better. For instance, @seawriter has two more days selected in May. You think he uses his best stuff early in the month?
May 21 is early in the month?
the creative process is not the result of central planning
I sure didn’t.
But Aquinas might.
Monday.
This was promoted today, but initially posted last Saturday, the 16th. Okay, so the middle of the month. He still has two more, and we have eight other people signed up for dates, too.
Depends on the person, doesn’t it? I have things planned out for the next fifty years for my books. Getting there is the hard part.
how often do things go according to planned?
No plan survives contact with the enemy. Plans are revised. It used to be 200 years.
You’re planning your own work. That’s not central planning.
Or you’re planning your own fictional world. That’s central planning, but you’re basically the god of your fictional world; this don’t have much to do with central government planning.
good point
I should have said the creative process can’t be planned
Considering that Mister Bitcoin seemed to be applying it to Seawriter’s individual efforts, I thought he was using it differently, rather than governmentally. Certainly the government has nothing to do with our Quote of the Day Series. Even the Powers That Be at Ricochet have little to do with it, other than @exjon occasionally participates. The only way any government is usually involved is as a target of one of the quotations.
Not very creative if you can’t plan your creativity.