Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
We distribute computer information so a single crash isn’t devastating. We distribute warehouses so deliveries are quicker. We distribute police officers so criminals don’t have a safe space to operate. Distributed transportation – everybody having their own car and good roads to drive it on – are what built America into the world leader in mobility and prosperity.
Urban planners insist we should move to cities, live densely in converted warehouses, ride trains. That’s essential to save the planet. The plan assumes the trains will run. What if they don’t? Then everybody is stuck, captive, held hostage to the demands of the train crews.
I vaguely recall America having this sort of trouble, years ago, employees essential to the national transportation system went on strike threatening to cripple the nation. Seems to me Ronaldus Magnus handled that problem swiftly and decisively. Might be worth looking into, Ms. May.
Joe Doakes
In the world of the utopian left, nothing ever actually goes wrong.
Brexit was above all else a vote for nostalgia: for a Britain of sweet milky cheap tea, bread-and-margarine sandwiches, black-and-white television, and… union-led strikes. So presumably May should shift Boris Johnson from the FO to the HO and put him in charge of Great British Nostalgia.
Britain voted to go backwards in June; endless strikes and discontent are surely just a welcome part of the total package?
If I recall my actual U.S. history classes correctly, I believe that the railroads threatened or actually did strike during WWII and Truman put the hammer down. Imagine if we had real Democrats as opposed to the mental midget utopians that we have now?
QUOTE: Britain voted to go backwards
Really? All of this centralized international governing is making for more disbursed prosperity and social harmony? It absolutely is not. It’s a disaster. The EMU is going to implode because it never had a fiscal union to go with it. The UK getting some sensible distance from that crap is wise.
Choo choos are centralized power managed politically. They add ZERO value in this era.
I saw a poster for a lefty governance candidate for The SF BART system. She had 10 points. Five of them basically indicated that the thing never should have been built in the first place.
BART has plenty of riders and every fiscal metric is a disaster.
Meet my new favorite article: http://tinyurl.com/hyke38e
Emery, so far you’ve been wrong on Brexit on wrong on Trump’s win. I reckon you are probably also wrong on what motivated the people who voted for Brexit and who voted for Trump. In my opinion, what is motivating the Brexiteers and others like them is a sense that they are losing or have lost power over their lives to a group of people who are nothing like them, who do not have their best interests at heart, and frankly, don’t think very much of them.
Example: the elites universally praise free trade as a good thing. But they are not, in fact, in favor of free trade. They are interested in expanding trade in certain areas with certain partners. Ditto immigration. Ditto tougher environmental protections.
In all these cases, there are winners and losers. The elites never address the issue of the losers. The closest Hillary got to addressing the concerns of the coal miners who would be thrown out of good jobs if the mines were shut down was to stumble through boiler plate about retraining displaced workers. It was clear she had never thought about it all, their livelihoods did not matter to her.
People tend to be very highly attuned to what serves and what damages their financial interests. The miners aren’t stupid. They know that a coal miner makes a Hell of a lot more money than a shelf stocker at Walmart. The miners in coal country have been dealing with government programs for generations. They knew that Hillary’s promises were worth what every politician’s promise is worth.
The people who think that a class of credentialed experts should govern the rest of humanity tend to be . . . credentialed experts, chosen by other credentialed experts.
That is in direct opposition to the American idea of government.
You don’t need some centralized, no account, bureaucratic blob to facilitate trade. It just screws most people.
If you don’t have a highly libertarian country with a lot of decentralized bottom up opportunity –which there is no such thing–the way the West is letting in people from crappy civic heritages is insane.
Elaine Kamarck is a political engineer. She designed the Democrat super delegate system back in the early 80s. She literally wrote the standard book on American politics, Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know About How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates. Kamarck engineered Bill Clinton’s win in ’92 and served in the White House during Clinton’s first term. There is no one who understands American national politics at the theoretical and practical level like Kamarck does. She is the expert’s expert.
This is what Kamarck had to say about Trump seven months ago:
http://inthesetimes.com/features/superdelegate-interview-elaine-kamarck.html
Kamarck was not just wrong about Trump, she was also wrong about Hillary. The superdelegate system she had designed to keep outliers from getting the nomination had been captured by the Clintons. The system that was supposed to pick the candidate with the best chance of winning picked the candidate who lost to an outlier from the other party. Kamarck couldn’t have been more wrong if she had tried.
So much for the cult of experts.
The only thing “experts” know is pushing things around with government, VOTING otherwise known as DEMOCRACY, and central banks. All of that is toast due to the deflation from globalized labor and technology. The only thing you can do is cooperate with it.
So we will get a bond market collapse followed by a police state.
Brexit was above all else a vote for nostalgia…
It’s quite a feat to be snide and still make unconvincingly feeble arguments using only rhetoric. And then to use those arguments to draw strange conclusions. Well done, sir.
The other thing regarding Alt-right Jethrene Clampett’s great post:
I find the stuff that the Democrat party does for get out the vote incredibly creepy. Orwellian. All it does is seize parts of an economic pie that is growing way too slowly. This process feeds back on it’s self with slower growth and then people need government more. It’s not going to end well.
Pingback: Finally | Things to Remember, Things to Cherish
When the path you are taking is clearly wrong, and you choose another path, progressives always say that you are going backwards. Under Czar Nicholas II, Russians had rights, even Russian peasants. Under the Bolsheviks they had no rights, not even to their own lives. The Bolsheviks considered themselves to be “progressive”, and any attempt to return to the days before forced collectivization and the gulag to be “regressive.”