“[democracy is an] institutional arrangement or arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s votes.”
joseph shumpeter. capitalism, socialism, and democracy p.269_________________old joe wrote that book in 1942 i believe ( the quote here is from the 1950 3rd edition ) at the height of frd and the new deal...joe was an economist and a political scientist so, of course, he loathed frd and "the people" every bit as much ass john jay did...he would have taken poor barbra to task for believing in a "common good" which he believed was a smoke and mirrors device trotted pout by competing professional politicians every election cycle to manipulate people into voting and then was promptly stowed away as the pols moved to make decisions based on an entirely different set of motivations ( do i hear echoes of stalin's "It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything." ? perhaps...certainly holds true in this country at times )...i hear the house of representatives ( representative my ass...last figures i saw showed 271 millionaires in congress...how can i expect them to represent my interests...i would be an idiot to think they would..."public service" is part of the special vocabulary of oligarchy ) have passed the tax bill that represents the greatest upward redistribution of wealth since dutch reagan doddered through the white house hallways..i am not surprised...it will not be defeated...it will pass...wealth will flow upward...there will be celebration...but not here...not among the people i know...acceptance...adaptation...okay...then one adaptation we need to engender is to make the government as irrelevant to ourselves as possible...once they have stolen all they can from below they will turn on one another...that may be the point at which to act....fuck these people.
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