Quote:
Originally Posted by prospectheightsresident
Because I'm electing a man (or woman) to do a job. They can't do that job if they are sick or dead. People in a position can be just as important as ideas. Ideas need effective hosts to see them through.
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Interesting.
Personally I found vigorous politicians who want to get a lot done the most dangerous. They want to put their stamp on the office and make a legacy, and that causes all their behaviors to promote their own self image.
No matter what ideology you have once you get into office you quickly learn the number one important thing is tax revenue. Tax revenue is how the government functions, its how they fund programs, and its how the private-public relationship can function mutually between the state and corporate America.
The biggest funders of the government are large concentrated capital holdings; no matter your stated ideology you have to promote these businesses to invest and cater to their interests.
That ends up distorting their supposed mission in America but must importantly it requires a static look at government.
If an ambitious politician who wants to get things done is in office, they eventually decide the best thing to do is make government work 'better;.
Now 'better' is a subjective term, but the DC consensus treats it as objective and look at certain meters to prove it; unemployment, wage growth, property value, total tax revenue, foriegn trade, cost effective output in the public sector, and lower crime (I'll get to that in a second).
Missing in all this wonder is a vision for society, not just your own career path. Combining the ridged structure of power in DC and desire to build an working government/administration, politicians who want accomplishments are doomed to seek power.
But what about the metrics above? Aren't they all great? They are, but only if you never ask yourself what type of society you want to live in; not what policy you think is right,but what
you think is right.
This belief as no universality and many people want different things, and that's why its dangerous for a politicians; it requires moral values that place the output higher than the input. That doesn't mean "means justify the ends", what it means is that rather than dedicating your vision to what you do for society, you are dedicated to how it responds. Its subtle, but it makes a world of differences.
Business investment may be good, but what if it closes out local businesses; sure they not be as effective in giving consumers lower prices high quantity goods, but they play a social role in their community; property value increases the total assets of a population, but it increases rent for those who can't afford it, raises property taxes, and hollows out residential populations until there is no stable population distribution. Worse of all it promote real estate speculation which turns housing into an investment scheme. Wage growth and unemployment sound great, but by what means? If average workers in the middle class range have more income it usually correlates with an increase in expenditure; the need for commute times, housing ownership, and consumption increase debt and credit levels. Often times you see that when a community increases its wealth from a relatively low situation it can induce a high stress society. Is that what we want? A highly developed society of people with less financial and physical control over their lives? Never mind marketing that promotes over consumption. Does that make it all bad? Maybe not. Maybe the alternative is worse; maybe the alternative is made worse by the capital structure in this country.
Foreign trade too can have its upsides and downsides, but its not a question of balancing free trade and market protection finding the most optimal balance, that again would be looking at policy over moral vision. What type of society do you want to live in? That should be the question people ask. Do you want a collection of small communities, a highly urbanized society, a high stress society with optimal output, a less effective but more social economic environment? Do you want capital to be controlled by people who use the capital or investors in New York or Palo Alto?
The above isn't a rhetorical question, it a question of desires. Most political and economic debates look at the two alternatives (industrial capital or financial capital; production or investment; etc.) and try to decide on which is most efficient at proliferating money. And people in DC ask the same question because they have to. They need the tax revenue for their programs, whether they're welfare funding or tax credits. So they never end up looking at the moral structure, or the human tendency towards personal desire, and look only at utilitarian ends. Warren for example supports anti-trust laws; but she can, by rule of politics, only endorse break ups that promote economic growth. Anything else would not just be seen as poor politics, but her plan to get things done would be stifled immensely. But that question misses the point, which is why we live.
People want different things, and that's ok, but having a moral vision that extends beyond 'bettering' society to the max requires a structural belief in society. Its not something that can be discarded as personal problems.
Society dictates our values by policy. America didn't stop being being a country or Yeoman farmers because people were tired of it, but because that is what the government decided. We didn't build the interstate highway system because we wanted a society of highly active movers, but because movement of labor and goods would more effectively promote economic growth. No one asked what the point was; our country has a more socially isolated population than ever before, and I believe it can be chalked down to population distribution being organized by wealth, not people.
Which brings me to the most supportive example. Crime. After the 1994 crime bill we saw a massive drop in violent crime. Sure people could complain about mass incarceration, but there were less rapes and murders on the streets; that's the value Americans have, whatever can promote "my" standard of living is what is good for everyone. Its very egocentric, but then again so are most people's thinking around the world.
Anyways what has happened is most of the crime on the street has moved into the prison yard; and there are victims there too. If anything they become more susceptible to gang initiations inside the walls of a prison than outside. Criminals are people too, and a homicide in the prison is treated like a homicide of anyone else.
So our crime has gone 'down' but our criminal population has gone up. This isn't comparable to the 1950s where a strict social culture kept crime low, but instead a forceful hand that keeps the consequences of our social system down; that in effect is closing the cap on a bottle while it continues to shake. The problem doesn't go away, it just becomes more extreme but less frequent.
If we have problems in how we work, how we live, and how we eat I'm sure there are many ideas in what is best. Horticulture, Monoculture, Urban environment, dispersal into small towns/villages, etc.
But these questions aren't being asked as long as we continue to see the negative consequences of our policy goals as separate problems.
You can find examples everywhere. Conservatives think abortion is murder. What is the solution? Ban abortions. I have not seen one of them ask why abortions have risen since the past, or what that says about how we consider families and people.
Liberals see guns as the cause of mass shootings; the answer is obviously stricter regulations. But have they asked why? And its not enough to say we need new medical institutions like before.
You can repeat this logic for homelessness, obesity, depression, alcoholism, or suicide. From 1920 to 1933 America found alcoholism to be leading to abusive husbands and masculine activities. What was the answer? Ban alcohol. It seems bizarre unless you understand negative externalities to be an affect of social problems.
And if that's the case we can sell a product (national park, anti-depressant, or entertainment) to help solve these problems, but we can't question how society is organized. Why? Because 'better' requires efficiency, and these things are the cost of productivity. Or maybe not, there is more to how wealth and power see society than productive elements. There are questions of ownership, or right vs. wrong, and of stability and control. In many ways we are the most unstable we have been and the most stable at the same time. We have less social cohesion than ever before, less control over our own capital (subscription and rent based transactions are becoming more extreme); on the other-hand we have growing control over how we live by external forces. Urban populations are more organized than ever, work life has become homogenized, and culture has morphed into global trends rather than local legacies. I'm not here to tell you that's bad, I saying that is the case.
The artificial compression of our problems can lead to larger consequences down the road. Our river streams have less flooding than ever as barriers help protect people; conversely more run off from due to gravel surfaces and concrete increase build up and the threshold of our man made barriers have increased build up potential so that when flooding does eventually happen it is at a much larger scale.
So yes politicians and presidential candidates can have ambition and a great many number of plans for societies ills. But as long as our methods of funding and how we measure power stay the same, the most ambitious and vigorous political candidate could be the worse.
In Bernie's case you could look to his VP in case he wins (I don't think he will) but it more about his weakness and focus public response that drives the importance of his candidacy. If you see him as a policy subscriber than sure it would not make much difference if he leaves or not. But if you see him as a weak politician with limited ambition focused on story telling and antagonism towards power then perhaps there is more to power the using it the right way, but willing to dilute it and have people, not policy drive society forward.
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