The End

"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." - John Adams

This is the end of "Politics and Pigskins". I may start another blog in the future, but I am done discussing the subject of politics on a regular basis.

It seems to me the political battle I have been fighting was a losing battle from the start. John Adams was right.

Ironically, I think the battle was over even before I began it. The 17th Amendment of the Constitution (passed in 1913) sealed our fate, by turning the U.S. Senate into a directly elected legislative body. What seemed like an innocuous thing actually set in process the motion by which the United States will inevitably be destroyed. It changed the United States from a republic into a democracy.

The health care bill which was recently passed brought the subject home to me:

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it." - Frederic Bastiat

Bastiat was right, and the health care bill is only the latest example of it. Where in the Constitution does it give the federal government the right to determine medical treatments? Where does the federal government get the right to determine how an insurance contract should be written?

Going back to previous examples of Medicare and Medicaid, where does the federal government get the right to determine how much a doctor can charge for his/her services?

The answer to these questions is simple: He who pays the piper calls the tune.

Once "We the People" decided money wasn't important, money was evil, that opened the floodgates to allowing the government to take what it wanted (as Bastiat said, "a moral code that justifies it"). After that, it was a short distance to creating a legal framework to plunder the people.

The next step? Enslaving the people. You think, how can that happen? I tell you, it has already begun. How much time did you spend on your income taxes this year? That is YOUR time, spent working for the government. For free.

With the passage of health care, whose ultimate result will be the death of the health insurance industry, that will leave the government with no choice but to assume the role of third party payer for all health care costs (God forbid we should take on this responsibility ourselves!). Then the government will decide what to pay for and how much to pay. That may sound innocent enough, but do you consider WHO gets paid? All the medical care providers in the country.

What if the government refuses to pay for what the medical provider deems the best treatment? Too bad.

What if the medical provider cannot make a living from what the government will pay? Too bad.

In a free market, if an employer wasn't willing to pay you enough to make a living from your labor, you have options. You can either go work for someone else, or take up another profession. That is not so easy when you have dedicated your life to the medical profession. That is not so easy when you have student loans to pay off for your medical education.

If you don't see it yet, we are in the process of enslaving the medical providers of this country. This is because the moral code of the Left does not recognize the rights of medical providers. It only recognizes the rights of the sick.

But I am not here to argue about the health care bill. That is just a symptom, not the disease. The disease is democracy.

Mind you, I am not recommending a dictatorship or an authoritarian state. No, a simple republic would suffice. Sadly, Ben Franklin was correctly reluctant about our ability to maintain the United States as a republic.

Why am I done blogging about politics? Simply put, political blogging is generally one of two things: I can either preach to the choir, or confront an opponent who will never be satisfied with anything less than my submission to their views. Only rarely does political blogging end in a reasonable discussion of the finer points of what public policy should be.

Preaching to the choir brings no pleasure. Arguing with an automaton who is well-versed in talking points but completely unacquainted with reason also brings no joy. So why bother?

My final message to you: Feel free to read through my past writings, and comment on them. I may even respond to your comments. But I am done with posting.

I leave you with the following thought:

"ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL
BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS." - George Orwell, Animal Farm

This is not something to be desired, but it is what we have.

Classical Liberalism versus Anarchocapitalism

According to Jesus Huerta de Soto (in his essay "Classical Liberalism versus Anarchocapitalism"), the great flaw in the Founding Fathers' thinking was "their ideal is theoretically impossible, as it contains the seed of its own destruction, precisely to the extent that it includes the necessary existence of a state (even a minimal one), understood as the sole agent of institutional coercion."

When you consider how the Founding Fathers viewed the differences between republics and democracies, you can see the flaw in their thinking. For example:

"The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended" - James Madison

As long as people view the government as some anomolous "other" entity outside of themselves, then any government is doomed to failure, regardless of whether it is a monarchy or a democracy or a representative republic.

Madison was right about one thing: The larger the government, the less connected to it will be the people under it. As long as people feel no responsibility for their own government, they will inevitably seek to use government towards their own ends. We see this today with the proliferation of special interests, ranging from the lowest welfare recipient to the highest CEO on Wall Street, with all of them seeking to get their cut from our government.

Another example:

"Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide" - John Adams

What Adams forgets is how the Ancient Roman republic devolved into dictatorship. Representation did not protect the people from the follies of poor representative leadership (which handed over dictatorial powers to Julius Caesar, and then Augustus Caesar), leading to the Empire, and the inevitable fall of Rome.

Jesus Huerta de Soto's essay does get the part right about how no government has ever succeeded over the long term, and the Founding Fathers were wrong to assume they could do what had never been done before. However, de Soto does fail to deal with one problem: other governments.

As de Soto describes it, anarchocapitalism does sound like a great idea, until you start to consider: How do you protect it from other ideologies, and more specifically other governments? Inevitably, some dictatorship will come along and use force to enslave an anarchocapitalist "government".

Unless anarchocapitalists are willing to live like the people in Afghanistan, which is really the only comparable system to what they propose that has actually shown an ability to defend itself along with an ability to maintain their political/cultural system, then anarchocapitalism is doomed to failure. The only difference will be that anarchocapitalism's failure will come from outside of itself.