That is not exactly accurate about this being only a 2 party system. It has evolved that way because there is an oligarchy that can maintain control through influencing both parties. It also gives us (the little people) the sense that we have some type of control. That, is an illusion unfortunately. As for a "controlled" 3rd party (that has been used twice already successfully). When Teddy Roosevelt was the 3rd party (Bullmoose) candidate, he successfully was able to unseat a relatively popular Republican incumbent President making it possible for Woodrow Wilson (racist and Progressive who gave us the Federal Reserve System monstrosity).

We now also have been made aware of the 3rd iteration of a "3rd party" candidacy in the making with Ohio Republican Governor - John Kasich and his proposed running mate, the Democrat Governor from the state of Colorado. None of the three candidacies were ever really supposed to win, just drain off enough votes so that the oligarch's candidate would (I.e., Wilson, Clinton and now to get rid of Trump). CFR anyone?

The current trend of a few trillion a year adding to the progressively escalating debt is going by a lot faster than learning to understand can keep up with. Understanding takes longer than 'conversions'.

True, but money is an "official" medium of exchange. What if people had a passion for "golf balls" or such? They coould just as easily become that form of exchange. My point is that most currencies are now fiat, with no relation to value, hence the destruction of gold and silver certificates. So, now, given the right access, you could easily become "rich" with a few keyswipes, and if undetected, not be an issue. So who is auditing the feds?

Thanks fr that detailed example. I would hate for someone to track Pelosi or Schumer....

There you go, and the professionals are the one with the limitless seeming checkbooks.

No, we need to convert the people of this country to a proper philosophy--i.e., Objectivism. But that cannot be done any time in the next thirty seconds.
I meant this to be an answer to ewv's comment, but sometimes the machines seem to go wrong.

Amen!

It's not a matter of left v right. It's a matter of what is Constitutional. Civil asset forfeiture is just as unConstitutional as Title IX is.

I agree with the article, except it merely says "it is time to stop" instead of pursuing the removal of the sorry civil forfeiture "law", so expand this to include just how we might toss it into the swamp.

No doubt, politicians will do whatever they can to further their power and objectives. No altruism except what is wrung from another.

DeVros is right, and Sessions is wrong on these two issues. Big time.

ALL of the congress are birds of a feather so the all function alike, are you surprised?

They rarely think of explicit philosophical principles and don't evaluate them. They simply accept the slogans uncritically as part of their world-view. Much of it is implicit and not even consistent, especially to the extent that they still have some remnants of the American sense of life and want to pursue their own happiness and goals and are willing to work for them.

It's not just "big government". That is too vague, and an anti-conceptual conservative approach. We need a government big enough to do what it is supposed to do protecting a multi-trillion dollar advance economy and the rights of hundreds of millions of citizens. They don't consider what a proper government is supposed to do.

They have no philosophical basis from which to understand and answer that. By accepting what they have been taught and heard around them since early childhood they vaguely hold that sacrifice to others is the standard of morality itself, it is good to 'help people' (with no qualifications), we have to 'live for country' as a collective, reason can't answer important questions of human value, people would be 'dying in the streets' without the welfare state, we 'have to be practical' without regard to principles, etc. etc. They have no conception of 'favorite programs' not being funded and provided by government.

I don't think that today they would vote for a 50% cut in taxes that would cut their emotionally accepted notion of government. They think there is only inefficient "waste" and "corruption" that would take care of it if weeded out. They don't even realize that most of the budget is entitlement programs like Social Security.

You don't need a survey. Just talk to people about how they 'feel' about these things, and don't expect a philosophical discussion.

They see it only because someone was able to make it a media issue. They have no idea of how much more there is and how tiny a fraction that was. It was like the 1970s $8,000 toilet scandal publicized by Sen. Proxmire, and later the House checking scandal in the early 90s: Some Congressmen were caught overdrawing money from the Congressional checking system and not replacing it. The popular uproar properly recognized that it was not right and was scandal by political privilege, but never made the connection that the same Congressmen and all the rest of them do the same thing a thousand times over every day with the budget and Federal spending.

The "bridge to nowhere" was intended to benefit some isolate people; it wasn't literally to "nowhere". What they don't question is that most of the budget is based on the same redistributionist premise.

It will be "taken care of" in the form of disaster when they can't get enough money out of the private economy to pay the government debts. That is why reality "taking care of it" is not a solution to the problem, only the inevitable consequences putting an end to that form of their operations.

Most people are not interested in or knowledgeable about explicit philosophical principles or their roots. But they have accepted philosophical premises nevertheless, if only by uncritically absorbing what is around them on all sides and accepting it in vague, emotional form. Reality does not spare them for it.

The general voters who give money to politicians do so to get them elected to implement and protect their policies, not because they want a pay-off back.

The professional lobbyists do expect 'something back' -- policies that will either impose and further their ideology (like the Sorros types) or financial policies they benefit from, either by being in on the racket or policies to leave them alone. Of course the system is corrupt, which is why some people have to pay them to be left alone. The statist ideology embedded in a fascistic government makes it corrupt.

But Schumer and Pelosi aren't mafia types for the sake of a mafia-like mentality alone, they are collectivist-statist ideologues. That ideology makes the ruthless, fascistic tactics 'acceptable'.

A good case history is John Jacob's (sympathetic) biography of Rep Phil Burton (D-San Francisco): A Rage for Justice: The Passion and Politics of Philip Burton. Burton ruthlessly clawed his way up through California politics and was an infamous ideological power broker as a Congressman in Washington from 1964-83. Throughout his 'career' he did enormous damage both as an astute, cunning, knowledgeable Machiavellian and a dedicated leftist ideologue.

In 1959 he told an editor that in the CA legislature -- at a time when welfare was not popular there -- that he supported any bill that "gives something to someone who hasn't got it". He told another reporter in 1963, "I already bankrupted one budget, I need a bigger one to play with." And he was off to Washington.

Jacobs wrote that

"Burton was considered the most knowledgeable liberal in the House on social insurance programs" and was asked "to help draft welfare legislation... By mastering arcane subject matter, Burton converted his superior knowledge into power, ran over opponents, and served poor people all at the same time."

And (about Nixon's welfare bills):

"'I don't care if it's a dime' In establishing the principle of a federal entitlement, he knew he could always manipulate the figures upward as he had with so many other programs. "If we enact FAP [Family Assistance Plan], I'll bust the federal government within two years."

In another quote I can't find right now he said that it was his job to get spending approved and it was up to someone else to find a way to pay for it.

Nancy Pelosi was Burton's hand-picked successor.

It wasn't just welfare statism. The reason I looked him up is his history with Federal land acquisition. He was known for "Park Barrel Politics" in which he paid off lobbyists like the Sierra Club and appealed to emotional imagery of scenery while, mostly in the 1970s, ramming through some of the nastiest Wilderness and National Park Service forced acquisition legislation, employing mass condemnations, that the country had seen. His statism had no regard whatsoever for the rights of the individual. It was all collectivist entitlements. You should read the book to see how he understood and ruthlessly maneuvered the "nuts and bolts" for his ideology.

"not the way most people evaluate politicians and policies."
How do you think they do it? Do you think they evaluate the ideology? I think you're saying they evaluate the ideology, but unfortunately they accept ideologies of big gov't.

I think the opposite: they're against "big gov't" if you ask, but they usually don't have a vehicle to vote for whether they want more or less gov't. All they can do is make sure the representatives know various programs that are important to them: cancer research, military, research grants, long prison sentences, Medicaid funding for nursing home care, anti-terrorism, education. You can make sure your favorite program gets funded. It's harder to promote across-the-board cuts.

In my theory, if you asked them how they'd like paying 50% less taxes, and it would cut all kinds of programs they don't care about, but unfortunately something they do care about and benefit from, people would say YES. We don't have a vehicle to ask the question though.

Thanks for the interesting comment BTW. I wonder if there's any surveys or something to find out which one of us (if either) is right.

Most of them are the 'popularity' types, with shallow understanding; and despite 'charisma' for the gullible, they can be quite nasty personally while knowing how to fake being 'nice'. But they know what platitudes are generally accepted and take them for granted themselves as justification. Particularly on the left, especially the viro left, there are a lot of hard core ideologues, which is not to say that they have any serious intellectual understanding of history, let alone philosophy, either. They have latched onto an ideology in terms of slogans and feelings and push it without compromise, but that doesn't mean they are original thinkers or write treatises like a Lenin. They concentrate on being experts in the contemporary political realms they operate in.

Somewhat more intellectual have been their counterparts in Britain following the Fabians, which was an intellectual socialist movement (started in the late 19th century) specifically out to spread the ideas throughout the professions and society and impose them by force of government. The Fabians also had a big influence in America especially in the 1920s-40s (including through Keynes), and built the Labour Party in Britain. An earlier intellectual example from the US is the progressive statist Wilson, from Princeton.

Some politicians today are dummkopfs about even the nuts and bolts of government. But they have a 'sense of smell' of how to operate in Washington political wheeling and dealing. Others are very much experts at it, which is how they slither into leadership positions and otherwise become very powerful. Both types at least vaguely support the ideology of collectivism and pragmatist statism as their motive and justification. I don't accuse them of being the intellectuals. Those operate in the universities, training the next wave of both politicians and voters.

If there are few who are personally motivated by a mafia-like desire for personal power alone, there are plenty of Machiavellian power seekers steeped in ideology. They go together.

You find this repeated in political biographies and can see it yourself if you are unfortunate enough to wind up battling over something in Washington politics. It's a big mistake to think that the problem is just weak or evil personalities who happen to get power through their personalities like the high school class president and who operate just for pork.

The first two types are a tiny minority of the population. A rare mention of 'bringing the bacon home' as a qualification for office is not the way most people evaluate politicians and policies. The dominant ideology assumes bacon everywhere.

If we're calling people affiliated with lawmakers accepting large amounts of money "mafia-like" (because it sure has the feel of corruption), then being mafia like is a requirement for serious politics. I say that because explicit quid-pro-quos are illegal. But you can give money to candidate of your choice. Maybe some people, like ewv, start with an ideology, find a candidate promoting and acting upon that ideology, and they choose to to give her/him money. But when most people turn over that type of money, I figure they want something back. But explict quid-pro-quos are illegal. So the whole system looks crooked.

" no real "money" as such,"
Money is a medium of exchange. If I make a circuit board and want to trade it for something completely unrelated, like a flight to France, I will not have a problem finding a medium of exchange. If there were no money, I'd have to accept something that most people like, like coffee. Then I'd take the coffee to the airline. That's not the case. There's no problem finding media of exchange in the modern world.

People are against the most egregious waste, like the bridge the to nowhere. The problem is most pork, when it's in your district, smells like bacon.

I disagree, there are obviously some mafia types, Shumer and Pelosi immediately come to mind, they think and act like them, and they "eliminate" anything that interferes in their "territory" or "family". They are the best of the mafia, in that their criminal activity is actually consider legal called "politics".

I think there are a lot of times people are aware of a specific funding issue, like the famous bridge to nowhere. It got money, money and more money for no real purpose. This was created with the infamouse Conservation Corps, and Works Progress Administration of FDR, where things were done just to do them, and to spend money, and sold as art and improvements afterwards. That model is the one they still use today.