The Conflicted Statist
Examine conflicted statists long enough (yes, it is distasteful, but like entomologists, herpetologists, proctologists, and pathologists, someone has to study distasteful things) and the realization dawns: not everything they do can be attributed to misfiring or nonfunctioning synapsis and cognitive dissonance. Perhaps, the suspicion mounts, the conflicted statist is not a relatively new stock figure on life’s dramatic stage, but rather a centuries-old character whose tale has been told and retold: Faust. There will always be useful idiots who accept statist proclamations of good intentions and ignore disastrous results, but there are some, cynics admittedly, who detect an exchange: souls (or whatever passes for them in an age that has tried to banish the words “good” and “evil” from the lexicon) for status, fame, wealth, and power. Expressing the thought will get one excommunicated from fashionable cocktail parties, but perhaps bad results come from the evil intentions of evil people. Squeamishness on this point is certainly understandable; those who want to stop reading now are excused from doing so....
The lies, evasions, apple polishing, social climbing, phoniness, hypocrisy, backstabbing, perversity, theft, fraud, blackmail, criminality, and violence that are part and parcel of modern politics and government would present irreconcilable psychological and moral conflicts for most people (let’s hope that is not giving most people too much credit). Those who can strangle their inner voices and stifle their consciences while winning the Washington game, quell any meaningful probes into how they did it, and achieve long term public and press adulation are a unique breed. Bill and Hillary Clinton have clawed their way to the top of the compost heap and will someday be seen as apt embodiment of our age. Now Hillary’s depredations―stretching from the Rose law firm to Benghazi―and her partner’s (partner seems like a more appropriate word than spouse) are down the memory hole and her flacks the mainstream media have gushingly anointed her not just the next Democratic presidential nominee, but the next president as well, with Bill as the First Man. The ultimate power couple made a Faustian bargain long ago. There is a bargain available for those who refuse to believe it, on a bridge that spans two boroughs in New York City.
The lies, evasions, apple polishing, social climbing, phoniness, hypocrisy, backstabbing, perversity, theft, fraud, blackmail, criminality, and violence that are part and parcel of modern politics and government would present irreconcilable psychological and moral conflicts for most people (let’s hope that is not giving most people too much credit). Those who can strangle their inner voices and stifle their consciences while winning the Washington game, quell any meaningful probes into how they did it, and achieve long term public and press adulation are a unique breed. Bill and Hillary Clinton have clawed their way to the top of the compost heap and will someday be seen as apt embodiment of our age. Now Hillary’s depredations―stretching from the Rose law firm to Benghazi―and her partner’s (partner seems like a more appropriate word than spouse) are down the memory hole and her flacks the mainstream media have gushingly anointed her not just the next Democratic presidential nominee, but the next president as well, with Bill as the First Man. The ultimate power couple made a Faustian bargain long ago. There is a bargain available for those who refuse to believe it, on a bridge that spans two boroughs in New York City.
"instincts we can't fathom" makes for good TV drama, but I suspect it's more like a taste for authority and power that I can well imagine
(I have an associate's in criminal justice with high honors, a bachelor of science summa cum laude in criminology administration, and a master of art's in social science for studies in transnational white collar crime. One of my blogs is here: http://csiflint2011.blogspot.com/)
My guess is that most of the 'stop and frisk' events are taking place in very high crime areas, and include familiar degenerates. The local cops know who the trouble makers are, and (right, or wrong) employ profiling to keep an edge over total chaos.
There was one seasoned NYC officer that told a story of a young black that simply started to run as he approached He pursued him down the street, and saw the teenager keep reaching back and adjusting around his back pants waistband. He never saw a weapon, but he 'suspected' from experience just what was going on.
The cop stopped the teenager, and found a 9mm handgun. The handgun was confiscated, and eventually linked to a drive-by shooting of several people.
Did he do right?
The neighborhood says "yes".
We need different standards for hiring police officers. In fact, it is not clear that we need CITY police as armed bureaucrats, versus, say, the ELECTED sheriff and their deputies.
The word "police" appears nowhere in the Constitution. But this is a different discussion entirely.
It is true that police officers overstep their bounds. That is a different problem entirely. That is not the abstract definition of what those bounds are. Even if all officers were college-educate women - the best of the statistical likelihoods for most arrests with fewest complaints - identifying problems before they blossom would still be in their duties. See my challenges above about the tornadoes and coyotes. By "strict constitutionalist" theory, the police would stand by and let harms befall the innocent. In a rational world, they would act, even if that meant stopping someone and frisking them for being "suspicious."
1. police have to have a "reasonable" suspicion that they have/will commit a crime.
2.AND a person is armed and dangerous.
between 2000-2012, there have been 4.4M stops. Only 6% of stops resulted in summons/arrests. Often, officers would write reports that said "furtive movements" or "high crime area"
That does not meet the three prong test. 1. suspicion of crime imminent 2. armed 3. dangerous. the Constitution is over 200 years old. that does not make it "out of step." I am 50 years old, but as well, not out of step, thank you
khalling: "Stop and Frisk is a violation of your natural rights and a violation of your Constitutional rights."
You are 50 years out of step with the significant court decision "Terry vs. Ohio." The police do have the right to stop and frisk a known felon loitering in front of a jewelry store. In fact, objectively, they have an OBLIGATION to do so.
Let me ask you: If the police heard on their radios that a tornado was coming to your town, do they have a MORAL (or) LEGAL obligation to warn you, given that a tornado is not a volitional creature that can violate your rights?
If a police officer on patrol saw a child surrounded by coyotes, does the officer have a moral or legal obligation to act, given that coyotes are not rational creatures who can violate the rights of a child who is ultimately the responsibility of her parents?
My points above bear directly on your claim that "stop and frisk" is a violation of your rights. It may be ... if you are not a threat to anyone. Whether you are or not is within the PROFESSIONAL PURVIEW of a trained law enforcement and protection services officer.
But it's mathematically impossible for gov't to pay for the average person's healthcare, college, etc. The gov't is funded by the middle class. Maybe they want to soak the rich, but there aren't enough rich to take care of *everyone's* basic needs. So it's impossible.
At the same time, automation and foreign trade are shaking up the labor market. People selling labor need to be alert and responsive to this. They need to think how can I design, program, or service those machine? How can I use those machines and labor pool in low-cost regions to get things down. Instead it's easier to kvetch that "the jobs don't come back after recessions" or blame the people who make the deploy the machines or work with people in low-cost regions. The complaining is counterproductive and one of the biggest threat to the US.
I have heard of people who live in $350k houses ($350k goes along way in the Madison area) saying the gov't should do more to help them pay for their basic needs such as their kids education. **No, people who live in in $350k houses should all contribute to help the poor.** It makes no sense to be moderately affluent and seeking a handout!
I have to agree with everything I read. I waited for something to argue, but that did not happen.
I actually believe that having limited programs to help the poor, protect the country, protect the environment, and so on benefit us all. If we let things go the costs of living with people so poor they live in another world became large, we'd naturally come together and establish some kind of gov't to deal with it. It wouldn't be perfect, but we'd find a way to ameliorate the problem and make people who benefit contribute.
I know that leads to some of the crap in Ayn Rand's books. Even with an ideal minimalist gov't, the world is still full of insincere Ellsworth Toohey's, wounded Gail Wynand out to prove the world won't push *THEM* around anymore, pathetically politicking Peter Keeting and his mother, the self-righteous religious women who fail to help Cherryl when she's suicidal b/c they want to stroke their own egos instead of helping, and so on. Add an invasive gov't into the mix, and some of them turn into Wesley Mouch. Many of them turn into conniving little shrews like Hank Readren's wife, carrying on about "dirty business" but wouldn't think of going without an affluent lifestyle.
I'm not so afraid of that risk, though, that I'll give up on having gov't do things.
That's a conflicted statist. There are many of us.
"The New Deal was a series of domestic economic programs enacted in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They involved presidential executive orders or laws passed by Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were in response to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call the "3 Rs": Relief, Recovery, and Reform. That is Relief for the unemployed and poor; Recovery of the economy to normal levels; and Reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression.[
The New Deal produced a political realignment, making the Democratic Party the majority (as well as the party that held the White House for seven out of nine Presidential terms from 1933 to 1969), with its base in liberal ideas, the white South, traditional Democrats, big city machines, and the newly empowered labor unions and ethnic minorities."
American culture in the early '30s was hardly entitlement, and/or welfare, oriented. The New Deal was a political event designed towards social engineering, and ushered in decades of like thinking administrations.
Decades of these politics bred a new cultural mindset, and Johnson probably put the final nail in American independent thinking with his Great Society.
Political reform today can reverse the cultural mindset, albeit with several generations of new Americans to experience the obvious personal advantages of Objectivism. It took the liberals (read: Democrats) three generations to make us slaves to Progressive thought, and it would take at least that long for political reform to reverse this.
Keep in mind that political reform has the chance of redefining the role of the education system, and thus, in the development of our youngsters. As it stands now (politics as usual), there will never be another generation of right thinking individuals.
And that will never change, without political reform, and guidance.
1) Those who want to be productive in controlling nature.
2) Those whose only desire is to control other people.
Since we cannot distinguish between them, we must limit everyone whose calling is government service
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Lawyers call what you are talking about the "slippery slope". Once "I actually believe that having limited programs to help the poor, protect the country, protect the environment, and so on benefit us all. " begins the end result must logically be $17 trillion in debt and $70 trillion in mandated entitlements. There is no other way than strictly limiting government to a military force, a police force, and a system of courts. A hat tip to Galt's speech which I've just re-read.
Those things that you want the government to take care are METAPHYSICALLY and EPISTEMOLOGICALLY impossible for it to do. Price is information. Absent that, they have no way to know how to direct their efforts, except by information about POWER, which is the wrong data.