unflagging diligence...............

 

     Making votes was one example of how corruption evolved—one could even say became democratized—in post-Revolutionary New York.  Given that land was no longer the sole path to wealth, politics became another pipeline.  Elites funded newspapers that promoted their interests.  They bribed legislators in exchange for votes on banks, turnpikes, and chartered corporations.  Van Buren saw this "implied alliance" between monied interests and the state as a means of restoring colonial-era oligarchy under a different guise.  Columbia's "money power" was, he believed, the essence of Federalism, whose raison d'etre was to "combat the democratic spirit of the country . . . an object which it has pursued with unflagging diligence."

-James M. Bradley,  Martin Van Buren: America's First Politician

still.............................

 

     This idea was at the core of Van Buren's worldview.  It would never change.  Collusion between government and private interests, he believed, would always enrich the few at the expense of the many.

-James M. Bradley, Martin Van Buren: America's First Politician

without apology......................

Van Buren's wooing of Jefferson captured the changing mores in US politics.  The Revolutionary Era system of deference was rapidly crumbling.  In most states, property qualifications were no longer a prerequisite for voting.  A growing number of Americans—all white men, of course—were enfranchised and participating in the political process.  The forty-one-year-old Van Buren typified this brash new style of egalitarian politics.  He played the game of politics to win elections and build power, and he pursued those goals without apology.

-James M. Bradley, Martin Van Buren: America's First Politician 

Can I get an Amen.....................?

 

As always, the censors claimed that they needed sweeping powers to make the world better, safer and more truthful. And as censors always do, they proved themselves unworthy of those powers, which they deployed not just against ideas that were false but against politically inconvenient truths. In the process, they demonstrated why no one, of any ideological stripe, should be trusted with that kind of authority.

-Megan McCardle, from here

via

Be careful out there.....................

 No power on earth is more fearsome than a highly educated class that faces a constrained, even dismal, future. 

-Joel Kotkin, as he starts this entry

Wonder if they'd write this today...................

 

     The power in Washington is not monolithic power in a few hands, as it is in totalitarian countries . . . It is fragmented into many bits and pieces.  Every special interest group around the country tries to get its hands on whatever bits and pieces it can.  The result is that there is hardly an issue on which government is not on both sides.

-Milton & Rose Friedman, Free To Choose, 1979

And doing a mighty fine job of it..........

 

Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it.

- Douglas Adams, via Chris Lynch

granted....................

 

To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

Ed. Note:  Methinks if he had added "heart" to "intellect and judgment", he would have been on to something.

the most fundamental freedom..............

 

As creatures who are self-moving, freedom of movement would seem to be the most fundamental freedom there is, a minimal condition for that basic animal pleasure that makes life sweet. . . . What is at stake is not simply a legal right, but a disposition to find one's way through the world by the exercise of one's own powers.

-Matthew Crawford,  Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control

normies vs. elites...................

 

The normies want to get on with life. They want to work, get married, have children—boring

 stuff. That’s what normal means.

The elites, for their part, wish to change everything: sex, the climate, our history, your automobile, your diet, even the straws with which you slurp your smoothie. For them there is no good and evil, no right and wrong—only oppressors and oppressed. Every transaction demands their intervention to protect designated oppressed groups. “Social justice” translates neatly into “elite control.”

-Martin Gurri, from here

Life is full of tradeoffs:..............

 

 .............if we want more "big data" and artificial intelligence then we might have less green energy.

Data centers consume massive amounts of electricity.  They are sprouting up all over Central Ohio.  If the push for all electric vehicles doesn't fade, there is little chance the electric grid will be able to keep up.  Sooner or later, we need to reconsider building new nuclear power plants.

Husband your..............................

 

.............................................power.

The trouble with doing.......................

 

.................economics properly and wisely:

It’s tempting to do economics as if an omniscient and omni-benevolent god were able and willing to hire itself out as the faithful agent to follow the mortal’s policy recommendations. Imagining oneself tapping into god-like knowledge and power is heady, and from that high perch the real-world, with all of its messiness and imperfections, does indeed appear to be in dire need of divine intervention. But economics properly and wisely done . . . takes human nature, including humans’ limited cognitive abilities, as given. Most of the so-called “theoretical exceptions” to the economic case for free trade are relevant only in an alternative reality in which governance of humans’ daily economic and political affairs could actually be turned over to a god or to a mortal transformed into a god.

-Don Boudreaux, from this post

On the strong dislike of power........

 

In a now-obscure 1960s BBC interview, Malcolm Muggeridge, the English satirist, journalist, and convert to anti-Communism (and later Christianity) declared: “I hate government. I hate power. I think that man’s existence, insofar as he achieves anything, is to resist power, to minimize power, to devise systems of society in which power is the least exerted.”

-from this review of Everyday Freedom

How to be........................................

 

................................................powerful.

a now familiar paradox..............

  In a now familiar paradox, the rational forces stuck to magical thinking, while the irrational ones were more logical, parsing the brute equations of power. And so the storm never passed. In a way, it still has not.

-Adam Gopnik, from this review

power.........................

     What is needed today is a new kind of politics that focuses primarily on fulfilling the aspirations of the Third Estate—on expanding opportunities for the middle and working classes.  The current emphasis on social justice through redistribution and subsidies does not increase opportunities for upward mobility, but instead fosters dependency while consolidating power in a few hands. 

-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

An idealist..........................

Power worried him: no one ever believed he possessed too much of the stuff.  His sympathies were with the man in the street, to whom he believed government answered.  A friend distilled his politics to two maxims: "Rulers should have little, the people much." And privilege should make way for genius and industry. Railing against "the odious hereditary distinction of families." 

-Stacy Schiff,  The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

divided...................

 Perhaps absolute power, of the kind it enjoyed after the Cold War, corrupted absolutely. Whatever the cause, the United States is now sharply, militantly divided over the question of whether it even wants to be a Western country. 

-Christopher Caldwell, as cut-and-pasted from here

a sense of history............................

       Driven, singularly willed, quietly but fiercely ambitious, hot-blooded and bold, and uncommonly charismatic, he cherished the military, but he also cherished something even far greater: a sense of history.  And virtue.  Thus, when a movement among the troops mounted at the end of the war to make him king of America, he rebuked them; it had given him, he said, "painful sensations."  Thus, when he learned of the pending mutiny among unpaid and disaffected officers of his army, Washington personally rebuked them, saying an insurrection would only "open the floodgates of civil discord" and threaten the very liberties for which they had fought.  Thus, when he informed Congress after Evacuation Day that he was relinquishing military power and turning it over to them ("I retire from the great theatre of action"), he was self-consciously imitating the legendary Roman republican leader Cincinnatus, who returned power back to the Senate and retired to his farm.  This single action, more than any other, was a virtuoso performance: His refusal to seize power that a Caesar, or a Cromwell, or a William of Orange would have eagerly grasped, and, moreover, his refusal to even entertain the notion of accepting power others would have gladly handed over to  him, earned him an international prestige and a domestic power that no American, before or after, has surpassed.  The old French generals saw him as a great captain because he did not let a superior force destroy his army; the world recognized him as a great man  because he did not let his victorious army turn loyalty to him into a military dictatorship of the United States.

-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800