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To: DogByte6RER
No thanks. Our Constitutional system if just fine. We just need a better educated population (which is why we need a school choice bill and an alternative media).
3 posted on 04/23/2013 6:40:33 PM PDT by concerned about politics ("Get thee behind me, Liberal")
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To: concerned about politics
No thanks. Our Constitutional system if just fine. We just need a better educated population (which is why we need a school choice bill and an alternative media).
What we have is a 1 − 1/2 party system. We have journalism - which was politics, back in the founding era, is politics now, and will be politics in the future. Before the middle of the Nineteenth Century, journalism - newspapers, back then - were primarily about the opinions of their printers. Pretty much like the Rush Limbaugh show. With the added function of the propagation of news, although in a real sense that was secondary. But the Post Office systematically subsidized the transmission of newspapers among the various printers around the country. Back then, newspapers were notorious for not agreeing about much of anything, but the promotion of communication among newspapers, ironically, violates a clear-cut recommendation by Adam Smith:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. Wealth of Nations (Book I, Ch 10)
According to that, even the mailing of newspapers among printers might have tended to unify them into “a conspiracy against the public.” But then we really go into trouble. The telegraph came into existence, and with it the Associated Press. From that time to this, the members of the Associated Press have been in a continual virtual “meeting.” And, as Smith predicted, journalism has over the past century and a half morphed into little else but a conspiracy against the public. The culture of journalism is about, not the public interest, but about interesting - and impressing - the public. The culture of journalism is subversive of the long - term interest of the public, for the simple reason that journalism denigrates the people and institutions the public depends on, systematically and for journalism’s own self interest.
We have a 1 − 1/2 party system for the simple reason that all of journalism is a singular entity and, journalism being politics, we have a journalism party and an anti-journalism party. Naturally the anti journalism party is permanently on the defensive, while the journalism party is dominant, arrogant, and intrusive on the rights of the people.

30 posted on 04/24/2013 7:55:05 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion (“Liberalism” is a conspiracy against the public by wire-service journalism.)
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