Posted on 06/25/2016 3:47:05 AM PDT by Kaslin
Paul Krugman may understand the Democratic Party better than most Democrats do. The New York Times editorial writer describes Democrats as a “coalition of social groups, from teachers’ unions to Planned Parenthood, seeking specific benefits from government action.” More often than not, what these groups want from government is at someone else’s expense.
That isn’t just a characteristic of the party. That’s what the Democratic Party is.
There are also groups that support Republicans: gun owners, small business owners, evangelicals, etc. But Republican groups tend to not want anything from government. More often than not they just want to be left alone. As Krugman sees it, Republicans are far more concerned with general principles or ideology.
Although Krugman often likes to characterize Republicans as Ayn Rand individualists, the typical Democrat is far more self-interested – in a bad sense of the word. Democratic groups tend to base their loyalty to the party solely on what political favors the party can deliver to the group.
There are no overriding principles here. The party is always seeking opportunities to take from Peter and give to Paul. Paul can be rich or he can be poor. Ditto for Peter. All the really matters is that Paul promises a bigger reward (in terms of votes, campaign contributions, etc.)
Think of the political system as a sort of Hobbesian jungle, in which there is dog-eat-dog rivalry among people who are only interested in what’s in it for themselves. Think of fighting over a fixed pie, for which one man’s gain is another man’s loss.
Who loses out in such a world?
Scour the entire country and you will be hard pressed to find a Democratic politician who is trying to reform inner city public schools. The reformers are almost always Republicans or wealthy people (who may sometimes vote for Democrats). Who cares about reforming the prison system? In Texas it has been a conservative think tank and Republican politicians. Who cares about lowering the barriers to a job (occupational licensing, union monopolies, minimum wages laws, etc.)?
The White House has actually come down on the right side of occupational licensing – complaining that almost one third of all jobs in the country require a government license. But most of the time the Obama administration has marched in lock step with other Democrats – favoring the haves over any (often minority) newcomers to the job market.
Although the teachers unions are a huge factor in Democratic Party politics, the teachers will vote for a Republican over a Democrat at the drop of a hat if the Democrat threatens their agenda. And this is true of most groups that make up the Democratic Party coalition. It has not been true of African Americans, however.
As I wrote in a previous post, black voters have tended to vote for the Democrats no matter what they do. That may be why so many black families must send their children to the worst schools, why they tend to receive the worse city services and why they are disproportionately the victims of environmental degradation – as in Flint, Michigan.
When Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), they rarely spoke about the need to insure the uninsured (who, per Sen. Chuck Schumer, basically don’t vote). Instead, they talked about the pre-existing conditions, a middle class problem. Even here, however, it appears they were speaking to the large population of people who feared that pre-existing conditions might become a problem in the future.
Those for whom pre-existing conditions were an actual problem at the time were a small, disorganized group with no political power. That may explain why so many insurers in the (Obamacare) exchanges have narrow networks that exclude the best doctors and the best hospitals and have outrageously high out of pocket limits for lifesaving “specialty drugs,” needed by cancer or AIDS patients. In the health policy world, it is only the Republicans and right of center think tanks that have shown any interest in changing perverse insurer incentives.
The idea of a party made up of special interest groups is not new. It dates back to the 1930s and the Roosevelt coalition. Franklin Roosevelt successfully put together a voting alliance that included farmers, union members, southern segregationists and others – people who had nothing in common and basically didn’t even like each other. They voted for the Democrat’s because they got something they wanted for themselves, even if they detested what the party was doing for others.
The pinnacle of this type of coalition building was the National Industrial Recovery Act, modeled after the Italian fascist model in Italy. (See some of the history here.) Before it was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, the act allowed (and even required) every industry and every profession to establish a cartel – setting prices and wages and controlling output.
The problem here is what economists call the “fallacy of composition.” In each separate market the producers benefit by enjoying monopoly rents. But that doesn’t mean that the aggregate effects are good. Just the reverse. Creating a monopoly in every market is terrible for the economy as a whole.
And that is the fundamental problem with Democratic Party politics. Think of political jurisdictions where there basically are no Republicans. Think Detroit, Michigan. Think Puerto Rico.
Think of sharks in a feeding frenzy, eating a dead whale.
Once the whale is gone, there is nothing left to eat.
FYI
The Democratic Party prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour!
socialism/communism run within a capitalist system
Please forgive the rant. I chose the first thread to express my epiphany of sorts. I have to write it somewhere before it vanishes like so many compelling thoughts I find. In trying to figure out WTF is wrong with this world so that I might find the inner ability to prepare my two kids better in how to deal with the bleak future society has stumbled them into. I have doubts like anyone, and especially doubts that I can guide them any better than I myself have been guided. I have long wondered what, or why people drag us all down to the pits rather than choose to make a world with happiness, with greatness. I have come just now to understand that it is because of guilt that they dwell forever upon. Most are unaware of it, yet it exists and they spit it out into the world for all of us to witness. People harbor guilt from all of history. Guilt that their for-bearers killed Jesus, that ‘witches’ were persecuted, that slaves were brutalized, that Hitler, Stalin and Hideki Tojo had the insanity to destroy so many lives, and so much more. So, many of our neighbors of this life, feeling the guilt of history, try to compensate, yet deny what is right, and forge what is wrong because they ‘know’ that we humans do not deserve anything so right as peaceful coexistence on this earth. I feel no such guilt, because I understand I had no hand it these wrongs. I know that my two beautiful girls did not have hands in these disasters. Yet those who permit mohamadism, socialism, globalism, and other wicked social evils to flourish believe we all deserve such disasters because they have no other place to perch their guilt except upon we and our undeserving children. All we can do is continue to resist them, and therefore I must prepare my children to continue that resistance, that fight as well, while also trying to give to them optimism that their individualism has greater worth than most of their peers would ever acknowledge or allow. Despite the guilt of those who know nothing of worth, who invite dread upon us all to fill their emptiness, I simply ask Almighty to guide us to give our kids a fighting chance to make their world full of each of their plentiful worth. So I will teach them to resist, and to love, if I can.
Please forgive the rant.
Now I might sleep a bit better having emptied these thoughts.
Good night, my fellow Great Fighters, FReepers, for whom I am so thankful every single day.
All power corrupts completely !
It strikes me that the name “socialist” for the leftist method of government is exactly opposite of what the word implies. Inasmuch as societies consist of people who agree to live by certain rules in order to create harmony, Socialism destroys societies. Where the socialist ideal is “What do I get out of it? How much can I soak other people for?”, the capitalist ideal is, “Let’s try to get everyone to be self-sufficient so that no one is a burden on other people; let everyone interact as equals.”
The selfishness of socialism destroys societies. We’ve seen this happen over and over—Venezuela is just the latest in a long line of socialist failures.
No foolish rant. Great words.
Antisocial is MUCH more descriptive.
That’s quite a mouthful. Paragraph breaks would do much to make your thoughts bite size.
;^)
“socialism/communism run within a capitalist system”
I believe you have just given the definition of Fascism...
“No foolish rant. Great words.”
Yes, they are, but I’m a whole lot more simplistic in my view because today, thanks to our failed educational system, people can’t comprehend the things the poster wrote. He’s only covering the few who somehow have manage to educate themselves sufficiently to allow them to think in the terms he describes.
So my pitch is that we are where we are today, thanks mostly to “diversity.” When the USA was a “melting pot” of Northern Europeans, we had immigrants who shared our values and our believed in our Constitution. Now, thanks to “people from other places,” we have devolved into an incipient $hit hole with people who come here, not looking for a way up, but a free ride at the expense of the dwindling number of productive members of our society. We don’t have many chances left to fix this problem, but it looks like the Brits are taking a stab at it, along with Donald Trump!
When I was a child, there were considerable Chinese and Japanese communities in our area. I don't recall that they ever caused problems. In fact, they seemed to assimilate into American culture fairly well, while keeping certain aspects of their Asian cultures. For instance, they were Buddhists... members of a genuinely peaceful religion.
I should note that this was almost 50 years ago, and the Chinese were pre-PRC immigrants and their descendants.
I love quoting myself:
The primary beneficiaries of a socialist program are the socialist politicians. The secondary are the bureaucracies, and tertiaries are the supposed recipients. Everything after is fluff.
I suggest you take a look at Hawaii today. And I might add that my son-in-law’s mother is Japanese and she was born in an internment camp. Also, FWIW, his mother doesn’t think much of ethnic Japanese either, because despite what this country did to her family, she’s an AMERICAN!
Nothing else to eat but each other.. that is ultimately what democrat policies do to societies...
Democrats should always remember the first rule of the parasite: don’t kill your host.
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