From Near Death in a Hospital to Happy at Home, a Father Is Saved by His Daughter, his lawyer, a doctor, a wise Judge and Ivermectin

People who build a better mousetrap deserve their riches, but people who make money through corrupt dealings in a rotten government absolutely do not deserve theirs.

Sure, corrupt government is always bad, but if you build a better mousetrap and don't have patent protection and the courts to enforce it, your idea is likely to be stolen and used by the same big boys you are complaining about. Unless you can keep your idea secret, it's only your property because of patent laws.

Nineteenth century America had similar concerns about being undercut by foreign competition. It was best, they thought, to make things at home, rather than keep having to pay foreign manufacturers for them. I'm not saying that was morally right or that protectionism is always a good thing, but it did contribute to making America a wealthy country, and there have certainly been much worse things that happened in history.

You want to believe it was done for good moral reasons, not evil corrupt reasons, and me pointing out the corruption makes you uncomfortable, because you fear in your bones that I might have a point.

Other people are as cynical as you are about government and politics, but there are some differences. First of all, they don't locate corruption in some region or ethnicity and they don't say that those people are evil from generation to generation. They recognize that people in power change from generation to generation. What you're doing is like some foreigner saying that "the Americans" are always running things. They don't see that who "the Americans" are changes from era to era.

I'd say that you weren't entirely wrong about mid-20th century America. People who made money in earlier times were still on top, socially and economically, and to a significant extent politically, but the country has changed a lot in the last 50 years. Northeastern WASPs don't run the country anymore. Some of their institutions still have a lot of power, but neither the old families nor the old industrial areas have the clout they once did. It's not the 1890s or the 1930s anymore when the wealth was concentrated in one region. Wealth and poverty are both more spread out in the country. You so resent New York City and New York state retaining any of the influence that large states and the country's largest city inevitably have, that you don't see that.

Secondly, people recognize that power always can corrupt. Some people are more corrupt or more corruptible than others, but wealth getting power and power getting wealth goes can go on in age in any country under any system, and it's not worse in America than in many other countries. It's not like there's some magic wand that can stop that from happening. It's also not like everyone with money or power in our system is inevitably corrupt or everyone without them is always innocent and cheated. In other words, you are so cynical because you are so naive in thinking that there is a magic wand to make things different or an ideal era when things were different, and in thinking that you can identify some group that always does it while others are free of the same temptations and transgressions.

Third, I think people recognize that cities and countries and governments have things they want to do and have to do. They have to spend money on national defense, public safety, road and sewer construction and other things. There's often some corruption in the awarding of contracts. That doesn't mean that maintaining an army, a police force, a public works or a sanitation department is wrong.

Some countries want to protect their industries from foreign competition. This can involve domestic producers getting money they wouldn't otherwise get, but if protectionist measures increased the material wealth of the country and enabled us all as individuals families and communities to have more and to do more, it's hypocritical to ignore the benefits that we received.

We weren't talking about the Bidens.

We are talking about whether or not there exists a corruption cabal in positions of power within the United States government, and Joe Biden is very good proof that it does exist.

We were talking about vaccine mandates and drug companies (and always talking about the Civil War). I don't believe that you can blame the fact that the major vaccine companies are in the Northeast on corruption. There were advantages in those areas that were beneficial to drug development, and if companies in some other part of the country developed vaccines, the government would be ordering them from those companies.

And this may very well be true, but in light of how much stuff seems to be motivated by corruption, it is not easy to discern if what you say is indeed true.

Of course. New York didn't become a big economic center because of corruption, though. They had an excellent harbor. They taxed themselves to build a canal to the interior (no federal subsidies). They build railroads (no federal subsidies until after New York had developed its connections with the Midwest and South). They had an industrious workforce and developed financial skills.

New York was geographically destined to be a city of wealth. About that there is no question. But sometimes the wealthy think it's perfectly fine to have inroads into government that gives them an advantage, and having looked at the evidence, it appears to me that the New York region has availed itself of this very tactic to increase it's wealth through government influence.

hen why the eternal hatred of successful Northerners?

Hardly eternal. When I was younger, I had no animosity or distrust of anyone from any region, but over time a person begins to notice that things are New York centric. The game shows ask questions that New Yorkers can easily answer but someone from a different region would have trouble with. The TV shows tell us how New York cops feel about things, and how New York crime operates.

If a person pays attention, they start to realize all the News services pretty much operate out of New York, and they give the New York Liberal slant to all the "News" they spew.

What really made me start to wonder was when the people on "Good Morning America" and "ABC News" in the evening were mocking the "Contract with America" and ridiculing the idea of a balanced budget. They said it was reckless and irresponsible, and they were all against it.

Why would any American be against a balanced budget? On the other hand, who would be against it? Well the people who would be against it are those people who are making money from excessive spending. They would be very much against it, but normal rational Americans? Why would they oppose a balanced budget? Didn't make sense.

Unless.... Unless the media people were somehow connected to the people making a lot of money from excessive government spending. That theory explains a lot. It explains why the media helps elect Democrats, and it explains why they were vehemently against a balanced budget.

All the subsequent behavior and the subsequent information I have seen tends to reinforce the view that the media are the tool of people making money through government.

That is a short synopsis of it.

Were they really any worse than the slaveowners?

Well they are still here, while the slaveowners are all gone and do not trouble us further.

Slavery was indeed legal, and protected by the Constitution. But did that really mean that any government had to treat slavery as morally equal to free labor?

It meant all parties had to honor the original deal, repugnant though it may be. As far as morals and free labor are concerned, Woodpusher has been doing excellent work on another thread clarifying the dominant thinking of the era regarding why they wanted slavery excluded from the territories, and it is not at all what we had been led to believe all our lives.

They didn't want black people in the territories at all. They wanted the territories to remain exclusively a land for whites only. This was why they wanted slavery banned from the territories, even though it was very not practical to take slaves into the territories.

Did that really mean that a constitutionally elected government couldn't forbid slavery in the territories or that legitimate state governments couldn't ban slavery within their borders?

It seems to me that doing such a thing violates the agreed upon "privileges and Immunities" clause. These things were legal to do when the constitution was ratified, and banning them subsequently looks like you are changing the rules after the fact of them having been agreed upon.

You could pass laws prohibiting the creation of new slaves by the laws of a state, because that is specifically a state matter, but to try and overturn the laws of other states is a bridge too far. To try to restrict the movements of the citizens of other state and their legal "property" was also a good faith violation of the agreement, because none of that was put forth when they were asked to ratify the constitution.

You are "against slavery" like Thomas Jefferson was "against slavery" in his later years. He didn't like slavery, but he didn't like Yankees even more, so he celebrated every victory for the Southern "agricultural interest" (slaveowners) at the expense of the North.

I know nothing of this, and will have to take your word that Jefferson did this. I know he didn't give up his own slaves, and I have always regarded that as hypocritical from someone who virtually launched the Abolition movement by himself.

Or you're like a politician who claims to be "personally opposed" to abortion, but is even more opposed to any attempt to limit the number of abortions.

Devil's advocate would be closer to the truth. I have no liking for slavery, and slavery is gone now, but the principle of laws being changed without getting them changed in the correct and proper manner has been a problem since this nation was founded, and it is something I have always been quite incensed about.

You may not have noticed, but I often bitch about courts changing laws without going through the legal process. I mentioned Abortion, Homosexual "marriage", ban on prayer in school, overturning the correct meaning of "natural born citizen", Kelo, Wickard, and many other cases as examples of judicial excess that should never have been tolerated.

Laws mean what they mean when they were created, until they are changed by the mutually accepted process required to change them.

I don't doubt that there is corruption, but I certainly don't think that the corruption all comes from one place or that successful people couldn't have success on their own without government corruption.

I believe the corruption has become very serious in our nation right now, and I think certain agencies now act as STASI for the deep state and the power brokers working with them. We have long been heading into Fascist territory, and we should all be quite alarmed by what we have been seeing.

But I have long said that if you would deal with a problem, you need to first understand how it became a problem. I started out years ago trying to understand how we got Abortion, and I had read many articles on the topic. It boiled down to it being another overreach by the courts through using the 14th amendment as a tool for judicial activism. I found a lot of issues facing conservatives were put into effect as a consequence of this exact same path for creating fake laws.

The intent behind the 14th amendment was not to do any of this, but the amendment is so badly written that you can drive an ideological truck through it. It has effectively given judicial activists carte blanche to do anything they want, and that is exactly how they have used it.

So how did we get the 14th amendment? Arm twisting by the federal government on states that would never have agreed to it in a legitimate process. And how did they get the power to do that? Well we are now right back at the causes of the civil war, and those I now see are dominated by a use of government power to play favorites with connected people, and *that* is a form of corruption, and one which we still are dealing with right now.

We are talking about whether or not there exists a corruption cabal in positions of power within the United States government, and Joe Biden is very good proof that it does exist.

Maybe you are, but you were also complaining that the vaccine companies are located in the Northeast and that's what I was responding to. Stop posting to me every time you think you see a conspiracy. I know there is corruption in government. I don't use that as an excuse to bash one city or one part of the country.

But sometimes the wealthy think it's perfectly fine to have inroads into government that gives them an advantage, and having looked at the evidence, it appears to me that the New York region has availed itself of this very tactic to increase it's wealth through government influence.

I'm not sure that you have looked at the evidence. It looks like you just assume that because you want to believe it.

The game shows ask questions that New Yorkers can easily answer but someone from a different region would have trouble with. The TV shows tell us how New York cops feel about things, and how New York crime operates.

Plenty of cop shows about LA, SF, not to mention the CSI and NCIS and Chicago this Chicago that franchises. A big city provides plenty of plots and the television industry is based in the big cities. Should we be like the British who pretend that Oxford, Cambridge and the Shetland Islands have a murder every few days?

One in 12 Americans in 1940 lived in New York City and the percentage of American entertainers who grew up there or lived there was even higher. So what? You want to throw out The Honeymooners, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Sopranos, Seinfeld? I don't have a problem watching a show set in New York. Why is that a big deal?

Well they are still here, while the slaveowners are all gone and do not trouble us further.

Everybody alive in the 19th century is now dead. Even the descendants of the 19th century capitalists don't have the power they once did. You're raging against geography and the past, against the advantages that New York and other Northern cities had and against the predominance that they had in the past. Nowadays, Charlotte, Dallas and other cities are doing a lot better than New York or Cleveland or Buffalo, so I don't see much point about complaining that Northern cities once had greater power and still retain some.

It meant all parties had to honor the original deal, repugnant though it may be.

The "deal" was that states could have slavery or not have slavery. It wasn't that slavery was to be regarded as morally equivalent to freedom.

The new revisionist oversimplifications aren't any more accurate than the old ones. You sound like one of those people today who believe everything is racism, and that one can't oppose illegal immigration or worry about China or question affirmative action without being a racist. The truth is that one can worry about all those things without racism being one's primary motivation.

These things were legal to do when the constitution was ratified, and banning them subsequently looks like you are changing the rules after the fact of them having been agreed upon.

Try again. The Northwest Ordinance, passed in the same year the Constitution was written forbade slavery in the territories. Pennsylvania had already passed laws against slavery and slavery had already been abolished in Massachusetts when the Constitution was written and ratified.

The Fourteenth Amendment was badly written. It has also been badly interpreted. Most of those who disagree with Roe v. Wade consider it as judicial overreach and don't reject the Fourteenth Amendment itself.

Interesting take on the situation. What do you think "X" and "BroJoeK"?

Once again, stop bothering me every time you think there is a conspiracy. I agree that there is corruption in government. I just don't get into bashing whole sections of the country, nor do I think Biden and Pelosi are Abraham Lincoln reincarnated.

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