SOURCE OF IRRATIONALITY IN GOVERNMENT

This morning on “Morning Joe” (MSNBC), as a biologist, I watched the annelids; +Nicole Wallace and +Joe Scarborough cultivate the soil to plant and root more right wing hate. They have become so skilled at twisting virtually everything that brought up into hate for +Obama, +Democrats, but mainly the “huge” government. Not once did I hear either one of them mention the root problems we all recognize. This is not just overstatement or failure to understand on my part; it is a fact. Everyone knows we live in an age of income disparity and that is bad. The people uniformly hate this; the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Almost everyone also knows that we want the government to do many things more than organize and fund an army. We love beneficial programs and the security provided by the government. Then the irrationality that people like #Scarborough and #Wallace kicks in. They want all the benefits but do not want to pay for them. A classic example is that working people are working harder and being rewarded less for their work but do not want to pay union dues, which is the only way to make higher wages possible. Is there anyone out there that can deny that everything I said in this paragraph is true? If so, I would like to know what it is.

The answer to our problem is simple; raise taxes on the rich as well as on the poor to pay for what the poor want and need. Inherent in that statement should be the source of social balance. That being the case, then we are drastically out of balance in our democracy; a government “of the people, for the people, and by the people”. What has happened should be impossible if that were true. Again, the answer is simple, even if hurtful; we are losing our democracy and have been over the past 40 years (about 1981) and if the truth were told, we probably have been losing it since it started; however, it is now in an exponential phase, which calls it to our attention. In past blog posts, I have used the expression “social entropy” to describe what has been happening. A great deal of energy was invested into building the highly complex and intricate structures of democracy but special interests have been eroding it ever since; as a mountain built overnight by the explosive energy of a volcano and then over centuries that mountain slowly erodes away.  

What happened is simple to understand; what is not simple to understand is why this is the case. We see and read or hear about it spelled out everyday in detail in the media; the people allowed control of the government to be taken out of their own hands and put it into the hands of the economic elite. It is also simple to explain how this happens but again it is almost impossible to come up with a rational explanation as to why this happened. This was the question I had while listening to Morning Joe; how could intelligent people like Scarborough and Wallace possibly believe the way they believe. They want a standing army; they want their investments in the stock exchange protected; they want excellent highways and safe water supplies, and cheap energy readily available, safe streets, fire protection, elimination of old age poverty, fair and honest government,  and health care.

My conclusion is that Scarborough and Wallace represent non-thinking America, or irrational America. These two represent people who want and want and want but most of all they want small government and no or low taxes. The sad thing is that every morning they, along with many more people, cultivate and plant the seeds of hate for their very own government. Why? Is there over one million dollar a year salaries worth it? Why do they have large salaries? They are highly paid because the have a big audiences. Why do they have big audiences when the audiences are the very people who are quick to tell you they do not really want what these people are advocating every morning ad nauseously? The people do not want income disparity. They want the people to have control of the government. They do not want anarchy. They want everything but do not want to pay for it, so we have Scarborough and Wallace telling us we can have that—they are telling us what we want to hear, and we love it. In fact, we believe it so much that we are willing to vote the people into office that cause the problem. We seem happy to pile irrationality on irrationality.    

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