Trump admin will issue a Rescission request of $15,000,000,000 to congress on Tuesday

[Jezcoe]

@Gaius

@NebraskaFootball

@Gaius

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.

• Alexander Fraser Tytler
  Wise man whoever he was.

He also stated…

From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.”

“The average age of the worlds greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

From Bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage.”

Was he prescient? Because we certainly seem to be following a similar path as well.

Friedrich Hayek a Nobel Prize Austrian) economist wrote a well known short book called The Road to Serfdom saying many of the same things.

It’s really more a work of social philosophy or political science than econ. In it he looks at the various reasons, poverty-related and-wealth related that economies tend to start centralizing.

It’s been probably two decades since I’ve read it, but basically he states it begins in a mundane, proper fashion with such things as public works, a social safety net and regulating externalities and economic necessity brought on by wars. IIRC he theorized (finally commiting his thoughts to paper in 1944), that IF once that happens a certain mindset is adopted by even a large minority of the population, a slow but terrible snowball effect can be unleashed in which there is more and more central control of the economy until eventually whichever large minority has the most political pull can and does use the central planning function to empower itself over others and ultimately becomes lords and ladies over the rest of society which ultimately becomes much like tge serfs and peasants of old.

In fact, it follows from his argument that THAT is how the English nobility was founded,
IS the reason communist states start out fighting for the workers but in the end only serve the interests of party cadres and functionaries etc. etc…

Not surprisingly he was an Austrian economist.

Hayek also undestood that a guaranteed wage was inevitable and necessary as automation took the place of workers.

Some form of a guaranteed wage has been talked about since before the founding of this country.