I agree completely. And sometimes the person is effectively, but inaccurately, portrayed as an asshole simply because his agenda is anathema to them. I think that that is true with Trump, but he makes their job easier because he is an asshole.
It’s a fine line though…being enough of an asshole to get the job done, but too much of an asshole to lead effectively.
Sure thing.
I will say this, if you believe in free trade, and free market capitalism, he is setting us back by thirty years.
If you believe that the government should not be picking winners and losers(never mind one man,) he is setting us back.
I will defend the ideas of men like John Smith, Friedman, and Hayek till the day that I die. I’ve never felt shame at defending those ideas, even when there were obvious failures…because they’re still the best ideas going. Just as soon as I get get the impression he’s learned who those three men are, I’ll back off.
What job is he getting done? Is the job driving away the only intelligent and capable men that were willing to stand with him? Sure. He’s great at it.
It is easy to be infatuated with yourself and your accomplishments. Any narcissistic asshole can do that. Humility, diligence and self-awareness are rare. Sherman had it. Does our current President?
“I hereby state, and mean all that I say, that I never have been and never will be a candidate for President; that if nominated by either party, I should peremptorily decline; and even if unanimously elected I should decline to serve."
I’m just happy he’s disrupting the status quo. We have needed that for decades. I hope he brings the government bureaucracy down and I don’t care if he does it through skill or incompetence.
Agreed…unless he fails totally and the polarization that his unfortunate rhetoric has fostered provides a rationale for majority movement to the increasingly extreme left.
That could happen. You never know. I’m hoping that by the time the so-called “shutdown” ends that enough government employees will have self-attrited that the bloated federal system is a shadow of it’s former self. That’s probably unrealistic, but it might slow down the Deep State machine enough that it takes them a decade to rebuild. I know–put down the crack pipe. But I can dream, can’t I?
The lowest paid workers will leave first, and their positions will be filled quickly. They are also the ones most affected by this shutdown. The GS-5 type workers don’t make a whole lot of money to build a savings cushion.
That’s what is worrying me. We will find out if the extreme Left will devour it’s own very soon. I think all of the Extreme Left are running for POTUS. Well not including the career Left that already have better / safer jobs.
Oh, speaking of POTUS from the Left… beware of Terry McCauliffe from VA… I think he’s in for 2020 but keeping it quiet. I think he’s going to be a late entry after the herd has thinned. He helped BLUE Virginia and feels owed so they could toss it to him.
As politics becomes increasingly polarized, everyone is moving to the left or right. My fear is that as that polarization continues, those moderates that had been in the middle will move off to the left. Trump’s inability to keep his ego from blurting/tweeting his every thought isn’t helping. I suspect a lot of people might share his world-view, but just won’t ultimately be able to vote for him because he’s just so distasteful in his public presentation. The more things don’t go his way, the more he distastefully blurts/tweets. I fear he is sowing the seeds of his own destruction. Sad, because he was once our best hope.
I agree the one positive is the fact that the Democrats are in more disarray than the GOP. The only unifying theme in their entire party is “Donald Trump is bad”. Other than that, they’ve go nuthin’. If only Trump wasn’t so hell-bent on helping them validate that one common theme.
Are uou talking about the Dem’s candidate? Or saying that Rand Paul, Cruz or Rubio would have been worse?
I’m sure he’s talking about Hillary. I voted for Cruz in the primaries, buy obviously for Trump in the general election.
I’m interested in hearing why you think Hayek’s philosophy of the economy which I dumb down by saying ‘it isn’t a machine, it is people, and it will self-correct’ is better for us than Keynesian theory, which I dumb down by saying ‘the economy is a machine, it needs minor tuning (regulation) to run best?’
I ask this because from what the few books I’ve read (and admittedly struggled to understand) it seems that while Hayek’s philosophy seems to work better in a vacuum, Keynes’s seems to be more appropriate when you factor in people.
The fact of human nature is that ‘most’ humans act out of selfish interest. Those that are in a position to choose, often make career choices that offer them the most economic promise versus the most self-satisfaction. Notice I said ‘those that are in a position to choose.’ Most people are still ‘forced’ to take the best offer the local employment situation gives them.
Continuing on, selfish interest/the profit motive is why a landlord, whose properties are paid for, will raise the rent, simply to make more money, without making any improvements to the property. Selfish interest/the profit motive is why the commercial currently running on TV that says ‘I got $36,000 dollars cash back, and I used it to offer my employees health insurance’ is for the most part bullshit. The average business owner is going to pocket that money and take the wife to Tahiti.
The totally free market is not evil unto itself, but unregulated, cost will rise to a level that leaves the bottom, let’s say 1/2 of the population needing government assistance to live little more than a subsistence existence.
Minor regulatory adjustments are necessary to prevent that from happening. Unfortunately, government tends to over-regulate and hasn’t hit the sweet spot, yet. That doesn’t mean that Keynesian theories are incorrect, just not applied as effectively as they could be.
Sorry if this was a derail.
They didn’t win the primary. It was Trump or Hillary.
I’m not a Republican so didn’t vote in any primary but would have preferred Cruz, followed by Rubio. I don’t have a particular problem with Rand Paul, but Libertarian Conservatives aren’t really electable to the Presidency and even if he had won the nomination he didn’t stand a chance. I would have deemed him a wasted vote as a third party candidate, but if it was just between him and Hillary, certainly I would have supported him even though he couldn’t have beat her.
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I like that he wan’t a politician coming into this and he isn’t playing by their rules. We definitely needed this disruption in the way things have always been done.
The very fact that people are selfish is why it works. Costs may rise on one thing, but a competitive service will emerge, because it doesn’t make sense to avoid servicing millions of people because the profit margin isn’t quite as high. Show me the millions of people that would be left homeless because rent went up a little bit, and I’ll find investors to undercut that rent with economy housing and I’ll make a fortune.
The classic examples tend to point to the conditions Charles Dickens and later Marx wrote about right? It was awful I’m sure. But people weren’t going back to the farms. Unrepentant and unfettered capitalism, while imperfect…was better. The same is true in China today. People kill themselves at the Apple factories…but they don’t seem to go back to the rice fields…
Left to their own devices, there are no losers in any transaction in a capitalist system…and incentives galore to provide products/services to the less wealthy.
The “pie” is not finite. It can grow exponentially, and there is nothing but ourselves preventing everyone from having a healthy slice…and the pie wants to grow, and it wants to be served efficient, and the idea that one person or one group of people, or even everyone together can figure out how to slice a pie that doesn’t want to be stagnant is where it falls apart.
With all of that said, I’m not 100% ideologically consistent, and don’t want to privatize public lands, and I’m occasionally against things like windmills where they destroy a vista, and so forth.
I feel the same way. It looks like Kasich and Romney are gearing up for a payback. Kasich has joined CNN and Romney is already on the warpath. They are hell bent to destroy what remains of the R party. What they seem to not get is that no one likes them outside of their neighborhood.
Yet, Trump always seems to have something up his sleeve. Who knows what will happen between now and Nov 2020. He can’t bring the same show on the road and win again though.
Bill O’Riley seems to think the Dem power brokers are going to guilt M. Obama into running and that she will win hands down. The only good part of that would be that Hillary will probably have a heart attack.
I wouldn’t vote for Kasich or Romney of Satan himself were their opponent.
I’m pretty much at the point where I want the spoiler, regardless of what their ideology is. If they can and absolutely will cause the establishment pols pain and suffering, I’m in. The only thing that would bring me joy more than watching McConnell, Graham and McCarthy go down in flames, would be watching Pelosi, Schumer, Hoyer and Durbin go down in flames. If they were all on the same plane and it went down? Well let’s party like its 1999!
I’ll admit I’m tired of the struggle. I’m all for anything that damages the extreme left. But if we can’t have that, then I’m resigned to accept their ascendancy and supremacy to the point where we can start some honest to goodness face shooting. I’m all about making some domestic enemies either pay their overdue tab, or pay the boatman for a ride to the other side. :mad:
Romney or Kasich? I wouldn’t piss on either one of them if their guts were on fire.
Bombs do not go off routinely your 20 years out of step.
Why do we have no more suicide bombings in pre 67 Israel, a part of it is the wall.