Commentation by Caleb

Here is some more political science talking by Caleb.

People have been whining about taxes for as long as I can remember. Income taxes are unconstitutional, blah, blah, blah. Who cares, if rich people, as an organized group, didn’t want to pay taxes they wouldn't, and the government would crumble. Yes, everyone wishes they could keep just a little more money, and who can blame the rich for cringing every time that money that they with good conscience gave the government in order to maintain an ordered society is handed to a chronic ne'er-do-well, or public menace. For clinching fists at the thought of feeding, clothing, entertaining, providing state of the art medical care, educational training to the dregs of society because they chose to BE the destabilizing force that they pay the government to hold at bay?

Some of you may be aware that I have at various times voiced my support for a more Roman system of citizenship in which the right to vote is granted through military service, or wealth, although in the early days wealth was not a free pass. Many of you will now complain that that is not democratic, but lets face it. YOU DO NOT LIVE IN A DEMOCRACY. That's just a utopian pipe dream. This is a republic, and in a republic we have the right to reject the right to vote to any who do not qualify. We rejected slaves as property, minors as mentally and socially deficient, foreigners for obvious reasons, and for a long time anyone who couldn't read. (How could they fill out the ballot?)

Don't like that? Well let's see if you like this. Rome in addition to being a Democratic Republic in its most successful days was a Patrician Oligarchy. In other words, all of the poor, the week, the huddled masses could walk up to a rich man and beg for financial or material aid. (Not the government until Rome took a downward turn.) This rich man had the right to snub you, or grant you your fondest wishes. If you got snubbed you went to the next rich guy. These rich men kept hordes of commoners fed, clothed and sheltered in return for; you guessed it, a constituency. The richer, the kinder, the gentler the man was, the greater his constituency. This likely wouldn't get him elected, his constituency couldn't vote, but I did make him an effective force in business, the arts, and culture in general. Is there a difference here?

There wasn't in the early days of the United States. At the turn of the century a seat on the senate was a bought position. That's how the robber barons got there, although later when the dissolving of their life’s dreams left them plenty of time for more humanitarian pursuits.

The difference now is that the government has made this an inhuman function of society in which the hopes and dreams of the masses fall through the cracks of massive bureaucracy. He/She whom destroys our future no longer has to look us in the face to do so.

Talking with Caleb later, he clarified that his key point was that the wealthy and powerful have always had to support the systems within which they live. That is the nature of society. In America, we may have diffused the power a bit more through society by giving everyone the vote, but it is still the wealthy and the powerful who we vote for.