Politicians

Libertarian Institute, May 25, 2020

Memorial Day: Remembering the Political Lies that Spurred Mass Killing
by Jim Bovard | May 25, 2020

Almost all of the lawmakers who co-sponsored a bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour hired unpaid interns to supplement their staffs. Bernie Sanders, the bill's leading voice, was the only one to pay his interns at an hourly rate. But even he only pays them $12 an hour.

Joe Biden's niece Caroline Biden just avoided jail for a $100k credit card fraud. When I first read this, I was outraged. She should go to jail like everyone else! But then I thought about it and realized, Isn't this better for her and us?

Every time a president proposes to cut anything in the $4 trillion federal budget — up from $1.8 trillion in Bill Clinton’s last budget — reporters race to find “victims.” And of course no one wants to lose his or her job or subsidy, so there are plenty of people ready to defend the value of each and every government check. If the budget could be cut by, say, $1 trillion — taking it back to the 2008 level — how much good could that money do in the hands of families and businesses?

After so much development in Operation Car Wash, former Brazil president Lula and his allies have resorted to very desperate means: calls protests and strikes to grind the country to a halt (which failed miserably, mind you), calls for early elections, promises to arrest journalists that “lied” about him, and support for a Supreme Court that decided to grant habeas corpus to convicted corrupt politicians. If that’s not swinging for the fences in desperation, it’s hard to know what is.
How did we get here?

People love to make jokes about government foolishness, but many still regard them with legitimacy and respect. They still vote for their incumbent representatives, and when there is a problem they look to Congress to fix it. They rely on them because they are in charge, and being in charge, they must know what they’re doing. Right?

It's an international issue that politicians don't listen to the people. But one of the first things a statist will say in response is that "the same thing happens in business. Many big companies don't listen to their customers, either." They're right. But the difference comes in what happens next: businesses pay for their arrogance with their own money, while politicians do not. One of the clearest examples of this phenomenon is the true story of two (sim) cities within urban planning video games.

(ANTIMEDIA) Just about all of us have a politician we hate. It might be Donald Trump, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, or anyone else who has tied themselves to the Washington D.C. machine. People’s views are increasingly polarized, and this divisiveness is almost tangible — a scroll through almost any Facebook feed yields rants from women’s marchers and gun enthusiasts.

With his firing of missiles into Syria, it took our new President about 76 days to start doing exactly what all the others do. Thinking about the politics of life-and-death questions, such as intervention in Syria, I imagine looking in the eyes of the mother of a person who would die if my preferred course of action be carried through, but who would live if an opposing course of action were carried through.

A politician's lies are less likely to be noticed or remembered by the "rationally ignorant" voter. Rational ignorance means that the individual voter has little incentive to invest time and money in gathering and analyzing political information because he will not be able, with his single vote, to change the election result.