…especially in our ever more enstupiated society:
“The opinion of ten thousand men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject.” —Marcus Aurelius
And you know, it doesn’t matter if it’s 50 million or 100 million ignorant sheeple. The principle (and its truth) is the same. Compound that by an ever more enstupiated sheeple, and democracy in these (dys)United States becomes a perilous proposition.
Also,
“You may have have no interest in politics, but that emphatically does not insure that politics has no interest in you; you ignore it at your peril.” —Jerry Pournelle
In his early manifesto Social Statics, Herbert Spencer proclaimed that every man has “a right to ignore the state.” Considering the rapacity and viciousness of every State in the historical record, Spencer might have been a wee bit Utopian in saying so…but it’s a ringing formulation even so. How we get there from here is, of course, a research problem.
Until the “rapacity and viciousness” (thanks for that phrase) of the “feddle gummint” became the anarcho-tyranny it is today, few noticed its essential nature had changed since the Founders’ skeptic plans created a genuine federation. Heck, the ax of corruption was laid at its roots by the very Founders themselves, in some cases. *sigh* George Washington and the Whiskey Rebellion, Jefferson’s witting overstepping of executive powers in the Louisiana Purchase for pure expediency were just examples for Jackson *spit-gag* and Lincoln (as two prime examples of “Politicians I’d like to get in a time machine and travel back to strangle in their cribs”) to follow in abuses of power. Not that Congress itself has a history to be proud of in that regard (Alien and Sedition Acts, anyone?).
But. The basic model the Founders devised–a limited Federal government tasked primarily with dealing with conciliation of the States that comprised it and dealing with foreign powers, with the post office and currency regulation thrown in for measure–would certainly make for a government that allowed its citizens the luxury of Spencer’s “right to ignore the state”–at least at the national level. A proper goal for Tea Partiers, it would seem to me, would be to make D.C. irrelevant to most citizens’ daily lives and lean toward making the town council (OK, maybe the loacl school board, divorced from remote politicians’ and educrats’ influence) the most important political body citizens ought to be concerned with at all.
I would love nothing more than to be blissfully unaware of what the federal gimme-it does. Unfortunately, Mr. Pournelle is spot-on yet again.
Both very true quotes.