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I really should amplify my recent thoughts about libertarians, and I thought I would use a recent post by Mrs. du Toit as a starting point.
It is not so much that the president is not in charge of the executive branch of government, as it is the legislatures serve at the pleasure of the real ruling class. If this sounds crazy or paranoid, remember that Watergate can happen to anyone. So called "journalism" -- especially the high-profile, celebrity-driven variety, rules. Politicians who get out of line can find themselves out of office.
The Clinton impeachment drama, a mini-series that failed, is a notable exception, for it was not approved by the rulers. But notice who got canned -- not Bill Clinton, but various non-conforming members of Congress who mistakenly believed that the legislative branch of government held real power. They don't; they too muct answer to the nexus of bureaucracy and media, where real power is held.
Let us return to Dan Rather's hit piece against home schooling. By the time a story like that is unveiled, a plan is already in place to enact legislation restricting home schooling, and featuring it on television is both a way of promoting the new laws, and locating sources of opposition. Proponents of home schooling are vulnerable because they do not possess real media power. Instead, they are portrayed as isolated, possibly religious, kooks living somewhere in flyover country. Unless they can persuade mainstream celebrities of the value of their cause, their political demise is like shooting fish in a barrel. Sure, they might be able to drum up support from the likes of a Pat Robertson, but this will likely hurt their cause more than help it, because he is "fringe."
Bloggers, of course, are not yet even Pat Robertson style fringe! That's the cool thing about blogging; it is still for the most kept off the official radar screen. More and more people know about it, but its fate has not yet been decided. (In matters like this, I think the best defense is a good offense, which is why I supported my blogfather's call for a blogger presidential campaign.)
But they really don't know what to do about blogging, and for now, they're waiting and watching.
Back to socialism. Here's Joseph Schumpeter an economist who I think has proved to be somewhat of a clairvoyant, predicting (in 1942) the inevitable degeneration of capitalism into socialism :
So looking back, Schumpeter's argument is that Capitalism favours the growth of critical rationalism and the growth of an anti-capitalist intellectual class (or status group) which bourgeois governments cannot control; given the bureaucratisation of capitalist firms (especially. the bureaucratisation of the entrepreneurial function) and given the weakening by capitalism itself of the surviving aristocratic groups which provided the bourgeoisie with political and military protection, and given the increasing hostility to capitalism of the intellectuals and of the labour movement they lead, the system will eventually be transformed into socialism. What he expects is not a revolution but the sort of process the Fabian socialists advocated--a gradual, piecemeal take over of private sector activity by various levels of government, and a gradual increase in government regulations of the remaining private sector. You might ask yourself how plausible this story is. Has it happened? Did it happen to some extent and then get reversed? How necessary and inevitable are the processes Schumpeter describes-- is he perhaps simply describing in abstract universal form what was contingently happening in his own time and place?