My big problem is life is that rulers gotta rule. If you are in the ruling class what you do when you get up in the morning is think about some new way to direct traffic and harvest loot and plunder. You do not just go out to lunch with your political pals and plot how to stick a dagger in their backs and wait for a crisis to boil up. You actually create crises out of whole cloth.
So, 97.2 percent of what ruling classes do actually makes things worse. And yet nothing happens.
Thus, our heroic Seattle City Council had a meeting Tuesday on the vitally important issue of defunding the Seattle Police. But what were they actually discussing?
A Seattle City Council committee will look to take a step Tuesday toward making good on moves made last year to move operations out of the police department after mass protests in the city called for a vast defunding of law enforcement.
So what does that mean, in practice?
The city’s 2021 budget brought a cut of about a fifth of Seattle’s more than $400 million annual outlay in police spending along with changes to reduce the size and power of the department by moving 911 and traffic enforcement operations outside of the Seattle Police Department and spending more money on social, community, and BIPOC services and programs.
Oh, I get it. We are talking about taking police union jobs away and giving them to other unions. The "Seattle Parking Enforcement Officers’ Guild" wants the jobs to go to the new Community Safety and Communications Center. No kidding! So the meter maids have their own union? But Mayor Jenny Durkan wants the meter maid jobs to go to the Department of Transportation.
So this is just business as usual, moving the deck-chairs around on the Titanic, and responding to the various public employee unions demands. Meanwhile the bright and shimmering stars in the political firmament of the Seattle City Council pat themselves on the back for Defunding the Police in accordance with the non-negotiable demands of the progressive and race activist groups for justice.
And so it goes. Until crime really starts to build in the nice-liberal-lady #WeBelieve neighborhoods.
Then there is Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm telling us that if we were only driving electric cars we wouldn't be bothered by the Colonial Pipeline shutdown.
Never mind that electric car are powered, probably, by natural-gas powered electric power stations, and guess how natural gas gets to the power stations? Never mind that in the future it is physically impossible to replace oil and gas with renewables -- even assuming that, at some point, activist liberals don't decide that the moral safety of the planet requires that we stop uglifying the landscape with wind turbines and solar farms. Remember the horror of paving the nation over with freeways? I used to look out of the windows of airplanes and ponder about that. All in all, it seems to me, the paving companies did a pretty poor job of paving the nation over. Today I look out of the window and am staggered by the number of gigantic wind turbines on every ridge between Seattle and Chicago.
But let us talk about California going to war against charter schools.
New legislation would clamp down on all charter schools — and would target those schools that specialize in providing distance learning.
You would think that the one thing that minority parents would want for their kids would be good schools, as the road to a better life, and the one thing they would want was to be able to send their kids to the school of their choice. And that would be the one thing that would determine their votes.
Actually, they don't. That's what Michelle Rhee found out as Chancellor of the DC schools. Minorities think of the public schools as a jobs program.
And when minorities finally follow the white working class out of the Democratic Party it will be half a century -- or even a full century -- since the ruling class had started to make them into "human rubble" with their failed programs.
The trouble is, as Pareto argued in his theory of the "circulation of elites," that
Changes of regime, revolutions, and so on occur not when rulers are overthrown from below, but when one elite replaces another. The role of ordinary people in such transformation is not that of initiators or principal actors, but as followers and supporters of one elite or another.
And if you ask me our elite is pretty united on the fact that we "ordinary people" should shut up and just follow our betters.
Trouble is, I don't see a new elite forming that could replace the current elite. I wish I could, but I don't.
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