2020 is 2020, not because of some arcane numerology ‘reason’…
…but because people fought to make it this way….
~
The Architect of the Radical Right
How the Nobel Prize–winning economist James M. Buchanan shaped today’s antigovernment politics:
✁
Her book includes familiar villains—principally the Koch brothers—and devotes many pages to think tanks like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, whose ideological programs are hardly a secret.
But what sets Democracy in Chains apart is that it begins in the South, and emphasizes a genuinely original and very influential political thinker, the economist James M. Buchanan.
✁
To see all this as simple obstructionism, perversity for its own sake, is a mistake.
A cause lies behind it: upholding the sanctity of an ideology against the sins of the majority.
This is what drives House Republicans to scale back social programs, or to shift the tax burden from the 1 percent onto the parasitic mob, or to come up with a health-care plan that would leave Trump’s own voters out in the cold.
To many of us, it might seem heartless. But far worse, Buchanan once explained in a famous essay, is misguided Good Samaritanism, which, by helping the unlucky, cushions them against the consequences of their bad choices.
This is exactly the sentiment voiced by the House Republican who voted to strip away Obamacare and then explained that the new proposal, which punishes people with preexisting medical conditions, has the advantage of “reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives.”
2020 is 2020, not because of some arcane numerology ‘reason’…
…but because people fought to make it this way….
~
The Architect of the Radical Right
How the Nobel Prize–winning economist James M. Buchanan shaped today’s antigovernment politics:
✁
Her book includes familiar villains—principally the Koch brothers—and devotes many pages to think tanks like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, whose ideological programs are hardly a secret.
But what sets Democracy in Chains apart is that it begins in the South, and emphasizes a genuinely original and very influential political thinker, the economist James M. Buchanan.
✁
To see all this as simple obstructionism, perversity for its own sake, is a mistake.
A cause lies behind it: upholding the sanctity of an ideology against the sins of the majority.
This is what drives House Republicans to scale back social programs, or to shift the tax burden from the 1 percent onto the parasitic mob, or to come up with a health-care plan that would leave Trump’s own voters out in the cold.
To many of us, it might seem heartless. But far worse, Buchanan once explained in a famous essay, is misguided Good Samaritanism, which, by helping the unlucky, cushions them against the consequences of their bad choices.
This is exactly the sentiment voiced by the House Republican who voted to strip away Obamacare and then explained that the new proposal, which punishes people with preexisting medical conditions, has the advantage of “reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives.”
~
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-architect-of-the-radical-right/528672/