Three basic things to keep in mind when you're trying to design a political system:
- Always maintain The Veil Of Ignorance
- Don't try to turn an economic philosophy into a system of government
- Never make it dependent on changing human nature
That said, we have to figure out how to put honor back up at the top of the heap. And I promise, the concept of expecting everybody to behave in an honorable way does not run contrary to #3 above.
I guess we have to start by re-acquainting ourselves with the concept of honor, and acknowledging that everything we do is, in fact, in the end, "on the honor system".
I can sign a contract or swear an oath, but when it comes time for me to deliver on the promises I made - in writing or otherwise - I can choose not to honor my word.
You can sue me. I can countersue. Maybe we settle. Maybe it goes all the way through the courts, bankrupting both of us.
The whole thing breaks down and loses its meaning if anyone decides at any time to act dishonorably along the way - which includes the people who are sworn to administer and uphold the law.
We've evolved a sense of honor (morality, ethics, law) because we know that's how it has to be in order to make a partnership work; to make a family work; to make a clan work; to make a tribe work; to make a neighborhood work - to make everything work that has anything to do with a world where there's more than one person involved.
Learn to live your life without needing a cop or Jesus or your mom looking over your shoulder the whole time.
Living honorably has fallen out of favor.
As Virus Spread, Reports of Trump Administration’s Private Briefings Fueled Sell-Off
On the afternoon of Feb. 24, President Trump declared on Twitter that the coronavirus was “very much under control” in the United States, one of numerous rosy statements that he and his advisers made at the time about the worsening epidemic. He even added an observation for investors: “Stock market starting to look very good to me!”
But hours earlier, senior members of the president’s economic team, privately addressing board members of the conservative Hoover Institution, were less confident. Tomas J. Philipson, a senior economic adviser to the president, told the group he could not yet estimate the effects of the virus on the American economy. To some in the group, the implication was that an outbreak could prove worse than Mr. Philipson and other Trump administration advisers were signaling in public at the time.
The next day, board members — many of them Republican donors — got another taste of government uncertainty from Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council. Hours after he had boasted on CNBC that the virus was contained in the United States and “it’s pretty close to airtight,” Mr. Kudlow delivered a more ambiguous private message. He asserted that the virus was “contained in the U.S., to date, but now we just don’t know,” according to a document describing the sessions obtained by The New York Times.
The document, written by a hedge fund consultant who attended the three-day gathering of Hoover’s board, was stark. “What struck me,” the consultant wrote, was that nearly every official he heard from raised the virus “as a point of concern, totally unprovoked.”
The consultant’s assessment quickly spread through parts of the investment world. U.S. stocks were already spiraling because of a warning from a federal public health official that the virus was likely to spread, but traders spotted the immediate significance: The president’s aides appeared to be giving wealthy party donors an early warning of a potentially impactful contagion at a time when Mr. Trump was publicly insisting that the threat was nonexistent.
Interviews with eight people who either received copies of the memo or were briefed on aspects of it as it spread among investors in New York and elsewhere provide a glimpse of how elite traders had access to information from the administration that helped them gain financial advantage during a chaotic three days when global markets were teetering.
The piece goes on to chronicle the assholery of (mostly) GOP politicians and their sugar-daddy donors, and it makes my blood boil.
The one thing that makes the economy run is people having a fairly high level of confidence that they're not going to be ripped off every time they turn around.
The one thing that makes a democracy work is people having a fairly high level of confidence that their votes count, and that a government of, by, and for the people isn't just a nice-sounding rhetorical flourish, but actually bears some resemblance to a government of, by, and for the fucking people.
When "justice" becomes selective, and depends on your level of affluence, because that makes it possible for you to buy influence over the justice system itself, then it's a pretty short road to the collapse of the whole mess.
Don't get me started on the near-perfect parallel between what we've got going here in USAmerica Inc and full blown Daddy State fascism. We are teetering on the brink of the event horizon.
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