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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsJeb Bush’s Favorite Author Rejects Democracy, Says The Hyper-Rich Should Seize Power
ThinkProgress
At the height of 2011s debt ceiling crisis, then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) offered a candid explanation of why his party was willing to threaten permanent harm to the U.S. economy unless Congress agreed to change our founding document. The Constitution must be amended to keep the government in check, McConnell alleged. Weve tried persuasion. Weve tried negotiations. Weve tried elections. Nothing has worked.
The amendment McConnell and his fellow Republicans sought was misleadingly named the Balanced Budget Amendment a name that was misleading not because it was inaccurate, but because it was incomplete. The amendment wouldnt have simply forced a balanced budget at the federal level, it would have forced spending cuts that were so severe that they would have cost 15 million people their jobs and caused the economy to shrink by about 17 percent instead of growing by an expected 2 percent, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. It was, in essence, an effort to permanently impose Tea Party economics on the nation, and to use a manufactured crisis to do so.
Few politicians are willing to admit what McConnell admitted when he confessed that elections have not worked to bring about the policy Republicans tried to impose on the nation in 2011. Elected officials, after all, only hold their jobs at the sufferance of the voters, and a politician who openly admits that they only believe in democracy insofar as it achieves their desired ends gives the middle finger to those voters and to the very process that allows those voters to have a say in how they are governed.
Charles Murray, an author who GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush recently named first when he was asked which books have had a big impact upon him, is not an elected official, so he is free to rail against democracy to his hearts content. And that is exactly what he does in his new book, By The People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission.
Pay no attention to the title. Government by the people is the last thing Murray cares to see. Murray admits that the kind of government he seeks, a libertarian fantasy where much of our nations regulatory and welfare state has been dismantled, is beyond the reach of the electoral process and the legislative process. He also thinks it beyond the branch of government that is appointed by elected officials. The Supreme Court, Murray claims, destroyed constitutional limits on the federal governments spending authority when it upheld Social Security in 1937. Since then, the federal government has violated a tacit compact establishing that it would not unilaterally impose a position on the moral disputes that divided America (Murray traces the voiding of this compact to 1964, the year that Congress banned whites-only lunch counters).
Murray is probably best known for co-authoring 1994s The Bell Curve, ... {emphasis added)
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http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/05/26/3662560/jeb-bushs-favorite-author-publishes-318-page-rant-democracy/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tptop3&elqTrack=true&elqTrackId=fb6d68f86e93491db5a08500850b6152&elqaid=25631&elqat=1
phantom power
(25,966 posts)JEB
(4,748 posts)MisterP
(23,730 posts)though that's directed at the "race equality is woo" types
Johonny
(20,820 posts)and that's a generous scientific review of it.
BlueJazz
(25,348 posts)Such a system would collapse almost before it was implemented.