government

Posts Tagged ‘government’

Only One Political System Will Support Western Restoration

Wednesday, May 24th, 2017

In a recent Q&A, Jared Taylor of American Renaissance wrote about an ideal form of government for European-descended people:

As I mentioned in an earlier reply, I hesitate to prescribe a form of government for white people. The Athenians did well with the city state and mass democracy. The Roman republics and empires were both effective forms of government. We have had good monarchies and good aristocracies. The United States of 1840,, with its limited government and local autonomy were not bad models. The Scandinavians were happy with cradle-to-grave socialism until their populations became increasingly non-white. I believe that the key to our success is in our nature, our culture, our asporations, and our will to transcend — not in our form of government.

As a longtime reader and admirer of Mr. Taylor, I commend his political acumen: he focuses on one thing and one thing only, and in doing so, fleshes out an issue whose relevance most people — brainwashed by the doctrine of equality — cannot understand.

However, to his mind and yours, dear readers, I submit an idea to amplify what he has said. Perhaps there is not an ideal form of government for European-descended people. However, we know that there are bad forms of government, because we are living through one.

Any government of the Left — that species of philosophy which begins with the idea that all men are equal, and ends in the idea that we must destroy society in order to save it — will naturally oppose a nationalist (or to use the PC term, “ethno-nationalist”) civilization. And yet we know that only nationalism works because every other approach culturally and genetically erases the people of that nation.

For this reason, it makes sense for us to escape the insane game of trying to make egalitarianism work, and recognize that only one method of organizing civilization works toward that end: aristocracy. It inherently rejects equality, ends mass culture, puts the good in charge and points society toward doing the good instead of the convenient.

This is especially relevant because a mixed-race, open air market of a society is much easier to create and live in than one where we try to do the right thing, except for the fact that this hybrid anti-culture will destroy us and leave only ruins behind with no hope of renewal.

Our civilization has fallen. It was once great, but rejected the understanding of reality necessary to maintain that greatness, and now remains out of control, in a death spiral, without an ability to even discuss these issues beyond halfway measures. Diversity was not the source of our downfall; lack of social order was, and it led to diversity, which will finish the job if we let it.

Democracies however have a bad record of pulling out of tailspins, and by “bad” I mean zero successes. We can try to work around democracy with an oligarchy, military rule or dictatorship, but these are unstable as well.

History shows us that for us, there is one working type of civilization, and it consists of a handful of things, of which aristocracy is one. Like nationalism, it is not a solution in itself, but a prerequisite toward having the cluster of things that comprise the solution. Until we accept that, we continue down the path to doom.

Tags:american renaissance, aristocracy, democracy, government, Jared-Taylor
Posted in Politics | 5 Comments »

WannaCry, The Cyber-Stand and The NSA

Tuesday, May 16th, 2017

Not for the first or last time will I say the following: “Julian Assange had a point.” His point was that the modern state used its intelligence apparatus as an information cartel to better enslave and control their civilian populations.

I referred to this apparatus as The Orwell State because if it were taken to its logical extreme, we’d all be forced into eternal servitude before some digital Big Brother. Orwell himself describes this set of goals thusly. “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” The Alan Parsons Project wrote that Amerika’s national anthem.

So Orwell warns us that the modern Post-9-11 Amerikan Surveillance State is a behemoth of malice that claims to protect us. Indeed this is so, but Orwell doesn’t span the entire scope of danger we have to fear from those determined to protect us right into the penitentiary. Perhaps it was the first twenty or so chapters of the Stephen King novel, The Stand that predicted something like “WannaCrypt” ransomware.

Starting first in the United Kingdom and Spain, the malicious “WannaCrypt” software quickly spread globally, blocking customers from their data unless they paid a ransom using Bitcoin. The WannaCrypt exploits used in the attack were drawn from the exploits stolen from the National Security Agency, or NSA, in the United States. That theft was publicly reported earlier this year. A month prior, on March 14, Microsoft had released a security update to patch this vulnerability and protect our customers. While this protected newer Windows systems and computers that had enabled Windows Update to apply this latest update, many computers remained unpatched globally. As a result, hospitals, businesses, governments, and computers at homes were affected.

Yes, indeed. The NSA had brewed up a digital version^* of Captain Trips Flu. They were going to “keep us safe” by knowing how to get into any device that existed. Apple wisely resisted them when presented with a demand from Generalissimo Comey that they let the FBI into the backdoor of his software. Amerika’s SJW haters of innovation and intellectual property immediately balked when Tim Cook declined to trust James Comey.** Cook remarked that the government couldn’t be trusted with that level of power. The ransomware pirates that horked up the malicious code as if they were an extra stack of Pentagon Papers just proved Mr. Cook’s perspicacity.

A Chief Engineer at Microsoft essentially admits that he and his boys got handed their asses over the weekend and gave us the straight-up scoop on why this was, as Martha Stewart would have told us, a bad, bad thing.

this attack provides yet another example of why the stockpiling of vulnerabilities by governments is such a problem. This is an emerging pattern in 2017. We have seen vulnerabilities stored by the CIA show up on WikiLeaks, and now this vulnerability stolen from the NSA has affected customers around the world. Repeatedly, exploits in the hands of governments have leaked into the public domain and caused widespread damage. An equivalent scenario with conventional weapons would be the U.S. military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen. And this most recent attack represents a completely unintended but disconcerting link between the two most serious forms of cybersecurity threats in the world today – nation-state action and organized criminal action.

We would appreciate the assurance of believing our government was a little more trustworthy than Kim Jung Il with a handful of nukes. I’m not as convinced this morning as I was last Thursday. In all honesty; I wasn’t particularly sold on the proposition last Thursday. So everybody, your’s truly included, who ever accused Julian Assange of being a bad man should be clearly convinced that Wikileaks was an ethical hack. We are just beginning to see what the scumbags who know how to hack are capable of. The NSA has forgotten that Col. Flagg is out there. Time and destiny will not. Amerika’s demise could be a massive own goal worthy of an old Stephen King novel. Small wonder that Vladimir Putin laughs at us this morning.

^* — Thank God it was digital. I’d much rather have a sick I-Phone than a sick me.
^** — This was well before ¡HILLARY! learned that she couldn’t trust him either.

Tags:cyber pearl harbor, cyberattack, cyberwar, government, nsa, surveillance, wannacry, wikileaks
Posted in Politics | Comments Closed

Watching Democracy Die

Thursday, April 27th, 2017

We know democracy is an illusion for two reasons: first, most people are not capable of making the decisions necessary for leadership; second, in groups people — even smart people — behave like ninnies by picking what is socially convenient instead of what is true.

In fact, we might view the election of Donald J. Trump not as a triumph of democracy, but as a vigorous slamming of the barn door after the horse is long gone. Democracy has destroyed the United States as it was, replaced its people and buried them in mountains of nonsense laws. No one in power seems committed to changing anything at a fundamental level, and in fact, we see they oppose it. One election cannot fix the vandalism of hundreds of elections.

Luckily, democracy has begun its death spiral worldwide, starting with the fact that people no longer trust it. Worldwide, distrust of governments is at an epic height; even more, people have lost faith in institutions in general because these have become corrupted:

The government’s trust problem certainly predates Donald Trump: trust has been falling for decades. Apart from a short-lived spike in support after the terror attacks on New York in September, 2001, the last time a majority of Americans suggested that the government in Washington, DC could be trusted to do what is right was in 1972, according to the Pew Research Centre. By 2015, less than one in five Americans held that view. And the trust problem spreads beyond government: survey evidence suggests that answers to the question “do you think most people can be trusted?” are also at a historical low in America, with only about a third of people answering in the affirmative.

That suggests that deep-seated, long-term factors might be at play. “Ongoing globalisation and technological change are now further weakening people’s trust” suggests Richard Edelman, creator of an eponymous “trust barometer,” who notes that it isn’t just America and it isn’t just government; trust in chief executives and markets is also down around the world. Bill Bishop, commentator and author of “The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart,” argues that much of modern life works against community and trust. He suggests that low trust in government is linked with the decline of social capital (blame television), globalisation and the cult of the individual.

Decline in social capital comes about because under democracy, anything that people do not share is viewed with suspicion, which means that difficult and complex ideas are discarded and replaced with moronic lies. Globalism is a tempting target, but is relatively recent. The cult of the individual (called “individualism” on this site) related directly to the mentality of the crowd, which is a group of people who want to remove social restraints to their acting as is individually convenient. That allows them to externalize cost to society at large and have few restrictions on their own behavior or moral activity, although over time the crumbling of their society results from this and eventually disadvantages them.

People are fundamentally exhausted with the political process. We have constant elections, television, speeches and other drama, but none of it seems to fix longstanding problems, and people are getting the impression — correctly — that no matter what they do, those who work in government, business, non-profits and religion will simply twist popular opinion to support whatever works best at destroying the public so it remains a helpless, quivering, and paralytic mass ripe for the plunder. We are lost in the hands of parasites.

Undoing democracy is surprisingly easy. We need to appoint a regent to rule in the interim, then select aristocrats, and have them select a king. To find aristocrats, we look at people who are the natural leaders — about five percent of the population — and from them, select those who are simultaneously both of penetrating intelligence and morally good. Those then rise in the hierarchy and from those we select leaders, and then encourage those to breed with the like-minded to produce a permanent aristocracy.

No system is perfect, but the best system is informal and emphasizes strong power with high accountability, or “skin in the game” as those wacky Neoreaction kids say. We either die with democracy, based on our pretense that we are so cool as individuals that our votes will make magic results, or grow up and choose actual leadership, and with it get rid of the idea of government and its Nanny State ways that inevitably make it more powerful to our loss.

Tags:aristocracy, democracy, government, informalism, skin in the game
Posted in Politics | 15 Comments »

How Far We Have Fallen

Monday, April 17th, 2017

Oh look; we’re busting people for posting things to internet forums now. America has inverted its original purpose of “freedom” to mean “many different groups demand obedience from one another,” and predictably, this has led to an absurd game of lies:

The 50-year-old was arrested in July following an investigation that linked him to messages posted that spring and summer on the Metalthrone.net website.

“I will slaughter them and burn their Synagogue to the ground . . . kids, goldfish, old folks. Shove money down their throats,” Sullivan wrote under the screen name KS43. “These Jews of 2016. They think they are safe.”

Investigators searched Sullivan’s Stamford home and found more than two dozen firearms, gun parts, high-capacity magazines and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.

So, he wrote something about a group, and also possessed weapons. In the old America, this would have merited an unkind comment from his betters or a discussion on whether his view has merit. While anti-Semitism goes too far, recognizing that different groups need different spaces is a type of sanity that our ideological government fears. We could at least hash it out and end the issue.

Instead, we have this sad pretense of a society. Our purpose long ago departed, we now act “for others” because this makes us feel momentary flickers of meaning to life, and therefore we crave it like a drug. In doing that, we refuse to admit that most people cannot get along and that homogeneity lessens this to the benefit of all.

Our pretense commands us to deny this, and so we smother small problems today, letting them grow so that at some point in the future, we will have an outbreak of violence and anger which will shock us all until we realize that, all along, we were living in denial and refused to see the obvious pattern forming before our eyes.

Tags:anti-semitism, censorship, government, metal forums, metalthrone.net
Posted in Politics | 1 Comment »

Brexit Signals The Coming Wave Of Government Obsolescence

Thursday, March 30th, 2017

Liberal democracy won — during the past era of history — because of fear. People feared being excluded, or rejected for their bad decisions, or even being persecuted for political trends. Instead of option for cooperation, they attempted to control compulsion by making it “good” or universally accepting.

That created a cascade of other bad decisions culminating in, as Francis Fukuyama noted, an end-stage of liberal democracy paired with the welfare state and capitalism, basically a compilation of all of the previous attempts to make a working modern society. It borrowed as much from Communism and Fascism as it did classical liberalism.

With Brexit, we are seeing the cresting of a wave against not just the EU, but the idea of government itself. The average normal functional person does not need government; we are happiest during government shutdowns. In fact, our lives are mostly centered around local events, and we want national government to just run itself moderately well without our interference.

The libertarian boom of the 90s and 00s was doomed but also prescient. It wanted to use the law to defend against the herd taking whatever its members had accumulated; while this was doomed, it also introduced a new idea, which was that for ordinary life, government is irrelevant and in fact nothing more than a bother. People need stability not “progress.”

Libertarianism by itself means nothing other than a defense of the ability to retain what one has worked for. Throughout history, this has been a failing position, because the parasites merely vote themselves a “right” to whatever you have. But, through its criticism, libertarianism introduced the idea that government is a proxy of the parasitic crowd.

We want no government. We need leaders — like kings — and we need a social hierarchy such as occurs through a caste system, and some kind of guidance through culture. Beyond that, all of what government does is unnecessary and merely a pretext for taking what we have. We would rather it just went away. Government shutdown? Forever, if possible.

The future belongs to a new type of society. It will be organic, informal and decentralized. And yet, unlike our failure of a society, it will have order: strong hierarchy and caste. Brexit and Trump are the first steps toward the recognition of what we actually want, and they start with removing the idea of government as necessary and a good guy, because it is neither. It is merely another parasite.

Tags:brexit, donald trump, government, libertarianism, nigel farage, parasitism
Posted in Politics | 8 Comments »

The Dark Side of The Gubmint Gimmedat

Tuesday, October 11th, 2016

One fairly odd privilege of living in Alabama is the ability to observe Birmingham. It is the opportunity to see Amerika at its worst.

Everything the Cathedral can do to screw with people out of bigotry, pity and contempt has been done to the African-American majority city.^* Recently, Business Insider.com listed the ten worst cities for the ratio of student loan debts to starting salaries and guess which municipality won the flippin’ Iron Bowl?

1. Birmingham, Alabama

Average student loan balance per person: $60,184

Median salary for graduates with at least a bachelor’s degree: $39,868

Debt-to-income ratio: 151%

But student loans are a good thing. We give power to the people. We extend the ladder of hope down into the abyss of the knee-grow ghetto out of our love for the strength of diversity! Imagine there’s no countries. It’s easy if you try. Peace and love will prevail in the end.

OK, let’s put down the bong, Sparky. Student Loans are the evil business end of the Cathedral’s system of societal control. They are like The Outer Party in 1984. You get that degree on credit and then owe everything you ever make to the Feds who can call it in on you anytime you piss them off.

Here’s the evil reality. The labyrinthine code behind the Cathedral’s matrix.

What would you think of a lender that has holds more than one $1 trillion in loans outstanding, targets low income and minority borrowers, has a payment delinquency and default rate in excess of 25 percent, and has postponed repayment on 14 percent of its loans, but is still accruing interest on them?

I would think that lender eventually intends to send Mackie “Knuckles” O’Bannon out to collect once the vigorish runs long enough to make it profitable. Does this sound paranoid? If so, then talk me through the following.

Why these borrowers can’t declare bankruptcy.
Why uncreditworthy borrowers are getting $60K in loans. Didn’t we learn anything from The Great NINJA Loan Sh!tshow of 2007-2008?
Shouldn’t the 13th Amendment make it illegal for the Federal Government of the US of A to make any debt owed to it undischargable and collectable through wage garnishments?

I bring up the 13th Amendment because Guaranteed Federal Student Loans are essentially a company financial services store owned by the Federal Government. At least it remains such as long as a Bachelors Degree from Podunk State is the symbol of respectable and trustworthy Middle Class adulthood in Modern Amerika.

And who do these people have to be trained and indoctrinated to be respectable by the Cathedral in order to manage? Obviously themselves. Like The Outer Party in 1984, the educational control measure isn’t designed to do anything but control the students themselves. That’s the sad, sad truth: the dirty lowdown…

^* — And that doesn’t even get into what happened before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed and enacted.

Tags:debt, education, government, student loans
Posted in Politics | 5 Comments »

Trump Cucks Media

Friday, July 22nd, 2016

The neurotics — this term is a good approximate synonym for “Leftists” — are dog whistling and beating the tin drum again:

Across the digital banner around the Quicken Loans Arena at the Republican National Convention, a tweet from the racist VDARE.com displayed during the night’s proceedings.

…This isn’t the first time the campaign of Donald Trump has made controversial connections with its white nationalist supporters throughout the 2016 race, of course.

…VDARE.com often hosts anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic and white nationalist viewpoints and columns.

“America was defined — almost explicitly, sometimes very explicitly — as a white nation, for white people, and what that means is that there is virtually no figure, no law, no policy, no event in the history of the old, white America that can survive the transition to the new and non-white version. Whether we will want to call the new updated version ‘America’ at all is another question entirely,” white nationalist writer Sam Francis wrote on VDARE in 2003.

The highlighted terms reflect the dog whistling. In typical Leftist fashion, he is signaling that something unacceptable was said and that the tribe needs to rally for the attack.

Except that in 2016, nothing has happened. The Left is already in full fight-or-flight mode over Trump, so they cannot turn it up to eleven. And the constant outrage drowns out specific incidents.

The real shocker is what has happened on the right and in the center. To wit: “meh.” No one has joined the chorus of mea culpas and self-flagellation that normally happens whenever a white person indulges in the same freedoms granted to every other race on earth, such as self-interest and self-pride.

Trump has already won. He has cucked the media and beaten them down, never to again achieve their former prestige. They have been revealed as echo chambers and propaganda outlets. He has shown us that you can defy the Politically Correct public standard and win, because that standard is in the hands of a small group of self-appointed elites who are not particularly competent or useful. We do not need them!

As a result, they are in full retreat. They bet the farm on Americans being unable to pull themselves away from the amplified voices telling us what to think, but those voices have failed us, and now their power has evaporated as a result. They are just talking heads, not the voice of the nation, morality, order or history. Everything they say or do is fake, just like Hollywood.

Look toward more of this roiling America and Europe over the next few years as academia, media, government and the arts continue to render themselves obsolete by supporting the old order, namely Leftism and its thought-control method of political correctness. They are no longer needed, and now stand recognized as the threat they are.

Tags:academia, donald trump, government, leftism, media, political correctness, SJWs, the arts
Posted in Politics | 2 Comments »

Why The West Is Ready To Be Free Of Courts And Governments

Thursday, July 21st, 2016

Our elites seem baffled at why they are hated, and yet, because all of their actions are reactions to human ideas and human trends, they are unable to keep doing what it is that makes them hated. Witness this mental retardation from Finland, of all places:

In April, a 35-year-old man from Hyvinkää, a town just 50km north of the Finnish capital, Helsinki, heard a knock on the front door of his suburban house and rushed to open it. As soon as he unlocked it, three strangers rushed in and launched at him, toting baseball bats and a gun. The man retreated to the kitchen, where he found a knife and with it was able to overpower the intruders, two men and one woman.

The homeowner has been convicted of “excessive self-defense and attempted manslaughter,” Helsinki news reports. He will serve an unconditional sentence for four years and two months, which he has to spend in prison. The man also has to pay damages to his attackers, with the fine totaling €21,000 (US$23,000). The newspaper does not provide information on the severity of injuries sustained by the home-invaders, however, it is known that they survived the event.

The attackers were also convicted for felony home invasion and assault, yet [they] received one-year-and-two-month conditional sentences, which is similar to probation or house arrest in Finland, depending on the case…The trio was also ordered to pay the homeowner damages, but their combined fine was ruled to be €3,000 (US$3,300).

Witness egalitarianism in action! If a poorer/dumber/uglier/fatter person robs a wealthier/smarter/attractive/thinner person, the latter must subsidize the former. When you think about it, such “Robin Hood” schemes are necessary for equality, because if some rise above the rest, they must be penalized in order to keep the vastly numerically superior population content.

We may see it as “virtue signaling,” but to the type of people who succeed in this system, it is essential to be neurotic and schmaltzy in this way, because that is how they show they are here for the individual. That pleases all individuals, and forms a better symbol-product that voters, consumers and social group members are flattered by, leading them to support the person who did it, even if it is obvious that this is just sick conformity.

More virtue signaling from Germany:

German police in a coordinated effort conducted a series of raids targeting hate speech online. Federal police (BKA) performed operations in 14 of Germany’s 16 states, reportedly investigating roughly 60 suspects. No arrests were made but computer equipment, cameras and smartphones were seized in the first-ever mass raids targeting online hate speech.

The operation focused in particular on the German state of Bavaria, where according to police sources, a secret Facebook group had posted messages glamorizing National Socialism, which is illegal in Germany. The police said that this group and others spread xenophobic, anti-Semitic and other radical far-right content.

…Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere meanwhile said that “violence, including verbal violence, in any form and in any context” was “unacceptable.”

The individual fears any standard higher than himself. This causes a “race to the bottom” so that everyone feels included, which requires standards so low they do not exist. In order to achieve this, governments and courts attack anyone who is not actively repeating the zombie-like mantra of equality.

The West wonders why it has a dying population; here is why. We live in Hell. We are ruled by idiots and lies. Life has become a task of tolerating all the incompetence, stupidity and dysfunction around us — a privilege we pay with our time, money, and energy — so that we can claim that our standards are so low that everyone is included.

Tags:anarchy, courts, government, hate speech, home invasion, self-defense
Posted in Politics | 6 Comments »

National Beer Day Celebrates Another Inverse Triumph Of Government

Thursday, April 7th, 2016

In the spirit of being politically correct, it might be kindest to stop referring to actions as “failures.” They did not fail; they merely inverted triumph. That is, they achieved its opposite, but that too is an equal choice and should be tolerated in the spirit of inclusion.

On April 7 every year, we celebrate the end of a famous “inverse triumph” of American government:

On April 7, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt took the first step toward ending Prohibition and signed a law that allowed people to brew and sell beer, in the United States, as long as it remained below 4.0% alcohol by volume (ABV). Beer drinkers celebrated and were happy to be able to purchase beer again for the first time in thirteen years.

Our research found this day was created as National Beer Day by Justin Smith, a Richmond, Virginia Craft Beer Examiner, and his friend Mike Connolly from Liverpool, England. April 7th was chosen because the Cullen-Harrison Act was signed into law and became effective on this day.

Past history suggests that government would be less destructive if its workers drank so much beer that they were incapacitated, at which point the few functional humans would resume directing the others toward productive activity instead of fighting eternal human weaknesses with even weaker laws.

Tags:beer, government, hic, national beer day
Posted in Politics | 10 Comments »

Anatomy of a democratic scam: the motorized scooter

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2016

“We need to stop these elderly voters from living alone, starving by eating cat food, and unable to get around!” bellowed the Senator triumphantly, hoping this desperate gambit would save his career. Otherwise, he’d be the one eating cat food alone in a one-room apartment, waiting for visits from the products of his terrible parenting who would never arrive.

In the way of democracy, the other politicians in the room panicked. To approve this measure opened a can of financial and regulatory worms, but to deny it was to appear to hate the elderly, which meant that they would all be voted out of office. Retired people have nothing to look forward to but (1) “early bird” specials at Luby’s and (2) going to the voting booth with fire and vengeance in their bleary eyes. Politicians offend this demographic at their peril.

So the law hit the books: government would provide health insurance and benefits for the retired who needed them. Like rewards for minorities, the poor and wayward immigrants, this new form of welfare would cost a huge amount of money at first, and a lot more later. But there were ripple effects too.

First was its hidden cost to government. Introduce a new program like that, and you have to hire many thousands to administer it. Then there are many lawyers who now become expert in it, and many more lawsuits. Everybody gets rich. But then, every government agency and every company out there has to hire its own bureaucrats and lawyers to deal with this new program. If you have workers, you are part of the program now… or if you deal with workers, or rent to workers, or sell to workers… because at some point, they will be retired. That’s legalistic thinking for you.

Employers reacted too. If Uncle Sam is paying retirement benefits, the company benefits are no longer achieving their goal, which is as a bargaining chip to bring talented labor into the company. So those go. And then, because of raised costs, other things go too. They need to streamline to hire all those lawyers and bureaucrats.

But now the real fight begins. Everyone wants to be qualified under the new program. But because the law has to be limited, some are not. In come the lawyers, and the media with sob stories, and the outside consultants. Soon the program is many times its original size. So the politicians come up with a “good” idea, which is to make lots of rules. They put out a rulebook with 30,000 pages of regulations on every conceivable topic.

Of course, they forgot that rules are like coral reefs to lawyers and bureaucrats. The more lines in that rulebook, the more exceptions there are and the more ways there are to make money off the system. This means more court cases and lawsuits, and more going back to the negotiating table for politicians. It’s money for everyone, they think.

Down in the “Anteroom to Heaven,” otherwise known as retirement paradise Florida, a guy and his nephew — who is a lawyer — look over the new rules. The rules list twenty conditions under which people can purchase motorized scooters. But these guys zoom in on just two: they must have “mobility issues” and be “under medical care.”

The lawyer shrugs. “Sounds to me like anyone who has any trouble getting around, and who gets a note from their doctor, can get one of these. We’d better incorporate that scooter business now.”

They do that, and then they go around to all the retirement homes. They hand out fliers. They do free consultations. They sign up two million people for motorized scooters within a decade, make a fortune, and sell the business so they can retire. About this time someone in Washington, D.C. finally notices the vast hemorrhaging of money, which has happened because Uncle Sam pays first, then asks for the money back if you did it wrong.

And so we get to the present day, where all of these supposedly intelligent people are standing around shrugging as to how the great motor scooter scam could have happened:

Members of Congress say the ads lead to hundreds of millions of dollars in unnecessary spending by Medicare, which is only supposed to pay for scooters when seniors are unable to use a cane, walker or regular wheelchair. Government inspectors say up to 80 percent of the scooters and power wheelchairs Medicare buys go to people who don’t meet the requirements. And doctors say more than money is at stake: Seniors who use scooters unnecessarily can become sedentary, which can exacerbate obesity and other disorders.

Nobody wins. And yet nobody is going to criticize this process, because to do so is to implicate democracy itself. At every step of the process, the logic of democracy was present: pandering to the victim group, writing the vague law, creating a labyrinth of byzantine regulations that ended up favoring the bad guys. This is not an exceptional case; it’s business as usual, and they did it on your dime.

Tags:democracy, government, medicare, motorized scooters, parasitism, scam
Posted in Politics | 4 Comments »