The State is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.Ayn Rand said:
A mixed economy is rule by pressure groups. It is an amoral, institutionalized civil war of special interests and lobbies, all fighting to seize a momentary control of the legislative machinery, to extort some special privilege at one another's expense by an act of government—i.e., by force.They're both right.
The news stories note that about 60% of Alberta voters didn't show up at the polls. I'm working to bring that to 100%.
It's high time we stopped pushing each other around with votes.
3 comments:
Absolutely. Amazing that 22% of the population can continue de facto one party rule in Alberta..that's alsmot as good as Cuba and North Korea.
Mike: Alberta is certainly conservative/corporatist, but in most senses that's a very benign involvement benign compared to equivalent present-day statist-leftism. Business--however impacted by bureacracy--is still largely voluntary throughout most of the product and sales cycles. That degree of petit Bismarkianism pretty much satisfies conservatives. Statist-leftists, on the contrary, attempt a much wider range of (allegedly reparative or "socially beneficial") interventions and do so often with only the barest and most shallow understanding of the larger consequences to the economy (see Mises).
60% of Albertans didn't go to the polls because they felt, for whatever reasons, that they had better ways to spend their time, and I don't see that as a negative. I don't care if that was because they were busy with personal or family life, seeing a movie, smoking reefer or whether they were just thinking that things would flow well enough without their input. Not one of those 60% made a move to marshall the resources of government either for or against me, and I couldn't be more grateful to 'em for that.
I'd also add that, with my somewhat detailed up-close and personal knowledge of government here in Alberta, certainly at the municipal level, that I don't think the results of the past election were as damaging as other alternatives could have been. Typical Liberal cronyism would be no improvement, and the NDP offer only old school bureaucratic leftist nannyism and poorly considered "green" techno-faddism. Would that there was a libertarian or otherwise described but truly non-interventionist alternative here at the provincial level, but that really doesn't exist here in Alberta...yet. I'd still venture to say, though, that we're actually closer to it in spirit than any other sector of provincial Canada.
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