Open thread Nov. 30, 2013
Nicholas Watt, “Boris Johnson invokes Thatcher spirit with greed is good speech“, The Guardian 11/27/2013:
Boris Johnson has launched a bold bid to claim the mantle of Margaret Thatcher by declaring that inequality is essential to fostering “the spirit of envy” and hailed greed as a “valuable spur to economic activity”.
Back in the Dark Ages people understood something about greed and the Spirit of Envy.
But we’re smarter than that now.
More important than whether greed is good or the spirit of envy has any beneficial effect on the economic activity of a society is the concept of democratic government selected by the people. That selection process needs be free of the undue influence of money and the propaganda that money can manufacture. When a government acts, through the elected representatives of the people, the presence of greed is offset by the laws which govern economic activity. No markets are fully free to operate without the constraints of the laws of contracts. Once we accept that economic activity takes place within a legal structure then it is for the governing class to determine what additional constraints need be placed upon economic actors. It is then incumbent upon the people to choose their elected representatives wisely.
Therein lies the rub. How to induce the people to make a rational choice in regards to their elected representatives and their own best interests is the secret to real democracy. The road begins at reducing the undo influence of money on the electoral process. And extends to the determination of how the mechanisms of mass communication are to be taken back from the control of too few people resulting in too much influence over the message.
Jack
you are exactly right.
my own comment above is subject to gross misinterpretation.
Re: Daily Mail story “Dial 00000000 for Armageddon”
About 25 years ago I saw a picture in Life Magazine that showed two of the highest security LOOKING keys you ever saw — that were used to launch of US ICBMs; you know, both had to turn simultaneously — pic taken down in a control bunker. I immediately recognized the keys as American Eagle keys (I still have two keys plus a lock — purchased in mid-1970s) — which have a snaking up and down grove cut along their sides (giving the extremely high security LOOK) — but which Consumer Reports had downgraded as less secure than your plain everyday, five pin door lock — because the Report said: they were just side wafer keys; and for some reason wafer keys are easier to pick than ordinary pin keys.
Formerly door lock obsessed New Yorker here. “Pray for peace (because that may be all you’ve got :-0).”
These drop-outs are getting embarrassing — too early in the morning (too senior)?
The “00000000” in the story above referred to the dial into which the launch crew were to input the nuclear weapon unlocking code from the White House — to be left at “00000000” at all times. SAC, afraid of miscommunication — without telling President Kennedy who initiated the coding, or subsequent presidents — left the launch code in the president’s “football” permanently at “00000000.” “Pray” indeed.