The Stamp Act

A new report says that Americans spend more on taxes, on average, than on food, clothing, and health care combined.

What do we get for all that money, again? Not food or clothing or health care. A military that can't win its wars and that is currently fighting a war against pronouns; a justice system that is increasingly targeting political opposition as actual criminals; an education system that turns our youth against their nation and its heritage, with a negative correlation between the cost of the system and its ability to produce people who can read and write and do mathematics; roads, I guess. Some of them are all right. Not so much around here, but the interstate system is fairly nice. The Post Office works reasonably well, but it's been privatized. 

No, what we mostly get are massive transfer payments to people who don't work. This is exactly what Aristotle warned against happening in a democracy: the people voting themselves access to other people's money. It was important that an oligarchy should operate this way, he says in the Politics; that's the only way people will put up with having no power over their situation, if you make sure they are at least made comfortable at public expense. In a democracy it is supposed to be destabilizing, as the (relatively) wealthy will come to resent it and will want to replace the system with one that protects them from being plundered. 

That raises the question, once again, of whether this is in fact in an Aristotelian sense a democracy: this is not the 'democracy versus republic' debate, but merely a question about whether this is a government in which power is widely distributed, a government of the many. Is it that, or is it now a government in which real power is concentrated among a few? If the former, this approach is destabilizing. If the latter, it's the very root of the government's stability.