Bribing the Public

Let's not be bribed. This article on Tocqueville and his insights:

"Is America on the road to comfortable servility? “The American Republic,” Tocqueville wrote, “will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” Since Roosevelt’s New Deal, America has slowly drifted towards a political economy of soft despotism. Despite the Reagan Revolution, the trend-lines of government-spending and intervention have been in the anti-liberty direction. Entire constituencies of people now exist who regularly support politicians who promise that, in return for their votes, their entitlements (corporate-welfare, bails-outs for the “too big-to-fail,” the old-fashioned welfare state etc) will be maintained and increased."

Despotism-The Soft Way.

Also, this is an interesting article on the collapse of the Icelandic economy. In elections coming up it looks like the conservative party is about to be outed and replaced by a the more left leaning party. The collapse is of the economy is blamed on the conservative party's ruling. I found this sentence to be most interesting: "After racking up massive debts during years of laissez-faire economic regulation and rapid expansion, the country's three main banks collapsed within the space of a week in October." I don't know details, but if I were a socialist, I'd eat this up.