During the last debate Chris Wallace addressed a question to Marco Rubio which starkly reveals how badly America as strayed (and been pushed) from her basic principles:
“You have taken to calling Mr. Trump as a con artist who portrays himself as a hero to working people while he’s really been, in your words, sticking it to the American workers for 30 years,” Wallace said.
“But he has built a big company that employs thousands of people. Question: How many jobs have you created?” Wallace said.
Rubio started out answering by going after Trump, but closed with a statement that should be a given for a society that ostensibly supports the concept of Free Markets.
And on the issue of job creation … the private sector creates jobs. The jobs of those of us in public service are to put in place policies that allow the economy to grow. That’s the problem with the Democratic Party — they think government is what creates jobs. Government does not create jobs. Now the way you create jobs is you make America the easiest and the best place in the world to start a business or to expand an existing business.
Government has amassed so much power over our lives that we are forced into this position of looking towards elections as life-changing events rather than hiring the most effective house management team to keep the pipes unclogged, the furnace in good repair, be proactive on termites, and weather strip as necessary, all while being nearly invisible to us as we go about our daily lives.
Now we have to treat it as if we are going to be in the group on the new monarch’s sh*tlist.
On the question whether government creates jobs, is it not an absurdity to suggest that government does not create jobs, namely, government jobs? Of course it is, and of course it does. What government does not create directly or in the same way as the private “sector” does is wealth, right? Yes jobs, but not a job for job’s sake, but productive work for the sake of surplus return more than sufficient to sustain the enterprise. But then too, some attempts at making productive work fail in private enterprise. Anyhow, seems like a far more complex question than is given scope here or in Sen. Marco’s answer. He might have spoken of the economists’ Public Choice Theory, for instance, which regards politicians and public servants in their capacity as ordinary economic actors looking to benefit their circumstances. But he does not.
The way it should be is that politicians can’t wait to get out of government to make a billion dollars.
When billionaires can’t wait to get into the government, something may be not quite right.
And generally, debate participants aren’t given 50 minutes to answer with a deep-in-the-reeds disquisition on the finer points of economic theory. Nor should it be necessary, given the broad-stroke differences among even just these four candidates still in the running for one party’s nomination.
There is indeed more disagreement between any two of the Republicans than between either party’s frontrunners.
It’s true McG, there’s no possibly way the limitations imposed by the folly of our tv “debate” formats can illumine the truths about our polity, why it exists, what for, with what objects in mind, how prosecuted, and so on. These limitations aren’t imposed upon us here though. We needn’t object (and I don’t) to the inadequate answers — or more pointedly, questions — posed and given in the context of the stupidity of the “debates”; but we can take the trouble to recognize now what those inadequacies are and how they tend to dumb us down, to the extent we meekly accept them and carry the ball no further. In a sense, it’s no great wonder our politics is so crude, so superficial when taken solely from television exemplars. We can hope to fix that, I guess, by doing otherwise on occasion.
The debates are awful. Obviously designed for the medians agenda, not the voters benefit. The whole concept of asking each candidate a different question tailored for a specific response needs to be trashed, and returned to an actual debate formate, where a specific policy question is posed to all the candidates to answer. There is no good reason why Carson gets five minutes and Trump gets twenty. Nor that Rubio gets asked about Syria every debate, but Cruz is never asked.
Ask a generic question; eg. The economy has grown at record low levels for 12 straight quarters, what policies would you enact to improve the countries GDP? They each get three minutes to answer, then another generic question. This would give contrast and be informative, the way it is now is purposefully uninformative and meant to place them all in a bad light. It’s just awful.
Campaigning is a tactical matter, whereas the scope of education you’re talking about has to take place on a macro-strategic timescale. Right now we’re faced with the prospect of two nominees who essentially agree on the broad strokes (and the medium ones, and most of the minor ones), spending this fall’s campaign not merely moving the Overton window further into the statist spectrum, but shrinking it to the point where Public Choice Theory will dwarf their points of disagreement.
To avoid that, the focus of voter education needs to be on the broad strokes.
@42%
kansas
Ted Cruz 49.5% 12,013
Donald Trump 25.0% 6,061
Marco Rubio 14.9% 3,629
John Kasich 10.1% 2,463
http://www.decisiondeskhq.com/results/2016/primary/gop/president/kansas/
Maine
Ted Cruz
42.3%
Donald Trump
33.9%
called for cruz
little marco
la @! 80%
Donald Trump
42.0%
101,708
—
Ted Cruz
37.5%
90,987
Wow, I feel dumb! macro-strategic timescale? I got nothing. Totally unfamiliar with public choice theory, sorry..
I’m not even talking about voter “education” , as I understand the phrase anyway, but candidate clarification to help the voter make an informed choice.
“Mr Trump, you have said you will build a wall and make Mexico pay, how exactly are you going to make them pay?”
“Senator Cruz, you also have said you will build a wall, but despite there being legislation to do so for ten years, congress has refused to budget the building of one. How would you get them to finance it given you vow to not negotiate ?”
“Dr Carson, do you pledge to build a wall, and if not how would you control the hundreds of illegal border crossings every day?”
“Govenor Kasich, let me play this hilarious TV ad of yours for no particular reason except to embarrass Mr Trump, prevoke Russia, and because we can”
Oops, that last one was reality, I’m envisioning a fantasy world.
kansas (100%)
sanders 26,450 67.7%
clinton 12,593 32.3%
nebraska (88%)
sanders 15,874 56.4%
clinton 12,293 43.6%
run barnie run!
[…] Click on Protein Wisdom: What Rubio said . . . Of the remaining candidates, I (sort of) liked Senator Rubio the most, but he’s pretty much […]
We all often feel dumb. That’s probably part of why we like to learn things. So we remain students in a sense whether we like it or not because we’re dumb. Being dumb is the human condition: we’re apes, not gods.
Sometimes simply making the effort as learners will be enough because the particular problems don’t happen to be too difficult. Other times the problems we confront are terribly complex, problems where mere effort will not penetrate — in those cases we’ll often have to await some novel idea coming from some quarter or from someone unknown to us, or as usually the case, we make do without a solution, treading water the best we can.
McG, it seems to me, is simply pointing out the two different problems which I and he address: one big or long (macro), the other small or short (micro) on their two differing time-scales. We know time-scales readily, right? Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, or for the latter in political terms, electoral cycles. That’s all that is.
So, I was talking about voter education, in this sense: that I suggested we take ourselves seriously as students, refusing to abide by the shrunken terms Chris Wallace brings to the conversation or the terms in which Marco Rubio chooses to respond to Wallace’s shrunken version of our politics, but to use the obvious absurdity Wallace presents (and to which Rubio accedes) to push ourselves back to confront the wider actual world in which we live. Public Choice Theory in that context is just an example, not a touchstone.
McG’s objection (if I may presume to call it that) is simply that the current problem, the crisis of our devolved politics which he there describes as the practical unity of the two parties’ “leading” candidates in their disregard of our former Constitutional regime presses too hard against us to warrant diversion from the shorter time-scaled problem of the campaign [tactics] to the (I assert) more long-term problem underlying that shorter problem as cause: the fact of that political devolution and why it came about. He’s right about that. As usual.
On the other hand, I still think the only possible cure will be found in the wider (longer-time-requiring) solution. Generational even, much longer than a succession of campaign cycles. Which leads us back to education. And in this sense too, that in order to achieve not merely one generation’s change or two generations’ change, one has to actually do the thing proposed to make the change all along the way, the whole time, and not merely at vastly separated intervals, popping up only so rarely as to have been completely forgotten in between.
Speaking of diversions, this one is pleasant in its way, I think. And also something Marco Rubio didn’t say.
Oh, I see. McGhee wasn’t even responding to me as I thought. Der.
As for education being the cure for what ails our politics, it almost seems to me the term is inadequate. I mean, statistically speaking we probably have the most “educated” population ever, in terms of the percentage of the population with degrees.
To my way of thinking, “education”, in the government institution provided way it has come to be understood, has become the problem in that it has usurped religion and truth instead of building from and on it. The process has become ungrounded, the very purpose of study so corrupted that truth is something to be overcome, the concept of a creator and a purpose greater than ourselves treated as barrier to knowledge rather than the beginning of wisdom.
A free people cant have their liberty taken from them, certainly not a country as powerful as ours. What is happening is generations are being taught liberty is inferior to security, and indeed, freedom is hostile the social justice. Our best and brightest arent lacking education resulting in not understanding constitutional principles, they’re educated to reject basic common sense and liberty for a Utopian ideal of their own imagining.
We all know the quote saying our government is inadequate for an irreligious people. Unfortunately the study of the great philosophers doesnt instill virtue. That takes a healthy fear of God.
but marco dick joke rubio had to hurry on his way
but he waved goodbye sayin please don’t cry
i be a lobbyist one day
soon
like a whore