{"id":26570,"date":"2014-06-30T00:02:29","date_gmt":"2014-06-30T04:02:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=26570"},"modified":"2015-02-22T11:28:11","modified_gmt":"2015-02-22T16:28:11","slug":"qotd-the-new-american-ruling-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/06\/30\/qotd-the-new-american-ruling-class\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The new American ruling class"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our political bureaucracies are grasping and vicious, and some of the larger of them are dominated by people who are, if we\u2019re being frank, not especially bright<\/a>. No society can long thrive by making its creators and innovators subservient to its pimps and thieves. But agencies with the power to tax or the power to pay themselves out of taxes have the power to command, and, human nature being what it is, it is not surprising that their executives use that power to extort for themselves extraordinary levels of compensation (occasionally through criminal means, as in the Bell case), even as they bore us all to death talking about the sacrifices they have endured on behalf of their careers in \u201cpublic service.\u201d […]<\/p>\n

It is baffling that my progressive friends lament the influence of so-called big money on government while at the same time proposing to expand the very scope and scale of that government that makes influencing it such a good investment. Where government means constables, soldiers, judges, and precious little else, it is not much worth capturing. Where government means somebody whose permission must be sought before you can even begin to earn a living, when it determines the prices of products, the terms of competition, and the interest rates on your competitors\u2019 financing, then it is worth capturing. That much is obvious. Progressives refuse to see the inherent corruption in the new ruling class \u2014 and, make no mistake, we now have a ruling class \u2014 because it is largely made up of them, their colleagues, and people who are socially and culturally like them and their colleagues. Getting a couple hundred grand a year to teach one class doesn\u2019t look so crazy if you think you might be the guy who gets the check next time around. You can be an anti-elite crusader on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised from your million-dollar mansion, even if you never find yourself so much as downwind from a poor person, without fearing charges of hypocrisy: Ask Senator Warren. Of course Chelsea Clinton does not have the sense or the good taste to be embarrassed when talking about her blas\u00e9 attitude toward money: Money is invisible to her for the same reason that water is invisible to a fish \u2014 she\u2019d notice it if it weren\u2019t there, and flap like a desperate landed mackerel until she\u2019d secured her next big payday.<\/p>\n

Kevin D. Williamson, “Politics Pays”, National Review<\/em><\/a>, 2014-06-29.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our political bureaucracies are grasping and vicious, and some of the larger of them are dominated by people who are, if we\u2019re being frank, not especially bright. No society can long thrive by making its creators and innovators subservient to its pimps and thieves. But agencies with the power to tax or the power to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,84,41,13],"tags":[363,727,1020,661],"class_list":["post-26570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-government","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-corruption","tag-cronycapitalism","tag-progressives","tag-regulation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6Uy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26570"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26571,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26570\/revisions\/26571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}