Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Santa Claus Front Runner in Economics-Free Zone

Santa Claus may turn out to be the real front-runner in the primaries, judging by the way candidates are vying with one another to give away government goodies to the voters.

We now have a bipartisan tradition of the government stepping in to rescue people who engaged in risky behavior -- whether by locating in the known paths of hurricanes in Florida or in areas repeatedly hit by wildfires over the years in California or by gambling in the housing market.

Why not also rescue people who gambled away their life's savings in Las Vegas? That would at least be consistent.

After the departure of Senator Phil Gramm and House Majority Leader Dick Armey, Congress has been an economics-free zone. There is not one economist among the 535 members of Congress.

But, in an election year, that is not a political handicap. Santa Claus has won far more elections than any economist.


From Thomas Sowell's article "Santa Claus Politics"

2 Comments:

At 1/01/2008 11:12 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse (generous gifts) from the public treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy (which is) always followed by a dictatorship."
"The average age of the world's greatest civilization has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence. From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance, from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back into bondage."


Alexander Tyler circa 1787 re the
fall of the Athenian Republic.

 
At 1/01/2008 2:01 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

The above quotation that you have attributed to Alexander Tyler is a misattribution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Tyler

Good quote but Alexander Tyler never wrote this.

 

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