Some time back in Norway’s history, a man of some rank named Harald asked a woman to marry him.  She said no.  Harald swore he would not wash his hair again until he had become king of all Norway.  And he succeeded, which is why he became known as King Harald Fairhair.

As you might imagine, this elevation required some demotions, and not all of the demoted got killed.  A group of people did not want to have to serve a king, no matter what his hair was like.  They moved to Iceland.

Medieval Iceland, both as a pagan society and then as a Christian one, functioned for a few centuries as a society without a state.  There were no state offices, or office-holders, or taxes, or legislation.  There was only a yearly meeting where any outstanding cases could be heard and verdicts given by people who were respected in the society as judges.  It was a completely private-law system.

No my question is, does what Paul says in Romans 13 mean that Christian missionaries should havd commanded these Icelandic “anarchists” to form a state.  What about ancient Ireland?  Or Israel in the time of the judges?

Oh, and how has Iceland prospered under its present democratic State government?

Thinking about David Frum’s plea for the Republican Party to embrace “Big Government Conservatism” can be understood from this angle. The more a government is limited the less it can do to bribe the powerful. If follows that, the more a candidate for office truly represents a limitation of state growth (let alone an actual reduction in the scope of state activity), the less he has to offer the gatekeepers who can put him into office.

Of course, the usual illustration for this, is payments to the poor. This is a prevalent model (a model of what to oppose) in conservative Christian circles. Supposedly, now that the government gives money to the poor, the poor have an incentive to vote for those candidates that will promise them more “free” (free to them) money and other benefits at the expense of other people in society. So in theory this is always the problem with democracies and welfare transfer payments.

But I don’t find this a convincing analysis.

It is true that the poor can and do vote, and it is true that they are taught to think that voting in this way is in their own best interests. But this fact is miniscule compared to other factors in play. The main factor that is relevant here is that the poor, almost by definition, never have much power in society. The only exceptions might be found in cases of extreme rioting (though I’d look for leadership and manipulation from outside that economic class even in those cases). The poor are cannon fodder—whether literally or figuratively. Always.

It is never the poor who drive campaigns for more alleged educational benefits. It is the teachers, their union, and their allies in government who are nearer to their own social class. It is not the poor who really drive welfare benefits, but the many better off who get jobs serving their needs, distributing funds, and getting paid for doing so.

The issue isn’t simply who votes for what. That is a factor but not usually a significant one. What matters is the powerful groups who use the poor for leverage. While the fact that the poor can be used that way does say something good about society, the fact remains that the poor are not the ones in control with their votes.

What you need to win elections are the resouces required to 1) win a popularity contest and 2) find creative ways to get people to show up at the polls. This requires money and labor. So the questions then becomes academic: Can a political party that expects people to only donate their money and labor/time expect to beat a political party that expects people to exchange their money and labor/time for real goods in exchange?

The answer is obvious, and it is equally obvious that Frum is just trying to give the GOP a fighting chance. If they don’t embrace more interventions and more taxation—with the favors and handouts made possible by those taxes—the Republican party has no chance. The ones who offer real goods and services will get the money and thus in most cases win elections.

Of course, for myself, I would rather be part of a losing political party that wanted to do what is in the national interest, rather than being a corrupt parasite selling the nation out to the rich and powerful. But I’m just funny that way.

This would also explain, by the way, how Frum gets funding despite being really unpopular with republicans. A “new majority” of funding, if you will.

On the surface this should be the moment the Blue Man basks in glory. The most urbane president since John Kennedy sits in the White House. A San Francisco liberal runs the House of Representatives while the key committees are controlled by representatives of Boston, Manhattan, Beverly Hills, and the Bay Area—bastions of the gentry.

Despite his famous no-blue-states-no-red-states-just-the-United-States statement, more than 90 percent of the top 300 administration officials come from states carried last year by President Obama. The inner cabinet—the key officials—hail almost entirely from a handful of cities, starting with Chicago but also including New York, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco area.

This administration shares all the basic prejudices of the Blue Man including his instinctive distaste for “sprawl,” cars, and factories. In contrast, policy is tilting to favor all the basic blue-state economic food groups—public employees, university researchers, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Wall Street, and the major urban land interests.

Yet despite all this, the blue states appear to be continuing their decades-long meltdown. “Hope” may still sell among media pundits and café society, but the bad economy, increasingly now Obama’s, is causing serious pain to millions of ordinary people who happen to live in the left-leaning part of America.

Read the rest at The Blue-State Meltdown and the Collapse of the Chicago Model — The American, A Magazine of Ideas.

Rich people’s crimes – from bribery, to fraud, to falsification, to plagiarism, to financial chicanery – always find defenders who will tell you there’s nothing really so bad about them.

But let some kid in the ghetto pinch a trinket from a store on Christmas eve, then the same people will thunder on about antisocial behavior, mobs, the sanctity of public property and everything else.

Read the rest at Rich People’s Thefts | LILA RAJIVA: The Mind-Body Politic.