Why Are We So Obssessed With Certain People?

    Today is Donald Trump's Inauguration Day. As usual, the media and most people generally are going over the top about it. 

    Let me first insert a personal disclaimer here - I never voted for either Trump or Biden, I am first of all a Christian and secondly a Libertarian. I have few expectations of Government, and try to vote for what will cause the least damage to ordinary folks. Government does have the potential to do good, but it seldom does. "Let us do evil that good may come" is NOT a Christian belief.

    When I was young, one of my teachers told us: "small minds talk about people, ordinary minds talk about things, great minds discuss ideas". This saying has been around a long time in various forms, apparently the earliest known is a quote from Henry T. Buckle, appearing in a 1901 autobiography by Charles Stewart. “Men and women range themselves into three classes or orders of intelligence; you can tell the lowest class by their habit of always talking about persons; the next by the fact that their habit is always to converse about things; the highest by their preference for the discussion of ideas.” 

    This doesn't say much positive about most folks in America or Europe today. 

    So, taking the above into account, what is going on in America today? Well, let's look at ideas. 

         A. The left has been pushing extremely radical ideas down people's throats using their control of Government. This has been happening all over the Western world, not just in the USA. Even if you personally agree with those ideas, making cultural changes always takes many generations. Getting impatient and trying to force them down people's throats using laws and extreme penalties is certain to provoke a reaction, often violent. When people get penalized for expressing their own opinions more severely than violent criminals do for looting or rape, the stage is set for insurrection. (If people could be freely convinced those changes would personally benefit them and make them more prosperous, they would adopt them much quicker and without anyone holding too much power and using force. However, this usually does not happen and did not happen, impatience won - corruption and repression followed). The reaction is now well underway and gaining traction as the pendulum swings. In response, leftists are cancelling out election results, trying to outlaw right wing parties, and generally trying to overthrow democracies. This will only lead to extreme violence.

        B. The increasing concentration of wealth.The right is most to blame here. There has to be upward mobility. There also has to be downward mobility - let's call it "the right to fail". If any corporation, facility, or individual HAS to be bailed out by the taxpayers because "it is too big to be allowed to fail", it should have been broken up long ago. Trickle-down economics has never worked, does not work, and will never work. (Neither does Modern Monetary Theory - or the Magic Money Tree). "Golden Parachutes" need to be made illegal. CEO pay should all be taxable, and not be over 40% higher than the lowest pay in the company.

        C. Undue influence. Corporations are NOT people. This is actually an old idea, and led to the various East India companies with their private armies taking over entire countries for profit. Only when they became too corrupt and a threat to traditional States were they brought under control. While the US Supreme Court ruled correctly in "Citizen's United" based on English Common Law, the Constitution needs to be amended to put a "wall of separation" between corporations and State - and to spell out what rights Corporations have (they really do need some) and what rights they do not have (which should include getting involved in politics, donating money to politicians, using eminent domain, etc).

     D. Militarism and Empire Building. A major scramble is on to corner increasingly scarce resources. This is exploding into war in various countries like Ukraine, Syria, and Iran. Western countries have deliberately put themselves at a disadvantage with their environmental restrictions, which hamstring them in developing their own resources and so send them out to build empires and seize other people's resources. We all live on the same ball of rock, so all this sort of thing does is "virtue signal" while actually doing nothing about environmental degradation. With the arctic warming, States are moving north looking for both resources and a usable northwest passage - hence the US interest in Greenland. Trying to rename the "Gulf of Mexico" is solely a legal ploy to bypass the drilling restrictions recently put on there. The restrictions specifically apply to the "Gulf of Mexico" and so would not apply to the "Gulf of America"! Going after Canada is a bit farther out and not very likely to happen, but it would give the US direct access to and control over the arctic.

    All the above are ideas that are in play right now. Changing the "man at the top" is not likely to change things much. Each idea has its own powerful supporters and detractors, most not elected and not even known to the average person. They will continued to be both pushed and resisted no matter who is President, Prime Minister, King, Dictator, etc.