Between now and November of this year there will likely be 10's of Billions of $'s spent in this country.
O'Fuher Obama is said by some to already have almost a billion $'s collected to assure that either he once again buys the top spot or has a tidy little nest egg to apply to his library and foundation which is sure to follow.
Who knows how much will be spent by the other candidates for the presidency, not to think of all the congress critters, one third of the senators and all the state and local wannabe's.
Put that way, it could be that 10's of Billions of $'s is far short of the total. Would a Trillion $'s be closer to the mark. I dunno. Maybe someone will go to the trouble to add it all up some day in the far off dimly seen future.
Is it worth it? Is it? All the efforts expended for literally years......sometimes decades, to claw and fight and struggle to the top of whatever heap you want to ascend to.
Really?
I confess that my juice's get to flowing every two years and especially every four years during the election cycles.
I rant, I rave, I flail about, waving my arms, eyes bulging out, veins in my neck and forehead bulging, red faced, frothing at the mouth, even more so than is usually my demeanor. Just ask any of my family and acquaintances. There is a reason that I'm that weird cousin, brother, in-law, that people keep one eye peeled for at any gathering of over one person. (that being me, myself and I) How my dear Kudzu Wife (KW) of 44 years and 2 days has retained any bit of sanity is, quite frankly, both a mystery and blessing to me.
I do keep the manufacturers and marketers of hypertension medication, anxiety and depression pills, muscle relaxers and massage therapists in business....so there may be some good that comes from all this.
But otherwise?
Sure, we go to the polls, we vote. We feel either satisfaction or despair depending on whether our choice gets the gold medal, or just a ribbon for participation.
To what end?
Does the number of bureaucrats diminish by any appreciable amounts? Sure a few of them may lose their patron or their job, but their is always either another politician or maybe a lobbying group that has need of their services or more likely their little black book of names and contact information.
Have you ever seen an agency or institution eliminated?
The "State" still lives. Managers come and go, either doing good or ill, and mostly nothing, while the bureaucracy, the core of the problem, remains, immovable, inviolate, resistant to change, year after year, cycle after cycle. Get rid of them. You jest. Where would these millions of minions-in-name, rulers......regulators-in fact go. On welfare? To further increase the problems?
This is the real State, hidden beneath the surface of this public theater. It is the vast army of professional bureaucrats and the mandates they carry out. It is the enforcement apparatus that oversees a gargantuan tax code. It is the Federal Register that is too large to print. It is the central bankers, their staffs, their machinery, their mandate to bail out the state no matter what. It is the hundreds and thousands of agencies that purport to control every aspect of life. And would if permitted control even the begating and ending.
We don't vote for this; no election puts any of this at risk. This is because the state itself is not subject to our whim. Imagine if the President and all the elected officials in the entire country and all those who work in their offices decided not to show up to work for a week. What would happen? New bills wouldn't pass. The media wouldn't have politics to cover. There would be a periodic scramble over superficial issues like the debt limit. But otherwise, the state would go on just as before. Nothing fundamental would change.
And it seems that none of the elected officials have the power to do serious damage to this system. This goes for the president, too. They can often influence the way the state grows, but they can't actually fundamentally threaten the apparatus itself. The longer they are in office, the less personal power they realize that they have. The reason is simple. The system is not structured to permit them to dismantle it, even if they wanted to. They are temporary managers of a ruling class, and the members of this class mostly scoff at these people, treating them like actors on a stage that the class itself owns.
Hosanna! Eleven months and our new managers take their seats, the talking heads will tell us once more: "The system worked." Yes, it did work in exactly the way they want it to work. Nothing much will change. If you don't like the results, there is something wrong with you. If you don't like the rules, taxes, human suffering, wars, inflation, intrusions, confiscations and all the rest of the apparatus, you had better run for office, give to another candidate or otherwise throw yourself into the politics full time!
This is not choice. When we go to the grocery, we face a choice of what to buy. Or we can walk out without buying at all, keeping our money instead. Whatever the result, it is really in our hands. The electoral system is different. The store is the state. The products it offers are produced by the state. There is no real choice, only enough shadings of differences to keep us entertained. And we cannot really walk away. There is "no none of the above" and there is no keeping your own money. After all.....look at your money. Does it say, "kdzu's money, or Bill, or Sally's money........or God in Heaven above, even United States Money?
No. You don't have to look, but if you need reminding, pull a fiver out and read what it says at the top.
Do you want the blue pill, or the red one, maybe the red, white and blue one?
Choose carefully, but be warned.........Storm clouds building on the horizon.
