Power selects for a specific personality type, and it is not yours.
F.A. Hayek spelled this out in 1944. In a centrally planned system, the people who rise are not the most competent or the most honest. They are the most willing to exercise force against strangers, the most comfortable with contradiction, and the most skilled at coalition-building through favors rather than merit. Government filters for the bad ones from the start.
The mechanism is straightforward. Political power means controlling resources you did not earn. Capturing that control requires outcompeting rivals who have no ethical constraints. A principled candidate refuses to promise contradictory things to different voter blocs. An unprincipled one does it without blinking. The unprincipled one wins. Repeat this selection pressure across hundreds of electoral cycles and you get the U.S. Congress in 2026: a body where the average member has held office for over a decade, raised millions from interested parties, and delivered almost nothing measurable to the people who voted for them.
Bureaucracy compounds the problem. Once entrenched, state agencies attract people who want authority without accountability. You cannot fire most of them. The FDA, the TSA, the Federal Reserve all function this way, staffed by individuals whose career advancement depends on expanding the agency's reach, never on serving you efficiently.
@AlexBerenson Fire can burn you. Wheels on cars can run you over. Factory machinery sometimes maims workers. Cell phones are used by terrorists. The examples are endless. If we forego fire, you know the Chinese will not. If we stop the development of AI, we better start learning Mandarin.
@CatholicVote People will say "Free! Great!" and take the visit. It is another step on the way to government control of children instead of parents. This is the way of all communist societies.
Sheridan Gorman was only 18 when she was murdered by an illegal.
Police had her killer in custody BEFORE her murder, but Illinois sanctuary laws set him free instead of handing him to the Feds.
JB Pritzker defended those laws—and Sheridan paid with her life.
@patrickbetdavid Imagine all the people with no skin in the game voting for even more "free" stuff. If there is an income tax, it should be flat and as low as possible.
Over the past 20 years, the United States has shut down 13 nuclear reactors, with another 19 now being decommissioned. China built 55 in the same period.
The U.S. closed 350 coal plants. China built over 600.
The U.S. shut down 11 aluminum smelters. China built 60 mega smelters and 20 smaller ones.
The U.S. closed 6 major steel mills. China built more than 200.
Leftists are now trying to do the same with AI and data centers, amplifying Chinese Communist Party propaganda so Americans self-sabotage while China grows.
@laralogan If you are a Catholic, you are apparently not a very observant one or you would have noticed that no one in this photo is Catholic. (Or did you think Pope Leo grew a beard and got married?)
@mervpilgrim That is a myth. Cronkite had an agenda. He just could not be quite as open back then as the leftists are now. For example, North Vietnamese credited him with helping them to win the war.