Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Reform? Fuggedaboudit! Schwarzenegger Has No Chance.

The Santa Monica Daily Press asks:
"Where should Gov. Schwarzenegger focus his efforts now?"

Well, the cheap shot is: "Terminator 4."

But seriously folks, any reformer today has no more chance than the proverbial "snowball in hell". There is the concept of the "tipping point". That has long since been reached. The decline of Kalifornia and the U.S. has begun long ago and is irreversible.

(A guy falls off the balcony from his 20th floor hotel room. Someone on their balcony on the 4th floor hears him saying to himself as he plummets by: "No problem so far.")

In the late 1700s, a Scottish history professor, Alexander Tyler, studied the democracies that had existed until that time. He had this to say about democracy in general:

"A democracy is always temporary in nature: it simple cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority will always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship."

(There is some disagreement as to attribution and exact wording, but whoever made the observation, in whatever form, is right on.)

Reform? Fuggedaboudit. Politically impossible.