Category: Philosophy

Diversity frightens SWMs

If you’re not sure what I mean by SWMs, check out my last blog post. Back in the “good old days” movies and television were for the most part made by and starring straight white males. Of course there were a few exceptions but for several decades people of color and LGBTQ people were rare in the entertainment media, although there was a veiled hint that the villains in “The Maltese Falcon” might have been gay. Now you are hard pressed to find any recent TV series or movie which doesn’t prominently feature these people and that reality can be disturbing to people who aren’t used to it. I certainly don’t feel disturbed by this trend, but I suspect that it is fueling the rise in white-supremacy feelings and the support of Donald Trump. I’m afraid that many people see life as a zero-sum game so the more that others not like them are visible, the less they become visible and the more vulnerable they feel. The fact that this country is becoming a majority of minorities and people of color is frightening to some people who forget that this continent was originally inhabited by people of color.

Enough of my ranting for today. As always, comments are welcome.

Archie Bunker is alive and supporting Trump

In my last blog post I wrote about Trump promising to run the government as a business. A reader (my only one?), asked why people would want someone who had a history of bankruptcy running any business, let alone running the federal government as a business. That’s a good question, which I have actually asked in the past. I guess the answer is that people didn’t really elect Trump to run the government as a business, they elected him to “Make America Great Again”. Their vision of the “great America” was not LBJ’s “Great Society” but was an earlier, more restrictive view of America. For almost the first 200 years of the United States it was governed by SWM (straight WASP males). Ok, maybe there was a closeted gay president at some point, but that wasn’t taught in my American History courses. I’m old enough to remember the concerns that the Pope would run our government if we elected a Catholic president. The Catholic was elected and the Pope didn’t run our country, although the president didn’t get to live out his whole term so who knows what might have transpired.

I think Trump’s election was a result of some people wanting to go back to the “good old days” when SWM’s ran the country. We had just gone through 8 years of our first African-American president and the alternative to Trump was a woman. I’m not condoning this backlash (whitelash?) but that is what I have observed.

Other’s comments are welcome.

The Fallacy of running a Government as a Business

President Trump promised to run the government as a business. The problem with that is that the purpose of a business is very different from the purpose of a government. While businesses may make something, or provide some service, the primary purpose of a business, in our capitalistic society, is to make money for its owners. Trump seems to think that he and his cabinet/cronies are the owners of the business of government so they are out to get all of the money they can out of this government. On the other hand, the purpose of our government, as defined in the US Constitution is “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”. I don’t see anything there about making money for the president, the congress or the cabinet.

The major problem with running the government as a business is that in most businesses there is a relationship between income and expenditures. That is, an increase in expenditures is usually connected to some expected increase in income, either through R&D or through increased production capacity. The income of government is not as directly related to its expenditures. The expenditures are for general services which the government provides such as education, policing, sanitation etc. and increasing these expenditures is not related to any direct increase in government income. Ideally a government should run with a balanced budget, such that the income for any given period should cover the expenses for that period. Unfortunately that doesn’t always occur.

Ok, enough of my meaningless ranting for today. Does anyone want to comment about this?