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This article with its tale of moneyed interests perverting the courts and democratic processes reads like Sallust's accounts of the decline of republican Rome.
by hodgesrm 7y ago
This article with its tale of moneyed interests perverting the courts and democratic processes reads like Sallust's accounts of the decline of republican Rome. [1] The sad part is that America seems to have lost the ability to fix problems like this. For that we have no one to blame but ourselves.
[1] http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Sallust/Bellum_Jugurthinum/1*.html http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Sallust/Be...
- lotsofpulp 7y ago>The sad part is that America seems to have lost the ability to fix problems like this. The problem is deferring payment far into the future where the people deferring the payment won't have to deal with it, and the people in the future have to now sort out how to allocate the limited resources which were already promised years and decades in the past. There is no solution other than various parties getting all of what they were "promised", so everyone has to fight to get what they can.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago> There is no solution other than various parties getting all of what they were "promised" Yes there is. It’s bankruptcy. What Puerto Rico is doing. Bankruptcy means poofing promises. Whose promises get poofed in what quantity is the question. Broadly speaking, the constituents are taxpayers, creditors (mostly lenders and pensioners) and service recipients. Austerity puts the bulk of the pain on taxes and services. Going Argentina puts it mostly on external creditors. In between are reasonable paths.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoI typo’d that. I meant to write “there is no solution other than various parties NOT getting all of what they were promised”.
- hodgesrm 7y agoThere was a similar problem in the 1980s with the S&L crisis. In that case Congress passed legislation to clean things up.