Pursuit of wealth is, was and will be the great goad to activity in the public sphere. Consider the enormous range of preferences, perversions and pranks into which the sexual impulse is diverted and it will cast light on the many ways greed manifests itself. Why, socialist redistribution itself is probably only a form of repressed sexuality – a solemn and circular exercise in enforced sterility. I shudder to ponder the sexual equivalence of regulatory bodies possessing great economic force, as they discuss market discipline and inputs and outcomes.

The GOP has to do more than evangelize the Ferengi Great Material Continuum to the American electorate, if it wants to regain power. Whether it is compassionate conservatism or Klingon Social Credit, the next platform has to be more than repackaged Laffer curves and blind faith in the plutocracy.

Sorry, my day-trading friends, but political warfare is far from a clinical exercise. It tends to be the most illogical, soul-sapping form of human engagement one can encounter. But it has conventions that are damned hard to overcome, and life is not worth wasting devising means to bypass them.

And in the field of intellectual property, there are advocates of the privatization of the letters of the alphabet. Thus we would end up paying royalties to law firms for the use of language.

The Republicans have denied those aspects of life (such as common infrastructure) which work best when they are free, as in free speech, or freely accessible, as in highways, or the Internet.

I offer neither apology nor equivocation for my reservations about the Republicans; I do not think they are sufficiently conservative, in my understanding of the term. They have become merely the party of successful appropriation. Conservatism is about more than property acquisition, though rights to property are the practical basis of exercising political rights.
The party that founded land-grant colleges, provided for the settlement of the West by granting title to those who tilled the soil, who liberated the slaves, and encouraged the building of railroads, had some vision. This vision was broader than mantras about the magic of the market; it had some conception of the broader purposes of political existence.

I propose theory #4 for explaining the complacency and I posted this earlier, http://www.barrelstrength.com/2009/04/21/fooled-by-intense-intelligence/. Maybe you are blinded by “intense intelligence”.

There was an old joke that Austrians have been trying to convince the world that Beethoven was Austrian and that Hitler was German.

Based on the above quote from “Dalwhinnie” it seems that Left has been successful in convincing the world that it was Bush who repealed the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, via Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act which broke down barriers between banks, securities firms, mortgage lenders and insurance companies, and that it was Clinton who signed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002 which set new or enhanced standards for all US public company boards, management and public accounting firms.