Dark Money and the Temple of Doom
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Democrats are rolling in dark money donations and Republicans who cheered Citizen’s United are wondering if it was such a great idea.
Democracy is such a pain, as both conservatives and progressives have noticed throughout the course of its history.
Reaching a majority consensus with regards to what laws should be passed takes years, decades. It requires hard work, negotiation, compromise, conciliation; so much so that it is hard for one group, even when in the majority, to completely railroad the other.
The U.S. system was designed that way by forward-thinking founders who knew well what the passing fancies of various lawmakers might mean for a fledgling experiment in personal liberty and self-governance.
Democracy and its natural partner capitalism have fared extremely well over the past century, especially when compared with communism, which failed or is failing everywhere it has been tried from Havana to Jamestown.
One 1989 trip to a U.S. grocery store was all it took to undermine Boris Yeltsin’s lifelong belief in communism.
“If my countrymen could see this,” Yeltsin said afterward of his transformation; “there would be rioting in the streets of Moscow.”
It wasn’t even a supermarket.
Capitalism and democracy have grown to predominance the world over with good reason, lifting with it over two billion people out of extreme poverty worldwide over the past 25 years alone.
The last remaining pockets of communism, Cuba and Venezuela, are failing nations. Even China hardly counts as a communist country anymore.
China is controlled by a single, all-powerful political entity which has harnessed the power of China’s massive workforce and plentiful natural resources- plus the “business friendly” environment typical of a post-industrial, pre-regulatory era- to produce consumer goods to sell to…capitalist countries.
Whatever the Chinese “Communist” Party calls itself, is communism really communism if it needs capitalism to work?
Democracy has its drawbacks, for all its benefits; it makes getting anything done in Washington very difficult. Which is why both parties are always on the lookout for…
