Sunday, July 23, 2017
Missing denominator
"Conservatives" are constantly agitating for small government and ZERO TAX ZERO TAX ZERO TAX ZERO TAX. Their purpose is obvious. I wrote about it 10 years ago:
A big dog patrolling a SMALL territory with GOOD fences can relax. He knows everyone who belongs around here, so he tolerates their oddities. He has time to enjoy life, enough spare energy to tolerate visitors until he picks up a signal from the family that a visitor is unwanted. This is Orban.
If you shrink the territory by dividing it into county-size pieces, a small government can be plenty strong enough to handle things.
For the Republicans a soapbox-car government is ideal because it looks awful, which persuades the voters that government is a bad thing. And then, even when a problem comes up that can only be solved by government, the people are ready to believe the claim that it should be left to the tender mercies of the stock market or the robber barons. So the government can't take over or even regulate in some areas where it's the only practical solution.BUT measuring the size of government BY ITSELF doesn't tell you anything. Nature gives us a more precise answer. Like all natural measurements, you have to take the BASELINE into account, and you need to measure a RATIO. In this case the RATIO is obvious. Size of government / Size of territory. Repooflicans and Democrats agree that the territory is the entire world. They don't argue about this point, so we forget it's there. With the whole world in the denominator, GOVERNMENT IS NEVER ENOUGH. You always need more, because the problems are automatically unsolvable by ANY size of government. Perfect Parkinson. Infinite expansion. Nature shows the importance of the denominator. A small dog patrolling a HUGE territory with NO fences has no time to get acquainted. He can only run back and forth barking all the time. He bites anyone and anything that gets close. This is USA STRONG, regardless of the color and appearance of the "president".
A big dog patrolling a SMALL territory with GOOD fences can relax. He knows everyone who belongs around here, so he tolerates their oddities. He has time to enjoy life, enough spare energy to tolerate visitors until he picks up a signal from the family that a visitor is unwanted. This is Orban.
If you shrink the territory by dividing it into county-size pieces, a small government can be plenty strong enough to handle things.
Labels: defensible spaces, Metrology, Real World Math
¶ 12:16 AM
