David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

statism

If you want a president to ‘run the country,’ you’re missing the point

By ·

You can tell just how warped people’s assumptions are when they speak of which presidential candidate is going to “run the country.” There are few political phrases that irritate me as much, because it reveals a pervasive belief that “someone has to be in charge.”

I was reminded of this again Thursday night when I saw comments on a Ron Paul website from random people in the public urging him to run in 2012, comments obviously left before he announced a couple of weeks ago. One of the comments said:

“I lean to left of center politically but I would vote for you to run the country as I believe you represent the fiscal common sense our nation requires.”

If you want Ron Paul — or Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney or anyone else — to “run the country,” you miss the entire point of what this nation’s government was supposed to be all about. But the fact that so many people do want this is yet another indication that we have to start something brand new — maybe many brand-new things — in different places for freedom to have a chance to grow again.
Keep Reading

Related Posts

If the state didn’t wither away for Marx and Engels, is there really a post-statist era ahead now?

By ·

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously predicted that the state would wither away after the working class seized power, although we saw in real life that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” created a stronger and stronger state. That’s because Marx and Engels saw the state existing simply to regulate class conflict. Since class conflict was going to be gone — with the “working class” clearly in charge — there would be no state. That was a fantasy at the time.

I keep talking lately about a post-statist world, and it’s time to be a little more specific about what that means. Am I predicting that all governments are suddenly going to cease existing? No, that’s not it. To make my point clear, I’m going to compare it to another controversial assertion that’s been made lately.

Nearly three months ago — following up on something he’d been talking about for nearly a year — Apple CEO Steve Jobs asserted that the computer industry has entered what he called the “post-PC era.” Outraged commentators screamed that he was crazy — because the PC was still the dominant computing device in the market. A few others got it. Eventually, I think everybody will understand what he was talking about.

Keep Reading

Related Posts

Would you have been on a ship? Or back home complaining?

By ·

On April 10, 1607, three ships left England with 214 passengers who were the original settlers of Jamestown, Va. When I think about what they faced, I really wonder whether I would have had the guts to get onto my ship.

When I think about the changes that are going to be necessary soon as this world transforms from one based on the nation-state to one based on multiple competing models, I realize that it’s going to be people like those earlier settlers who are going to make the difference.

Change can be very difficult for some people, but even for those of us who embrace and enjoy change, some changes can be scary. The people leaving Europe to come to America in those days were sometimes seeking financial gain and sometimes fleeing oppression. It was a high-risk gamble, because other English groups had tried colonies and failed. Many had died.

Keep Reading

Related Posts