Numbers, budgets, charts and graphs about government finances. That’s what we do here. We try to understand where public money should be spent and what it accomplishes.
Through that lens, it’s difficult to know where to begin on what has befallen the Chicago area and most of the country.
For now, this simple observation seems paramount: The most fundamental element of the social contract between government and the people is cracking. That’s the obligation of government to keep its citizens safe. For that, we surrender a portion of of our freedom and wealth to government for the collective good.
That arrangement has been recognized as a foundational philosophy of civil society since Thomas Hobbes articulated it over 300 years ago.
Citizens expect government to protect them from rioting and looting just as they expect it to protect their lives and adhere to to a civil process when being arrested. Both expectations are now broken.
“The sight of looters and arsonists pillaging stores at will has shaken the confidence of many that law enforcement is capable of maintaining the peace. It has also tainted the very real grief felt over the tragic loss of life.” That’s not from a source that’s unsympathetic to George Floyd or protesters. It’s from an editorial in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
What will be the consequences breaking the social contract? Speculate if you want, but know that it may extend far beyond George Floyd’s murder and the resulting violence.
-Mark Glennon, Wirepoints Founder
Sounds like you stopped taking your meds.
At what point can an Illinois community surrender and say that it cannot afford to exist? Illinois residents must quantify the percentage of home value considered reasonable to pay annually for legally mandated social service provision (schools, government bureaucracy, police, fire, parks, libraries, roads). At what inflection point is the percentage of home or property value taxation “too much”, and it becomes strategic to abandon property ownership rights? One might estimate that by comparison with “everywhere else”, that inflection point is breached when the property tax rate exceeds the national mean or median: when the property tax rate in Chicago… Read more »
You’ve been voting in liberal politicians who have given away generous pensions to all state workers. Government and private enterprise unions have a strangle hold on your state. They have made it possible for low level workers to retire and live high on the hog. I know. I see these yankees moving here and buying mansions and fancy cars. People who barely made it out of high school but are smart enough to get out of a failed state. Now we hear the Illinois politicians clambering for the federal government to help them out of their financial problems. Why should… Read more »
Back in 2014 or 2015 for the following year’s budget the congressional finance committee PPT presentation showed that unless the Obama spending was addressed before 2020 austerity would be required to meet the debt repayment requirements in order to prevent an irreversible death spiral beginning in 2028 and lasting to 2040 at which point the US would no longer exist. You can look up the meetings on CSPAN to find the right one, but what you want to look for is the slide of the timeline when the interest exceeds the principal on our payments. Unless something drastic/new happens (war,… Read more »
The social contract is broken only if you actually believe that there was a social contract to begin with. Hobbes was wrong about just about everything, including his idea of social contracts. Hobbes believed that without government, men’s lives would be nasty, brutish, and short, yet governments were the leading cause of death, outside of natural causes, during the 20th century. Furthermore, is it not ludicrous to believe that the institution that professes (via some unwritten “contract”) to “protect” you must first rob you to do so? Madison channeled Hobbes in Federalist 51, and stated that if men were… Read more »
If you read all of Hobbes — I certainly have not — and you read it to be making a case for a large, intrusive government, then I would agree with your point. But I don’t know how one can avoid the basic idea of a social contract that is generally ascribed to him and a few of his contempories. We give up certain money and certain freedoms in exchange for even the most basic forms of government — traffic rules, defense, fire, police…. Why? Because we get something in return. While it is true that some will say they… Read more »
The universe in which we live is not characterized by uniformity but by a potential for infinite variability. Not only that, but also no two atoms can be exactly the same in all aspects, for even if two atoms are of the same element they are not both in the same physical location, and this alone makes them different, and their circumstance also; and, therefore their potentials are also not the same. There is always going to be some difference, no matter how relatively infinitesimal, and this is true at every scale, both large and small. Therefore humans are not… Read more »
Basically, your concept if one was created in an Eastern Symbol as revealed in icon of ‘The Cosmic Dancer aka ‘Shiva Nataraj’. However, the West is still on the learning curve as the East rise again.
I don’t understand what you’ve written. Can you state your comment more clearly please? Also, correct spelling and grammar are both important. You’ve written, “…concept if one was created….” Did you mean to type, “…concept is one that was created….” If so, your sentence’s meaning is still not clear.
Are you saying “equity” instead of “equality”? Because at least equality to most people can be defined under the law – but equity is in the eyes of the beholder. What one person thinks is fair is can be deeply unfair to others.
I am not talking about equity. I am talking about genuine equality, in the dictionary sense of the word, ‘equal’ which is, ‘the same as’. No person can be ‘the same as’ anyone else. In this universe it is impossible.
Equality of outcome was never the intent. It can NEVER be the intent. Equality under the law was that intent, and even on this point, government has failed miserably. This is to be expected from a centralized power that holds a monopoly on justice.
Lawmakers believe there is not any aspect of human behavior that cannot be completely addressed by written law; whereas, any thoughtful person who has extensive experience applying written laws must ultimate come to understand that it is not possible to write any law to which there is not legitimate and reasonable exception.
I can tell you’re not a lawyer because in law school there is a joke that there are more exceptions to the rules than there are rules! The law, now at least, is designed to apply to everyone equally. The same laws apply to everyone and the same exceptions apply to everyone. Now you can argue that the *application* and *enforcement* of the laws are not equal – and that’s a legitimate gripe. There is some truth that the suburban kid caught with drugs in the suburbs gets off easy while the urban kid caught with drugs gets a… Read more »
I understand what you’re saying. But my comment was not about general application. If you talk about roses, all roses are roses, but no rose is exactly the same as any other rose. So of course if you send two different people to jail they are both in jail. But in terms of what is actually true, their experience is different, and it will be perceived differently by each of them; therefore, jail time is a nebulous concept, not an equal application of punishment. The distinction resides in the meanings of words. We like to say, “Cows give milk”, but… Read more »
Additionally, I wasn’t griping, so my description was not a gripe. Rather, I was writing about differences in human language usage as it is actually practiced and what the words are really supposed to mean. When this difference becomes large, the meanings tend to become untrue, and this has a result on the sanity of the population in which incorrect usage prevails. My concern is to identify that one of the problems behind the present failure of our system is that people are careless in how they use words. This is not a small problem. It is a profoundly enormous… Read more »
There is not any power from which failure is not to be expected.
“All men are created equal” is a way of saying “All people start out at zero”, meaning that everyone starts out as a helpless newborn totally dependent on his or her mother with very little knowledge about anything. In this sense we are all created nearly equal, even though we are all unique even at the moment of conception. It doesn’t do any good to dissect the concept of equality in order to clarify this idea of starting out at zero. As we age and accumulate experience, we become more and more unique as we move away from our common… Read more »
June 8, 2020 | DR. JORDAN B. PETERSONIdentity Politics and Class Guilt One of the most awful elements, I think, is the idea that individuals should be defined in terms of their group identity at all. This is one of these weird inversions that’s so characteristic of this chaotic state that we’re in. When people originally started fighting against unfair discrimination… the initial idea was to eliminate the proclivity for people to be categorized according to their group identity, because that was interfering with everyone’s ability to view them as competent individuals. But that got flipped, probably in the 70s after the… Read more »
Well said, and that is indeed the core of it. We’ve abandoned the simple notion that individuals should be judged individually, which has set back race relations by decades. The white privilege/implicit bias/systemic racism crowd won’t even accept that as a good faith position now, and will call you racist if you express it, as I know from experience.
Oh don’t you worry JimBob, they’ll be coming for the farms too. Farmers are ‘disproportionately’ old, and white, and their productive land is worth, at least on paper, in the millions. The only equitable solution is to redistribute the land to BIPOC (black, indigenous and POC) for social and racial justice. We’ve seen all of this all before. Fortunately, in our society, the rural farmers are all Republican and armed to the teeth, with tens of millions more willing to defend them. They’re not going to lose their farms to the mob without a fight. And it will be… Read more »
Yes, the contract is broken. It began with Reagan who proved “Deficits don’t matter” and has accelerated ever since. We have a sociopathic wall street who owns a treasonous congress! Throw in an abundance of psychopathic control agents an you get revolution. It is astounding the ignorance of history by these people. I predict a replay of the French revolution.
I highly recommend “Black Death, the world’s most devastating plague” if you have Amazon Prime, which will be available until June 30, if you are interested in fascinating stories of cities in crisis and how they reacted to that disaster. One episode describes how cities had to pay people high wages to work in quarantine houses, for obvious reasons. Cities don’t seem to have changed that much since 1348.
“What will be the consequences breaking the social contract? Speculate if you want, but know that it may extend far beyond George Floyd’s murder and the resulting violence.”
My community hasn’t broken any social contracts. It’s also not full of criminals. I fully expect my home value to increase as other law abiding citizens, who’ve saved their pennies for a downpayment, consider my little community as a nice place to live away from the mobs of unwashed masses terrorizing the population. I just hope they don’t bring their awful left wing politics here.
kudos to Mark and all of the commentators below for their insights…however dire they may be
Order of the Commissioner of Health of the City of Chicago. No. 2020-3 – Second Amended and Reissued. (Applying Governor’s Stay-at-Home Executive Order). Issued and Effective: May 29, 2020.” “Stay at home or place of residence. With exceptions as outlined below, all individuals currently living within the City of Chicago are ordered to stay at home or at their place of residence except as allowed in this Order. To the extent individuals are using shared or outdoor spaces when outside their residence, they must at all times and as much as reasonably possible maintain… Read more »
Did he write that from Fontana or previously ?
Democrats confuse “empathy” with “enabling”. They profess to “understand” the motives of bad behavior, tolerate that bad behavior, shame those that question this bad behavior, and excuse “people of color” and “undocumented” for their law-breaking, their incivilities, and their lack of motivation to better their lot in life.
And yes, I understand that a certain percentage, but not all, “undocumented” folks are law-abiding and tax-paying, but it falls far short of the mark. Being “undocumented” now accrues MORE financial benefits than simply being a poor citizen-resident.
Currently the U.S. is experiencing some troubling under bellies that I fear will lead to something cataclysmic but truly hope not. Add up all of the following and it usually leads to revolts: government overreach, pandemics, unemployment rate at 25%, income growth stalling, sky high deficits. We cannot let our personal liberty or capitalism be overrun or we will see the same fate as the roman empire, british empire and all other global leaders over the centuries.
If you believe Wirepoints has accurately reported on Illinois the last few years, then you know this state is self destructing in more ways than one. Illinois government steals from a struggling class of residents (private sector workers and businesses) to allow another class (public sector workers and businesses) to live in comfort. It allows dangerous criminals to go free before completing their punishment. It risks the safety of it’s citizens by allowing illegals to live as equals (or more) among them. When a crisis arises, the police are either prevented from responding in an appropriate manner or forced to… Read more »
Living in Illinois can cause moral people to feel dirty. They are forced to pay and support a system of unfairness. They are put in the position of being an unwilling accomplice. Are they victims or part of the problem, or both? What if they do it year after year, submitting and sending in their taxes? How long can someone live in Illinois and claim they had nothing to do with what’s going on?
The left claims to have a monopoly on understanding “nuance” and the “deeper” reasons for the tragedies of human behavior. They claim to have an exclusive connection and empathy with people who are “less fortunate.” But then their policies demonstrate ignorance–at best–or extreme negligence and malfeasance–at worst, of the same humans they claim to understand. Disincentives matter. The easier you make it for criminals to escape consequences, the more crime you will get. No more cash bonds (Foxx, Prekwinkle). No more prosecution of theft under $500 (Foxx). Murder clearance rate less than 30%. And the victims least able… Read more »
Our 2nd Amendment is ALL that is between us and a violent Mob led by lunatic Leftist Democrats it seems. In Minnesota the Democrat Governors daughter helps coordinate with the domestic terrorist group Antifa. The Minnesota AG, supposedly a ‘thought leader of the DNC’, supports Antifa also. In Illinois and Chicago, the Governor and Mayor pander to extremists who loot and riot, unable to denounce the domestic terrorist group Antifa or the violence of BLM. The lawlessness is stunning – it starts with ‘little things’ like our elected leaders ignoring those parts of the State and U.S. Constitution ‘they don’t… Read more »
Don’t forget the complicit media and academia. Mockaitis of DePaul just declared that the behaviour of the looters is not terrorism… Sorry – if I am unable to allow my family to leave the house for fear of harm, that is the exact definition of terrorism.
If the protests source is change, do the folks who desire change realize that creating divides and gaps and supporting the “anger” ,of criminals will only harder the hearts of those who do not support racism? How sad that our elected officials are disinterested in change… They only want to divide and conquer.
So true…The ‘fourth estate’ is as corrupt as our government. Don’t ask softball questions of the Governor or Mayor, and get banished or worse lose your job.
One distinction between terrorism and looting is the intent of the perpetrator to create fear and intimidate others.
Who owns the small businesses that were destroyed last night? Your neighbors. Who spent the night in their stores last night, hoping against all odds that their business weren’t targeted. Your neighbors. Were they afraid? Would you have let your children outside last night? Did the police have a cordon within 4 blocks of your house last night? Maybe you fail to understand the goal of terrorism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism