Thoughts on a revolution

This was originally posted as a comment to Sebastain’s post The Myth of the Clean Revolution several minutes ago but the comment didn’t show up–at least not immediately. It probably tripped some spam filter and needs to pass moderation. And besides it stands fairly well as it’s own post. Plus I have corrected a few minor typos, grammer errors and my sloppiness of formating and writing in the original.






Sebastian, This is not intended to dispute your main point. Just to point out that perhaps not all of your justification for it is valid. You said:



Remember that your revolution will not change the people of the United States, who elected the government that you so despise.


There may be solutions to the problem of continuous government growth and power without restricting the voting rights of the people that don’t know better.


Go read The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and their search for a new form of government. Possibilities discussed included all laws requiring a 2/3 majority in one house of government to be put into effect. And second house of legislation has as it’s sole purpose the repealing of laws. And it could do so by getting only 1/3 of the votes. Other interesting options were considered. I think we have learned a lot about the failures of our current system of government to protect freedom and perhaps we could better if we started with a clean slate.


Often the biggest barrier to a solution is properly defining the problem. My son James and just finished the book Future of Freedom. We both were highly annoyed about the author being able to describe the process by which freedom was/is destroyed in democracies but never pointed out the, what to us seemed, obvious solutions. But perhaps we were too harsh. Successfully defining the problem is a major accomplishment in its own right.


Anyone considering “shooting the bastards” needs to realize that even if taking that step is fully justified (justification basis deliberately omitted as being beyond the scope of this post but this could be a starting point) one needs to look at the long term direct and unintended consequences of such an act. They need to have a reasonably good idea what the position of society will be a day, a week, a year, and a decade after they “pulled the trigger”. And after evaluation they conclude the world will be a better place by most measures. They need to be a grand master chess player with only a small fraction of the pieces visible on the board and see ten moves ahead against opponents who are known and unknown. Or they need to know, with near certainty, things can’t get any worse if they do take the shot.


I contend no such grand master “chess player” exists. Hence before “taking the shot” the existing or reasonably projected conditions need to be so bad as to replicate something like a Nazi concentration camp or Soviet Gulag. We aren’t there yet.

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