Progressives have a set of ideas that are easily understood, flatter those who subscribe to them, and provide plausible-seeming insurance against things most people fear. That’s a sufficiently powerful combination that it scarcely matters whether the ideas have any actual merit.

Enlightenment about progressive ideas isn’t going to come from external events, such as economic or even social collapse. Those things will only cause people to cling to their beliefs that much harder. If it comes at all it will come, as veryretired said, after a long period of publicly critiquing progressive ideas.

*Named for that path-finding legal scholar, David Gregory of MSNBC, who established that firearms laws do not apply to the right people.

no, no, no … if/when he needs pain meds, he ‘ll have them. these laws are for the commoners – not for the ruling elite.

off topic, when the corrupt idiots passed gun control laws, they forgot to exempt police from the “7 bullet limit on clips” – so, now they need to revise (and the turd bloomy or cuomo won’t be affected in any way)

His last re-election was not at all comfortable. He near lost against an underfunded non entity. Bloomberg spent more than $100 mil on his campaign. His popularity is (at least from what I see) in the tank. Not because most New Yorkers are not liberal (in the US sense of the term) but because his nannyism is so annoying.

A few year ago I was amazed to see a very violent screed aginst him on a blackboard outside a gay bar in the West Village. His support for Gay marriage didn’t stop them from hating him for all the petty regulation he’s imposed on their lifestyle (smoking bans etc.)

Our Baron has a mean streak that comes out whenever he feels he is up against an opponent that cannot, within the context of New York City politics, strike back.

I could go on but it would be a waste of time. There is only one thing I am certain of, the next Mayor of my beloved city will be worse.

I’m sure that Bloomberg enjoys that as much as any politician. But, why does he want to control these people in this particular way? Why don’t the left have more legislative pops at the rich, the religious and conservative? They certainly could, the poor may be easier to control, but not by much.

“Welfare” means control, because he who pays the piper calls the tune.”

But, do governments control people directly with welfare? Generally not. Some welfare comes with strings attached. For example, most of the unemployed who are claiming benefit must show that they’re looking for a job (though this is easy to circumvent). Governments don’t say “to claim X you must stay off the fags, booze & drugs”? Why not? Because doing that would be an admission about welfare recipients that the elite left don’t want to make.

Once in a while someone suggests some sort of “re-education camp” for those on welfare. A sort of military-style program to put them back on the straight-and-narrow. Why does no government do this? It would certainly satiate some lust for power and control. They don’t do it because spreading the idea that it needs doing would be too detrimental to their goals. The public may think “Instead of sending this shiftless lot to a bootcamp why don’t we cut their welfare down to, say, 10lb of potatoes per day? Or how about nothing? Nothing sounds good to me”.

The government can’t directly attack the feckless that would be too dangerous. So they have to impose laws on everyone in order that a specific few hopefully obey them. Conservative governments are limited in the same way because if they are too obvious about targeting welfare recipients then they’ll get attacked by the left.

The crux of this is what can be said in polite society. If it’s off limits to criticize the poor and welfare recipients too much then the left are safe. At present it seems acceptable to laugh at stereotypes of people watching Jeremy Kyle in every situation except conversations about politics. If that changed then the first thing that would happen is that conservatives would use it as an opportunity to show that certain groups are feckless. They could do that pretty easily, the statistical evidence exists it just isn’t polite to talk about it. That would then push a whole lot more voters in an anti-welfare direction.