by Pops » Thu 21 Jul 2011, 11:50:39
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Nefarious', 'D')o political views really matter?
Government is not going to disappear tomorrow - and if it did there would be another in it's place the day after. People will always need to interact with other people and we will always do it as
Us vs Them - so there'll always be politics too.
Government and politics will be more important going forward not less simply because we won't be rich enough to ignore it. In any society the pain/comfort level is based on the amount of surplus, without cheap oil the surplus may be thin to none and that is where governments begin to cast a long shadow.
We are already in a dangerous place since capital is held in increasingly fewer hands and most jobs are predicated on extreme levels of consumption. And of course all jobs depend on large energy inputs. Add in specialization, automation and global trade and the possibility of gracefully falling back to a lower level of income along with a fall in economic activity is impossible for most workers.
If that system providing our living falters, our society will become much more stratified with the middle hollowing out even faster than is currently the case. By actively supporting today, a style of government that protects the 1% plutocracy at the expense of everyone else, one assumes they will be part of the 1%, but is that realistic? I'd be surprised if anyone posting here is part of the 1% and in fact even the 91-99%ers are barely staying even:

Look around, over the last 40 years it isn't the Moochers who amassed a greater and greater portion of wealth and control, it's the 1% - especially with the current make up of the SCOTUS. And the way the truly wealthy have accomplished that feat is by playing on the greed of the middle and the small minded - the very people whose wealth and power they are taking away.
Pretty clever.
Simply because most 21st Century Rich Worlders have had the luxury of ignoring government doesn't mean we're immune to government oppression or government complicity in de facto control by the 1%. I don't know if irreversible energy decline begins next week or next decade but our current course of willfully transferring wealth and power upwards - to punish the Moochers - is creating a plutocracy that will be the downfall of democracy.
The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities.
-- Abraham Lincoln, Fragment on Government (July 1, 1854)