The GOP Doesn’t Realize The Bitter Harvest Their Deficit-Bill Extortion Will Yield
Rewarding People For Gaming The System, Breaks The System. Paying Blackmailers Motivates More People To Engage In Blackmail
By David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
What Is A System?
A system is a series of procedures that are designed to accept certain specific inputs and generate a desired output.
People watch and learn which inputs result in the system producing the desirable output, and then they strive to also deliver those same proven-successful inputs.
The Work For Money System
The system for allocating wealth is supposed to be “deliver value” as an input and “get money” as the output.
If “be violent”, “kidnap people”, or “hack a computer and demand ransom” become inputs and “got to keep a lot of money” becomes a common output, then there are many people who will avoid delivering valuable goods or services to get money and instead will deliver violence as the input to get money.
The College Admissions System
Colleges all have a system designed to determine which applicants should be admitted as students. That system accepts high-school transcripts, SAT scores, letters of recommendation, etc., as input, processes them in certain ways, and outputs two lists: (1) the applicants who will be granted admission and (2) applicants who will not be granted admission.
As we’ve seen, when some applicants used false information and bribes as input they were successful in securing acceptances as outputs. This encouraged other applicants to do the same.
The Government By Majority Rule System
We have a representative-democracy system of government. Its input is supposed to be the votes of the majority that elect a majority of the representatives to the government body and the output of that legislative body is supposed to be legislation generally in line with the desires of that majority of voters.
The system is supposed to be: The most votes in → legislation out.
Legislation By Threat
We’re used to politicians saying, “You vote for Law A and we will vote for law B.” That a trade of “You get something and we get something.”
But when an input to the legislative system is the threat: “Vote for Law A or we will let bad thing B happen to the country” and the output from that threat is the passage of Law A, you’ve corroded the system of democratic, representative government and replaced it with a system of minority rule by those who have enough power to damage the country, but don’t have enough votes to get the laws they want passed under the principles of majority rule.
The Consequences Of Legislation By Blackmail
That corruption of the system is the real danger from Biden’s giving in to the Republicans’ demand for the repeal of laws they didn’t like as the price for their agreeing to prevent the government from defaulting on its obligations.
The GOP thought it was being clever by holding one of America’s choke points hostage as leverage to secure legislation they didn’t have the votes to pass under the principle of majority rule.
But the Republicans refusal to vote to raise the debt limit until the Democrats voted for other laws the Republicans wanted but didn’t have the votes to enact changed the system from
Most Votes → Legislation, to
Power To Harm The Country → Legislation.
This lesson will not be lost on the Democrats.
Monkey See, Monkey Do
What’s to stop the Democrats who might retain control of the Senate or the White House from saying, “We won’t allow the passage of any Defense Appropriation bills unless the Republicans vote for other laws that we want but which we don’t have the votes to enact ourselves”?
If in some jurisdiction the Democrats control the county commissioners who run the mass transit system, they could put the bridge, tunnel and subway workers on half-time duty and strangle the transit system unless and until some state-government legislation they want is enacted.
Legislation By Blackmail Is Minority Rule
The persons threatening to cause or allow societal damage if they don’t get what they want are, by definition, people who haven’t won enough elections, who can’t win enough elections, people who have to resort to societal blackmail to get the legislation they want because if they represented the majority they would have gotten the legislation they wanted through the normal process of having enough votes to pass their bills.
By definition, Ransom Laws are a power grab by a minority that is too small to get its way under the system of majority rule.
If legislatures enact laws designed to benefit a minority in order to avoid threatened damage to the financial system, the economic system, the court system, the military, etc., then we’ve wrecked the system of democratic, representative government and substituted a system of government by minority blackmail — Ransom Laws.
Legislation By Blackmail Isn’t Limited To Political Parties
This Ransom-Law process isn’t limited to just the machinations of a political party. Any organization with choke-point power can do it.
If the government enacts laws based not on the voters’ choices, but rather on the level of harm to the country that would result from the blackmailer’s refusal to act, then every group, every business or organization that has the ability to close down a choke point could leverage that choke-point-power to coerce the government to enact laws that were favorable to them.
For example, Abbot Labs manufactures over 40% of all the baby formula used in the United States. If they shut down or triple their prices, it would take years for other manufacturers to be able to fill that 40+% hole in market supply.
Suppose Abbot Labs decided that some tax was too high or some environmental requirement was too onerous. Then Abbot might say, “As a protest against these unfair taxes/regulations we’re going to stop manufacturing baby formula for three months, and until the bad tax/regulation is repealed, we’re going to cut production to only 25% of our current volume” or “In response we’re going to triple our price.”
They’re not required to manufacture baby formula. Nor is Eli Lilly obligated to produce insulin.
In an economy as complicated as ours, there are many choke points which, if throttled, would visit great harm on the country.
You Will Reap What You Sow
The Republicans thought they were being clever by leveraging their power to wreck the country’s economy to obtain laws they wanted but didn’t have the votes to enact according to the rules.
But they were no more clever than the armed robber who gets the combination to the bank vault by putting a gun to the teller’s head, or the hacker who gets millions of dollars in exchange for unlocking the hospital’s frozen computers.
Yes, the Republicans weren’t required to vote to raise the debt limit, but neither are the Democrats required to vote to approve the Defense Department’s budget or allocate the manpower required to operate the bridges and tunnels at full capacity, and neither is Abbot required to manufacture baby formula or Eli Lilly required to manufacture insulin.
Lots of people are free to refuse to do things that are vital to the country and that will cause massive societal damage if not done, but if those people are successful in using that power to blackmail the government into passing laws that benefit them, when they say, “We will refrain from doing something and that refusal will cause massive damage to the American people, unless the government passes the laws we want,” they are absolutely operating as blackmailers.
The GOP got away with it this time and other minorities will note the Republican Party’s success and likely use the same tactics to get the government to do what they want.
In the short term the Republicans’ blackmail worked for them. In the long term, Joe Biden negotiated with extortionists and the country will likely reap bitter results from that.
Blackmailers are never satisfied.
— David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)
