Statism Freezes

Nobody asked but …

Just over a year ago, I wrote a blog entry on anchoring, a form of cognitive bias.  In anchoring, the debate often becomes artificially narrowed by how the participants frame the issues.  An example would be that after Congress took up the cudgel from Dr. Martin Luther King, the debate narrowed to statist remedies for racial discrimination.  Some people will, wrongly in my opinion, blame MLK for being a statist.  But the Civil Rights Movement had much more breadth, and no particular connection to statism, before the politicians, such as LBJ, seized upon political equality as a cause célèbre.  Now most of the discussion of equality swivels around legal measures.

I am concerned now that politicians will keep going to the well as long as it works, or until it works.  In South Africa, President Zuma, is asked by his party to step down.  Advocates for Zuma say, but he is an anti-apartheid icon.  Isn’t the apartheid  issue kind of old hat these days?  The focus should be on Zuma’s current fitness for office, not on his position on some historic issue.  Apartheid is not the current issue.

I have some friends who want to march on Washington, DC, to express their preference that POTUS  loses his office.  We can get bogged down in narrow issues real quickly on that question.  Because POTUS himself blurs all criteria of whether he is doing a good job, where would one start to open the debate back to definition of a true set of parameters?

— Kilgore Forelle

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