Democracy and its Preconditions

I have a gaming post mostly typed out, but I haven't quite got a way to tie it together quite yet.  I'm also considering an early post-publication overview of the Battleground Dark Elves, who are now out and slowly trickling their way through distribution, but I think that's not for tonight either, and I might wait until I'm confident that all parts of the world can buy them, rather than just those parts that shop at my store.  So my first dedicated gaming update will have to wait.  Instead, since it has already been over a week for various reasons and I don't want this blog to be too neglected, have some more politics.

It is quite trendy, it seems, to claim that your own political system is the best in the world.  There seems to be this idea around that there's some platonic form of leader selection*, and if we can just find it, we'll have discovered the governmental system that is ideal for all peoples, all places, and all times.  Being as this is the United States and we are already prone to flag-waving and overblown exceptionalism, it isn't particularly surprising that it is also widely taken for granted that our system, or at least a similar one, is the ideal.  

Freedom and Redistribution

Despite my previous post, I'm having some trouble with the sleeping thing, so here's a second post, faster than expected!

Government is Not a Special Snowflake

Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Redistributive Taxes

I think many people in this country have a problematic idea of the nature of government, and of what the world would be like without it.  Too often it seems like we think "The Government" is some entity that is unnatural and apart from other good, American things like money and freedom.  A good example: recently I had someone defend tax cuts as "stimulating the economy by creating spending" as if this were some sort of obvious thing - clearly if the people have that money they'll spend it, so if you give the money to the government instead...