But it's not all my fault...and I'll get to that:
I'm thinking a bit now about "Citizens United, "money is speech, " and "corporations are people my friend," because I recently came upon a worthy argument that opposed this travesty and wanted to share it with you.
...it is disgraceful to make the highest of offices open to purchase. ...when money has been spent to get office the purchasers may naturally be expected to fall into the habit of trying to make a good profit on the transaction.
It is such a logical analyses as to the nature of the end game, when rules and conscience become unhinged from money and politics - that I was shocked the highest court turned it's back on the argument.
It was indeed more shocking when I learned the man who put forward this argument most forcefully, and before all others - believed the wealthy due to their stature and education were more inclined to be better leaders. In all fairness; however, the court did not hear his voice on the day Citizens United was argued; unfortunately on the day of the oral arguments Aristotle had been dead for 2400 years.
It is striking that two-and-a-half millenniums ago in a much simpler world of spears, arrows, and oars for power when the wind stopped - that Aristotle could peel away the complexity of men's actions and get to the core of their motivations. Especially when it came to a public office they paid to have.
More striking yet is our modern court that cast Aristotle to the wind and pretended the events of the last 2400 hundred years had somehow dis-proven Aristotle's simple conclusion abut money and politics.
And that's why I often read slow - because Aristotle, Tocqueville, Locke, Spinoza, and the rest - even translated and interpreted by our contemporaries - are just so friggin hard to understand. Sometimes it just takes forever to get it - and after the third reading of one paragraph - I just feel stupid. But by the fourth time - I feel like I know something.
quote from
Barker M. (Translator), Aristotle POLITICS, Oxford University Press, New York, 2009, P. 78-79