In Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” the most uncomfortable scenes aren’t the cyclops or the shipwreck. They’re the ones set at home.
Dozens of men have moved into Odysseus’s palace on Ithaca. They slaughter his herds. They drain his wine. They lounge in his hall demanding his wife choose one of them, and every day they consume a little more of an estate none of them will ever own. Telemachus watches it happen. He is a boy. He has no standing, no army and no idea when â or whether â his father is coming back.
That is not a Bronze Age problem.
SEN RAND PAUL: MY PLAN WOULD FORCE CONGRESS TO STOP OVERSPENDING YOUR HARD-EARNED MONEY
We will soon be over $40 trillion in national debt. I have spent my career as an mergers-and-acquisitions banker valuing what things are truly worth, and I can tell you what that number is: it is a claim on people who cannot yet vote â taxation without representation.
I became a grandfather last year. When I watch my grandson playing, there is one question that never once crosses my mind â how could I steal from him? I don’t know a single person who thinks that way. And yet, collectively, year after year, our politicians buy votes with money belonging to people who haven’t been born.
That is the hall on Ithaca. The suitors were not monsters. They were ordinary men, following ordinary incentives, in a house where nobody could stop them.
that “lovers of wisdom” should make decisions for society. Two and a half millennia later, how are we doing? He would say we never understood his “ship of state.” The skill that gets a person elected is not the skill required to govern, and we keep being surprised by this.
CAPITALISM IS ABOUT INCENTIVES. STOPPING THE STUPIDITY OF SOCIALISM IS A BIG INCENTIVE
Cut the time frame by 90%, to 1776. The Founders were so wary of faction they warned us about it in the founding documents themselves. They made Congress Article I â not merely one branch among three, but the body meant to write the laws. They would be stunned at how much of that work now happens in the other two branches, and how comfortable Congress has become with the arrangement.
Cut 90% again, to 2001. Those Americans had just watched a Democratic president and a Republican Congress run a budget surplus while expanding trade. Tell them we would arrive here, in just two and a half decades â $40 trillion in debt, in the middle of a global trade war â and they would simply not believe you.
Three data points, each a tenth of the distance of the last, and the trend does not improve.
How did we get here? At bottom: incentives.
SUPREME COURT STRIKES DOWN LIMIT ON PARTY CAMPAIGN SPENDING IN COORDINATION WITH CANDIDATES
People respond to them, and our system gives citizens almost none to really understand the issues â because understanding does not translate into any real say. We hand our authority to a proxy selected largely on partisan soundbites, then root for our political team the way we root for a ball club.
Wealth and civic health are twin engines. The nations with the strongest safety nets don’t have them because their politic
