"Essential Services"

     The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. – H. L. Mencken

     I’m fascinated – in the sense that a horror-movie fan is fascinated by gory slayings – by the phrases governments use to clothe themselves in righteousness and indispensability. You’ve already seen me rant on “compelling government interest,” a phrase that’s been used to legitimize one invasion of our liberty after another. Here’s another: “essential services,” a phrase by which the Omnipotent State means us to assume that the “services” so described are...well...essential. And maybe, just maybe, they might be...but to whom?

     It’s a subject worthy of a few CPU cycles, if you have any to spare on a Sunday morning.

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     “Gentlemen, you see that in the anarchy in which we live, society manages much as before. Take care, if our disputes last too long, that the people will come to think they can just as easily do without us.” – Bejamin Franklin, to the other delegates to the Constitutional Convention

     It’s been noted, here and elsewhere, that during the “government shutdowns” we’ve all been instructed to fear, approximately 85% of all federal workers are still at work...whatever “at work” might mean to a federal “worker”...and 100% of all federal “workers” are guaranteed to receive their full salaries, including for the duration of the “shutdown,” when the “shutdown” is over. In other words, the “shutdown penalizes the government and its drones only to the extent of a brief delay in paying 15% of the federal workforce. Everything else about the Carriage of State, with the possible exception of payments to holders of federal debt instruments, rattles on as it had before the “shutdown.”

     Doesn’t sound too fearsome, does it? Why, you may ask, doesn’t the “shutdown,” which has been painted in such garish colors, actually shut something down? The answer is always “essential services.”

     There’s a notable lack of specificity about those “essential services.” That’s probably because so few Americans would agree with the list of nuisances and make-work tasks bundled under that heading. So it’s worth asking explicitly: what “services” does the federal government provide that a majority of Americans would agree to classify as “essential?”

     National defense? Well, yes, I think we could get majority concurrence on that one. But what others? The Postal Service is autonomous today. The interstate highway system pretty much “serves” us without need for human supervision, despite the occasional pothole. Would anyone much care whether the alphabet agencies were furloughed in their entirety? How about the staffs of our elected federal legislators? Surely the 535 elected nostrum-spouters in the Capitol could go without their regularly scheduled tongue baths for a few days without soiling their diapers, no?

     Not according to Washington’s definition of “essential.” In Washingtonese, it appears to mean “whatever we choose to do, regardless of whether it benefits anyone but ourselves.”

     There’s a moral in there, somewhere.

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     An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public. – Charles Talleyrand

     At this point in the deterioration of the American Constitutional order, there’s an irrefutable case that the federal government is a lethal parasite upon the American people. Subtract the military and the border patrol, and what’s left that any private citizen, not an employee of the federal government itself, really values? Granted that there are millions of pensioners and layabouts who really like their monthly checks, but were the federal apparatus uprooted and cast into the flames, would they need them? Consider in this light the enormous increase in the cost of living imposed on us by the federal government: first in our tax burden, and after that through regulation, inflation, and the federal protection of coercively maintained unions. Isn’t it probable that even the millions of retirees who subsist on Social Security alone would find other means?

     A Man From Mars, looking disinterestedly at the federal government, would immediately conclude that “it’s got to go.” Not only is it a parasitic organism; it commits some horrendous crimes. I’m not talking about the A-Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ponder the murders of Randy Weaver’s wife and son, or the massacre of the Branch Davidians at Waco. Try to find a justification for them.

     The redefinition by Washington of “essential” is essential only to Washington itself. With only the two exceptions already noted, every service private Americans genuinely value is provided by a lower level of government, usually a municipality or county. Yet we’ve been taught – quite successfully – to fear a “government shutdown” above condemnation to Hell. But that’s rather convenient for those who value their ability to mulct us for their personal benefit and the benefit of their cronies, isn’t it?

     Apologies, Gentle Reader. I got up on “the wrong side of the bed” this morning. It doesn’t much help that my driveway is a shambles, that my lawn has been ruined by the same people who ruined my driveway, that my hands hurt as if they’d been smashed by a closing car door, or that Rufus has just drooled all over my only clean pair of jeans. I’m sure I’ll be better soon. Tomorrow, perhaps.

Feedback

I never have understood what it is that propels certain ideas to the forefront of my thoughts, but at least it provides me -- and hopefully you as well, Gentle Reader -- with some entertainment. (Hey, ya gotta go with the flow, y'know?) Today the theme is feedback: how it shapes trends in government, politics, and popular attitudes.

Anyone who designs active systems must be aware of feedback, its uses, and its pitfalls. The exploitation of feedback is often an important part of a design: sensing it, determining the proper response, and most critically, limiting the response to prevent a runaway. Some treatments of feedback in the world of inanimate mechanisms attempt to avoid positive feedback, the sort most prone to runaway, completely, while others seek to exploit it with a limiter attached. We can find both approaches in the political realm.

Consider governmental deficit finance. We have here an example of positive feedback bounded, if at all, by the readiness, willingness, and ability of the legislature to put a stop to it. Borrowing to fund an underfunded budget results in debt, which is added to the next year's budget. This increases the government's incentive to borrow while simultaneously dampening economic growth by reducing the capital available to the private sector. The cycle will stoke itself into ever larger borrowing and spending unless and until Congress votes down any and all spending greater than conservatively projected revenues, or a popular revolt destroys the government.

Consider arms races between nations. In keeping with the military dictum that threat is about capabilities rather than intentions, for country X to increase its armaments creates an incentive for surrounding countries to increase theirs. Seldom do nations draw any distinction between offensive and defensive arms once this cycle gets under way. There are two potential limiters here -- Congressional refusal to acquiesce to further military spending, and warfare -- but there is reason to believe that in this age of nuclear weapons, the first cannot halt the progression, while the second might put a halt to much else as well.

This morning, we have a curious example of a form of negative feedback -- the sort of feedback that immediately dampens the stimulus that evokes it -- among Americans of a conservative bent. Two articles at Breitbart.Com are relevant:

• "The End Of GOProud"
• "Conservative Media Refuse To Cover New Book On Gay Movement"

These articles speak in somewhat plaintive, uncomprehending terms. Their authors appear unable to grasp why the "gay movement" is encountering public resistance after a long series of advances in popular acceptance. Yet the feedback mechanism here is one that ought to be widely understood. It's closely related to a term that became popular in the Eighties and Nineties: compassion fatigue.

The cited article speaks of compassion fatigue as an individual malady, but it has obvious application to popular attitudes and responses as well. One cannot berate the American people endlessly about some "cause" that demands "action" without evoking resistance, for as Thomas Sowell has said many times, "There are no solutions. There are only tradeoffs." At some point, no matter how poignant the cause nor how eloquent its promoters, our willingness to trade other considerations for it will dwindle to zero, or perhaps go into reverse. We saw this thirty years ago, as popular resistance to the indefinite and eternal expansion of the welfare state rose to check it where it stood.

In the realm of "sexual politics," the advances of homosexuals and deviants in achieving public tolerance at first evoked a positive-feedback dynamic: as resistance to them weakened, the vanguard activists of that movement intensified their demands, pressing for ever more. Eventually they demanded privileges that ordinary heterosexual Americans would not enjoy. They got one of these -- the prohibition of employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation -- before public resistance stiffened significantly around them.

The activists reacted to being thwarted in a perverse manner. (Apologies, Gentle Reader.) They "doubled down," demanding legal recognition of same-sex marriages, mandatory acceptance by homosexuality-averse churches and allied institutions, the legal prohibition of public condemnations of sexual perversion, and lesser accommodations. But the negative feedback merely intensified. In continuing to press for more, they are merely sowing the wind. Public resistance, defied by activist judges who've undermined the institutions and rights to which Americans are accustomed, has become public resentment, which will cost homosexuals and deviants heavily in the future.

Negative feedback is the mechanism that enforces equilibrium. Things change, but they do not change without limit. ("Trees do not grow to the sky" -- Baron Philippe de Rothschild) Every instance of positive feedback eventually self-destructs unless a superior negative influence should rise to counter it in time. We should not be surprised at its dominance, for equilibrium, at least on the longest time scales, is the dominant principle of the universe.

Consider the other "causes" that have dominated American public discourse for a time: the amelioration of poverty, race relations, women's rights, environmentalism, et cetera. Each of these, after a period of positive-feedback-propelled acceleration, has run up against a limiter: a negative force that has overwhelmed the positive one and brought the "cause" to a halt. The striking thing is the uniformity of those limiters: swelling public resentment at having our rights undermined, our institutions re-engineered from outside, and our traditions corrupted.

You might think that resentment is something we should be reluctant to celebrate. But all the emotions with which God has equipped us have their proper place. The important thing is to bring matters to a halt before resentment morphs into hatred and violence.

Food for thought.

Licensure

Five years ago at Eternity Road, I wrote:

A colleague of your Curmudgeon's made a piercing observation the other day. Imagine, he said, that a group of policemen have come to your house determined to execute a warrantless, causeless search and seizure. When you cite your Fourth Amendment guarantee of the right to be free of such, the head cop says, "Okay, just give us $100 and we'll let you be."

Has the cop acknowledged your right to be free of arbitrary invasions of your property, or has he merely extorted you? If the latter, how does this differ from the registration and licensure of guns?

If something is yours by acknowledged right, why should you have to meet conditions to get or keep it? Why should you have to pay a fee or meet extrinsic, State-specified requirements? Especially considering that the fee and requirements are set at the State's pleasure, and can be made so high that practically no one can afford to exercise his "right."

An old anecdote, most frequently attributed to Francois-Marie Arouet (Voltaire), has the philosopher ask an aristocratic Parisienne, "Madame, would you sleep with me for a million livres? When the doyenne responds in the affirmative, Voltaire asks, "Would you sleep with me for five livres? Outraged, the woman screams, "What sort of creature do you think I am?" To which the philosopher calmly replies, "We've already established that. Now I'm trying to determine your price."

Aristotle is nodding as we speak. Inclusion in the category of prostitute does not depend upon how much one charges for one's services. The genus of "prostitute" is "a human being;" the differentia is "who sells sexual services for payment." This is how we define: we make absolute distinctions between some things and others that are unlike them in significant ways. Definitional differences are differences in kind.

Similarly, a right is an absolute possession: a property that inheres in its possessor by reason of his nature. It is not and cannot be conditional. (Defenders of the spurious "right to vote" have a great deal of difficulty with this concept.) If you possess a right, you need no one's permission to exercise it.

By that standard, our governments recognize just about no rights, their lip service to the contrary notwithstanding.

Give that a moment's thought.

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This morning, by way of Random Nuclear Strikes, we have a new direction to explore in the abridgement of rights:

Two California busybodies David Schel and Sharon Tekolian are trying to get Colorado to put an initiative on the November ballot that would require mandatory pre-wedding education before couples could say “I do.”

The proponents, who have chosen lucky Colorado as their first state on which to inflict their scheme, say the intended purpose of the act is to “better prepare individuals going into marriage to fulfill their new roles as spouse and potentially as parent, to furthermore protect children given that marriage is the foundation of a family unit.”...

The California duo’s amendment would require widows and widowers who are remarrying, as well as divorcees, to take the classes. So, let’s get this straight: Millie, age 78, and Sam, 82, met each other after they lost their spouses of nearly 60 years to death. It seems that they, not some therapist certified by the state, could be teaching a class on enduring marriages.

What's particularly risible about this isn't the requirement laid upon elderly Millie and Sam above; it's the idea that a marriage license has any detectable effect in our time. Unilateral no-fault divorce is available to spouses in every state in the Union; therefore, no marriage contract is enforceable against an unconsenting party. More, there is no de facto way to compel a connubially-inclined couple to apply for a marriage license, as no state enforces a law against fornication any longer. More still, "palimony" precedents and parental rights and responsibilities granted to non-spouses as remote as sperm donors have utterly effaced any legal import pertaining to the married state. So what's the point?

Give that a moment's thought.

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Here's a piece from Oleg Atbashian that will have you laughing...at first:

Comrades! Much evil has been done by the NRA and gun-toting non-persons who seek to undermine the power and authority of The Party^™. Indeed, reactionary scum have shot up malls and schools, in clear defiance of posted signs and laws prohibiting murder and weapon possession. The solution of course is simple, and will enhance state security.

All persons shopping at a mall must undergo a strict background check, be issued a shopping license, and demonstrate good cause for entering a mall.

Unlicensed persons will be refused entry to a mall, which will reduce crime, as only licensed shoppers will be inside the mall.

Children will be taken out of schools, and placed in high security education camps, where only authorized persons will be permitted entry and access to The Children^™.

Parents who cannot secure a visitation permit will not be allowed access to their children until after they graduate.

These common-sense safety measures are needed to end all mall and school shootings across America. After all, if it saves just one life, it's worth it.

Funny, yes...until you reflect that the reasoning is identical to the reasoning for the imposition of a licensure regime upon any and every human activity that falls into the State's clutches.

Licensure, when it first appeared, applied to very few things: mainly the practice of medicine and law. The rationale was "the public safety:" the protection of the layman from the quack practitioner of little or no actual skill. That rationale now applies to trades as unthreatening as the braiding of hair.

A case from some years ago, to which I was privy simply as an observer, involved a state official in Massachusetts who entered a unisex hair salon and demanded service. The attendant on duty politely asked if he could wait for the specialist in his sort of hair, who was expected to arrive shortly. When the official saw the attendant give immediate service to a subsequent arrival, he had the state police shut down the salon, invoking the state's licensure laws for his authority.

Yes, the official was a Negro.

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Whether it goes by licensure, permittage, or any other name, the imposition of State selectivity upon the exercise of one's rights is merely a back-door method for denying those rights. The denial need not be uniform across all persons; indeed, that's seldom the case. To make a licensure regime palatable, there must be a licensed or "grandfathered" group of practitioners to whom the State can point and say "See! You still have your rights; just do as they do and get a license!" That privileged group acquires an interest in maintaining the regime, especially in those cases where the ability to earn depends upon the possession of a license.

This is not free enterprise as I understand the term. But as bad as that is -- and it's very bad; ask the women who tried to make a living braiding hair and were told they had to acquire expensive cosmetology licenses before they could do so legally -- when the rationale can be applied to non-commercial activities and arrangements, it acquires a new magnitude of ominousness.

Do you think I'm exaggerating the danger? Then consider this: the Dishonorable Charles Schumer, ever eager to shove his face in front of a camera or a microphone, has proposed that the federal government fund the provision of tracking devices for autistic children.

We're already on the way to a licensure regime for parents. Consider the number of cases each year in which "child welfare" workers deprive a parent of his children on the grounds of "the best interests of the child." Consider how difficult and expensive it is to get such an action reversed. Consider how many such abductions have morphed into prosecutions of the parents, as some "expert" succeeded in eliciting "recovered memories" of abuse from those minor children, unshielded against "expert" manipulation by those who love them.

But Schumer has told American parents that they need have no fear: his bill would make the acquisition and use of his trackers entirely voluntary.

Do you have enough to think about for this morning, Gentle Reader?

Not Enough Part 3: The Triumph Of The Iron Triangles

Once in a while, I stumble over an essay that reminds me of my own writings...of thirty years ago.

There's no need for me to excerpt the cited article. Any Gentle Reader of Liberty's Torch will be familiar with all the sentiments expressed therein. It does contain a scattering of useful quotes from major figures in American history, but that's about as far as its utility goes.

Why, you ask, am I so dismissive of an article that could have come from my own fingers at an earlier age? It's not that I disagree with the thesis. It's not that I consider it poorly reasoned or written. It's not even that it's all been said before, though that is surely the case.

It's because it's irrelevant to the problem we face.

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The American political tableau has been immunized against the importunings of reason. If it surprises you to hear that from one of the Web's foremost apostles of reason, imagine how it pains me to say it.

The heart of the problem, which is also the reason I find the cited article a sad reminder of my own earlier days as a "manifestist," is that the ongoing operation of the welfare-warfare dynamic has made reason and evidence politically irrelevant. Those who applaud the principles the article expresses are now outnumbered and outgunned by:

• Those who operate The System;
• Those who sell to The System;
• Those who receive direct transfers of wealth and privileges from The System.

In sociopolitical jargon, the above combination of boosters, when we speak of a single government program, is called an iron triangle. Such triangles are fantastically resilient against attempts by "outsiders" to eliminate or reduce their demesne. Collectively, they now come to so great a mass that, in combination with the less numerous but equally firmly committed ideological Left, they constitute an indefeasible majority of the American electorate. They are the force that returned Barack Hussein Obama to the White House in the election of November 2012.

You cannot reason with such persons. Reason is irrelevant to their personal interests in sustaining and enlarging their triangle. Their time horizons are too short for arguments over long-term gains to influence their thinking. They want their pockets filled now. For a goodly number of them, their survival depends on the perpetuation of The System.

We warned for many years of the addictive powers of government redistribution and special-interest subventions. The logic was sound and easily comprehensible by anyone capable of understanding the words we spoke. Yet the triangles multiplied and grew. All our nightmares have come to fruition. The monster's fangs are embedded too deeply in our necks to be removed. It's too late to regain the upper hand by rational or electoral means.

What remains are flight and violent revolution.

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There's nowhere on the surface of the Earth to flee. The entire land area of this planet has been parceled out to nation-states, every one of which suffers the same "triangle infection" as the United States. More, those nation-states are inherently and implacably hostile to competition; they tolerate one another only out of their inability to "correct the problem." They would do whatever is necessary to snuff out any free society that might spring up within their reach. I wrote of this in the prologue of Which Art In Hope, a passage that strikes me today as more prophecy than fiction.

Sadly, there's nowhere off the surface of the Earth to flee, either. The space sciences are not yet advanced enough for freedom lovers to establish habitats for human life in space or on any other body in the Solar System. Whether that will change any time soon, no one can say. Myself, I doubt it; Earth-based life is much more delicate than most of us are aware.

But revolution is no solution. The steady separation of the agencies of force from loyalty to the rights of the common citizen, coupled to the aforementioned transfer of allegiance from any principle of freedom to the lure of "free stuff," has made a successful armed uprising next to impossible. Consider the well-documented shift in the attitudes of the police toward those they "protect." Consider the careerism that has come to dominate the armed forces. Consider especially the steady arming of the bureaucrats, such that an ever larger percentage of federal and state employees go about their day armed and are pre-indemnified for the use of force in the performance of their jobs. And remember that all of those persons are members of an iron triangle of their own.

What, then, must we do?

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I have no solution. My natural optimism is waning rapidly. It might be possible for some to "go Galt:" to remove their sliver of support from The System and, more important, to remove themselves from its baleful gaze. I doubt that there are many who would find that form of "interior escape" possible, let alone palatable -- and as I've already said, the other possibilities have been foreclosed.

Disconnected individuals and small groups have a chance of evading the smothering grip of the Omnipotent State. For the rest of us, the future looks grim.

There is no salvation in elections. From this point forward, no genuinely principled, freedom-loving figure will be permitted to rise to national prominence. A few will be permitted to linger in the legislature, where they'll be called "the conscience of the Senate," or some such, while being thwarted in any initiative they undertake. If they ever become threatening to the System, the System will simply shake them off.

There is no salvation in the law or the courts. When Obama recently said "We are remaking the courts," he was speaking of a process that's already near to completion. Judges high and low already openly dismiss arguments founded in the Bill of Rights.

There is no salvation in the Constitution. That venerable document has been made a dead letter by decades of dismissal and neglect. Even its supposed defenders aren't willing to abide strictly by its terms.

What can we do, other than hunker down and pray that we'll be permitted to die in peace? Someone please give me a reason to hope!

Did lazy Americans kill those 1,127 Muslim garment-workers in Bangladesh?

Once upon a time, we tried to go cold-turkey.

After all the reading I needed to do for the following piece, I was left with a feeling of nostalgia and some sadness. What a shame for our once-great nation to be brought to its financial-knees in part for the sake of cheap (and increasingly tawdry) fashions, and other "stuff." I'll bet the ChiComs could figure out how to get all the abandoned American factories dotting the countryside up-and-running again... 

My 3400-word essay, Did Westerners cause the Bangladesh apparel factory collapse, will expose a unique angle on how we, as a nation, got hooked into the fashion-by-slave-labor industry, as well as offer 3 1/2 all-American solutions. I hope it’s sufficiently provocative to begin to awaken my fellow consumers; whether they’re young, practically born with an internet-connected cellphone in their hand, or more mature – and have quickly adopted the same distraction by glitz & glamour disorder.

From the essay:

Once upon a hippy-er time…a pocket-sized green dragon was summoned. Raised by Keynesian-channeling bureaucrats and called, innocuously, paper-currency. This new sovereign crawled forth from the depths of the earth and it stood momentarily, like any usurper, on the fresh grave of the just murdered, hastily buried, Gold Standard it was designed to supplant. It was hungry, so it went hunting; tiptoed innocently across the country at first. You see, that original green dragon was quiet as a tornado the day before it’s born, but as it traveled, it kicked off the last traces of gold; grew insatiable; grew more menacing with every step, as tornadoes will, once set in motion.

The Debunking: Community Standards

Robert A. Heinlein once noted that the human race can be partitioned into those who seek to control others and those who have no such desire. Granted that that's only one of the possible partitions, nevertheless it's an important one. It bears directly on today's cant phrase, how such things as "community standards" arise, and how they become accepted despite the fraud upon which they're based.

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In any group of men, there will be a percentage whose members:

• Desire to impose certain of their preferences upon the rest; and:
• Possess the time, energy, scale of priorities, resilience before criticism, and persistence in the face of opposition to have a good chance of making it happen.

Empirically, that percentage in American communities seems to hover in the single digits, usually as low as 1% to 2%. Within that small group there will be a distribution of characteristics, most important among them persuasive power and power of personality. Those at the top of that distribution will tend to dominate the others, and will mobilize them into a cohesive political force. Once that force is in motion, it will normally succeed in its endeavors, despite its small size.

How this comes about has been made a study of its own. It's a variation on special-interest political dynamics: the array of forces and tendencies that allow numerically small interest groups to impose their agendas on a larger population nearly all the time.

In conventional political analysis, we see that the successful interest group always possesses the following attributes:

• Its agenda is very short -- one to three items -- and perfectly coherent.
• Its members are passionate about that agenda and willing to contribute heavily toward it.
• Success in achieving its goals brings direct, personal satisfactions -- sometimes tangible, sometimes not -- to the members of the group.

Interest groups outside government that seek to sway public policy do so by public relations, lobbying, and by bloc voting. The lobbying is, of course, reinforced by the group's ability to sway a substantial number of votes: first and foremost those of the group, second those of the general public who are persuaded by the group's PR efforts. In a region closely divided on "basic" ideology and issues, officials and aspirants must respect the power of such groups; the 1% or 2% of the vote they might sway could be the margin of victory...or defeat.

The one notable difference between the "conventional" interest group and the sort of group that strives to set "community standards" is that the latter isn't necessarily trying to sway the government. About as often as not, it seeks to become the government.

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When a group introduces some set of rules as a proposed "community standard," the reactions of the wider community range from essential disinterest ("Doesn't affect me in the slightest") to passionate approval or opposition. A typical distribution of opinion might look like this:

1. Indifferent: 80%
2. Mildly interested in either direction: 10%
3. Passionately in favor: 3% - 7%
4. Passionately opposed: 3% - 7%

Yes: the indifferent will always predominate...in the numbers, at least.

The rules in question might pertain to zoning, or to construction regulations, or to what sort of businesses will be permitted in the community, or what goods and services the community's businesses must, may, and must not sell. What matters most to the outcome is how effectively the group can marginalize the passionately opposed. None of the other members of the community matter.

Community segments 1 and 2 are largely immune to the proponents' PR. Their participation in the process that decides the question will be thin and its impact randomly distributed. Segment 3, the passionately-in-favor, are assets to the proponents, and likely to participate at a high percentage. However, their voices and votes could be overwhelmed by the passionately opposed. Minimizing the influence of segment 4 is therefore the proponents' most important task.

The proponents of the "community standard" don't always win the day, of course. Much depends upon the size of that opposed group and just how ardent it is to see the proposal defeated. But the really interesting aspect of the thing lies in the distribution itself:

How can a set of rules to which 80% of the community is indifferent be a true "community standard?"

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It's been said, in many contexts, that "20% gets you 80%." Perhaps the most common form is "80% of the results come from 20% of the workers." Indeed, in politics and political interplay, the figures are more likely to be 95% and 5%, owing to the immense importance of public relations and the money that makes such campaigns effective.

At any rate, just as with other special-interest groups that attempt to sway public policy, a group that seeks to make a "community standard" will have influence out of proportion to its actual size, and for the same reasons. It will carry the day against its opposition when it can marshal its supporters and dishearten, delegitimize, or otherwise neutralize its opponents. But when it wins, it will have succeeded in imposing the passionate desires of a numerical minority -- usually a very small minority -- on the far more numerous persons and institutions of the community.

And thus we get everything from curb rules to blue laws.