Stop greed and idiocy!

Pending a miracle tomorrow there will be a government shutdown. Marx was right, history repeats itself, first as tragedy than as farce. The reasons are not difficult to understand. Carlo Cipolla, in his fantastic Allegro ma non troppo, explained that there are four kinds of people, the helpless, the intelligent, the idiot and the bandit. For us, the ones that matter are the idiots, that is, the “person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.”

The Laws of Human Stupidity imply that non-stupid people underestimate the damaging effects of idiots. In particular, if there is an increasing number of bandits within the elite of the country (e.g. Republicans and his plutocratic friends) that want to plunder the budget, cutting taxes for the rich and cutting spending for the poor and the elderly, and a large number of idiots (e.g. the Tea Party), with only helpless people (e.g. the Democratic leadership) to avoid catastrophe, then as Cipolla suggested society is sure to go to Hell!