A Critique of Power
Public Sector Unions Rally Against Proposed Pension Changes In Maryland (via @daylife)
For quite some time now I’ve been primarily interested in the topic of power and how various institutions fight for self-preservation even if the means of self-preservation jeopardize the very mission of those institutions to begin with.
Take, for instance, the war on drugs. I believe it is a hugely destructive crusade, and its victims are often law enforcement agents. But if we were to end the war on drugs, even if it were to mean less violence, fewer arrests, and fewer police deaths, it would also mean smaller police force budgets, fewer prisons and prison guard jobs and so forth. So the very institutions that suffer from this war also lobby to keep waging it out of institutional self-
