John Adams

I've started watching "John Adams", the HBO series. I'm renting it from Netflix.

Initial thoughts after the first disc:

1) In times of real crisis, smart people are forced into politics.

2) Nothing we are facing today is a real crisis. We have a lot of pseudo-intellectuals proclaiming doom from the highest mountaintops but those are just molehills compared with what John Adams was facing.

3) What a shame that our government has become what it is after its modest beginnings. What a shame that we as a society feel that tax money and government interference is necessary to solve every individual case of poverty or mismanagement. This is not what a government ought to be used for. We (the people) surely ought to be able to fund all the welfare we'd like without actually taxing ourselves and getting the government to do all the work for us. It's probably the worst way to do welfare, given the government's track record on efficiency.


But I'm not too concerned about it, because we aren't in a real crisis.