Dichotomy
1 : a division into two especially mutually exclusive or contradictory groups or entities <the dichotomy between theory and practice>; also : the process or practice of making such a division <dichotomy of the population into two opposed classes>
Interesting word that you might see in Reader's Digest's Word Power. I always enjoyed that page. Vocabulary is power. They named it properly. But power is all around us. Vocabulary power stays until senility anyway; the others are more transient.
Amy has an interesting slant. Little to do with poker but everything has to do with poker when you think a bit about it. Her demi-rant is about the Chicago School of Economics. Which is only to the right of the Austrian School.
Ayn Rand is the goddess of both. Her books and some by Heinlein build worlds where the principles of thought with action triumph. They are great concepts and triumphant but fiction. They merged the robber barons and Robin of Loxley.
Otis waxes on about balls with the same problems all are or have discussed. He's again disappointed and bothered by it all. Join the club, Otis.
Dichotomy and “The Human Condition” are two sides of the same coin. Well, dichotomy is double sided so maybe it is a three sided one where the edge plays. The edge seems to be the good results that the various fiction uses.
Business and labor are a great example too. We were taught the excesses of business. Taft-Hartley came along and leveled the field in depression times. Some great things took place then. The Pullman Car Porters Union is a great example. One close at hand – for me anyway – was the steel workers. Both had a crappy job. Both fought for and got great improvements.
Today we are demanding improvements with health care being the grand example. That was fought for by the steel workers and granted. Their health care then was better than Medicare. The steel companies at the time were on a roll. The nation was bursting forth and steel was one of the underpinnings of that. As a result the mills were cash cows. They built the interstate overpasses and high-rises and car and so on. If idled, the loss was huge. So, the unions had leverage and contract benefits that were on a par with the health care proposed. Detroit went through a similar cycle with a similar outcome.
The dichotomy was – for a time at least – set aside. And both prospered and became prosperous. Times change. Industry declined and what it could afford in the hay day became the problem. A problem without resolution. In Otis terms, it had become the green ball. There was no longer enough to go around and the dichotomy came back like a roaring lion.
You take the pie and cut it up. Everybody wants the big piece. When you can reach over and grab another pie, it isn't a problem. When you get to the last pie, the problems start. You now have Otis' green ball instead of a dividable pie.
Our government has been a pie maker for a long time. They grabbed resources and baked pies. They're in the process of baking a Guinness award size one now. The question is how many of those can they bake. Prosperity allowed industry to bake a lot of pies too. All of those ovens are gone or acquired or crippled. It is the old dichotomy running into the new set of circumstances. We've never had a solution to that and one isn't in the offing.
We recognize the problem in boiler plate statements. “Past results do not indicate blah blah” We overlook the disclaimers in documents and in life. Resources seem unlimited and resolve to finite availability. Wealth is lost so much as moved somewhere else. The current Wall Street mess didn't destroy a dime of wealth. It just moved it around. That is always happening.
Government today, and that is all government including state and local, is operating on their past success. States, cities and companies can end up bankrupt. They are the last systemic risk underpinning our lives. When wealth is expelled from a system or company that is the final dichotomy and that is the one between rich and poor. We've seen it from time immemorial. It won't change to just accommodate anyone. If Ayn Rand was right it is in that.
ADDENDUM:
Today brought a lot of spam to the blog. 82 items were in the hold bin. That's almost as much as I had up 'til now. If you were stuck in the middle and got deleted. Please try again. I didn't see any that shouldn't have been but, when it is 82, it is a possible error.
Related posts:
Wonder why more spam? Must be some key words in your piece?