President Obama’s Wealth Destroying Goal: Taking the ‘Curley Effect’ Nationwide
12th June 2016
As defined by Harvard scholars Edward L. Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer in a famous 2002 article, the Curley effect (named after its prototype, James Michael Curley, a four-time mayor of Boston in the first half of the 20th century) is a political strategy of “increasing the relative size of one’s political base through distortionary, wealth-reducing policies.” Translation: A politician or a political party can achieve long-term dominance by tipping the balance of votes in their direction through the implementation of policies that strangle and stifle economic growth. Counterintuitively, making a city poorer leads to political success for the engineers of that impoverishment.
Here’s an example of how the Curley effect works: Let’s say a mayor advocates and adopts policies that redistribute wealth from the prosperous to the not-so-prosperous by bestowing generous tax-financed favors on unions, the public sector in general, and select corporations. These beneficiaries become economically dependent on their political patrons, so they give them their undivided electoral support—e.g., votes, campaign contributions, and get-out-the-vote drives.
This is the constant Democrat agenda: Make more and more people dependent on government handouts so they will more and more vote for the party of government handouts, i.e. Democrats.
June 13th, 2016 at 10:20
FDR patented this strategy…or would that be a copyright? Anyway you get the gist. My only curiosity is if he stumbled upon it or was truly an architect of tyranny.