{"id":743,"date":"2009-08-03T08:19:25","date_gmt":"2009-08-03T13:19:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/?p=743"},"modified":"2009-08-03T08:19:30","modified_gmt":"2009-08-03T13:19:30","slug":"the-decline-and-fall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/2009\/08\/the-decline-and-fall\/","title":{"rendered":"The decline and fall&#8230;."},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/cafehayek.com\/2009\/08\/panem-ed-circenses.html\">Panem et Circenses<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http:\/\/opinion.latimes.com\/opinionla\/2009\/07\/la-city-council-considers-30-million-loan-for-cirque-du-soleil.html\">The <\/a><em><a href=\"http:\/\/opinion.latimes.com\/opinionla\/2009\/07\/la-city-council-considers-30-million-loan-for-cirque-du-soleil.html\">Los Angeles Times<\/a><\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/opinion.latimes.com\/opinionla\/2009\/07\/la-city-council-considers-30-million-loan-for-cirque-du-soleil.html\"> reports that Uncle Sam is on the verge of paying the City of Los Angeles $30 million to subsidize a ten-year run of Cirque du Soleil<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>So it\u2019s finally come to pass \u2013 America has embarked on the same road down which ancient Rome marched to its ruin: Uncle Sam not only subsidizes bread (by subsidizing wheat production) but now also circuses.<\/p>\n<p>As my friend David Gasten asks in an e-mail, \u201cif the Cirque du Soleil is so popular, then why does it need to be subsidized?  They didn\u2019t need to subsidize Michael Jackson\u2019s funeral.\u201d  True dat!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>From <a href=\"http:\/\/cafehayek.com\/\">Caf\u00e9 Hayek<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Panem et Circenses: The Los Angeles Times reports that Uncle Sam is on the verge of paying the City of Los Angeles $30 million to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":647,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pekNN-bZ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/647"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=743"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":744,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743\/revisions\/744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}