Politics
Out of context: Reply #567
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- TheBlueOne0
"Our government has fucked up Schools, Social Security and just about every financially related social issue it has touched. Why is health care going to be different? Riddle me that Batman."
-TommyO
Has it? Social Security is actually pretty solvent (imagine if Bush had succeeded in privatizing it at the beginning of his second term? It would be *poof* up in smoke now). Last I read up on it, SS is OK. Government has run the Postal Service pretty well. It runs the military well. It negotiates international trade pretty well. And across the board the school system isn't too bad and has more to do with local conditions than federal spending mandates. Our universities - public and private - are the best in the fucking world (thanks in a large part to public grants). Not bad for a system that oversees about 300,000,000 people.
This whole "whatever the government touches sucks" meme is just right-wing pablum that has been hoisted on us since Reagan. Government can lead to excess, as any concentration of power can, and it's the people who make up the government that should bring it back in line - there are methods of recourse. But concentration of power in private hands with all this Free Market Circle Jerk leads to the same place it always has in history - monopoly, oligarchy.
There is no such thing as a "free market" - a market is a social construct as much as anything else and
May I remind you that the unions begged Detroit auto manufactures to join with them to implement National Healthcare back in the 50's. Detroit told them to fuck off thinking they could fund healthcare and pension systems themselves and use that pool of money to invest and scoop off additional profits. That model failed, and what's left of US manufactures has to compete now with global companies form Europe and Asia that don't have to carry healthcare and pension costs on their balance sheets. The inability of management to work with unions together at that point set up decades of Unions and managment at odds over these things and gave the power to unions to become too big for their own good.
Sure I would like to give as little as possible of my money to a government that fritters away money by funding stupid useless wars and lining the pockets of capitalists when they fail. But that's because the government is corrupt, not because government in general is a bad thing.
Governments govern. It's a job, and an expensive but important one.
Your brain governs you. It also uses up a pretty high percentage of your calories to do what it does. Brains/governance is expensive. Now if your brain is getting you to a happy place by making good decisions - you have a job, a roof, money in the bank, getting laid regularly, get good excercise, etc...than that good government is worth it. If your brain is making decisions to have you sit in front of a computer screen masturbating to Paris Hilton videos and scarfing down doritos and bags of pepsi, it's making bad decisions and not worth it.
But the thing is to get your brain to make better decisions, not to drown your brain in the proverbial bath tub. I mean unless your answer to lack of discipline is to say "Wow, we;re jerking off to much, owe to much money, getting fat..you know what - I think I need less brains! 'Cause it's eating up all these calories and it's making shitty decisions for me. I'm going for the less brain option..."
As some one smarter than me said "Liberals have an irrational childlike faith in the government. Conservatives have an irrational childlike faith in corporations. Libertarians have an irrational childlike hatred of both."
I, like the founders, am very wary of government. I have no faith in it doing the common good if left to it's own devices. This is doubly true of any "free market". Government, markets, etc. are human tools, human inventions..the minute we think they have some sort of inherent quality other than what we give them then we give into ideology - of either the "left" or the "right"..we operate on assumptions and not facts...