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Guns Guns Guns
Guest
In this electoral season the role of government in the United States has become an important issue.
Surveys reveal that most Americans don't like government, especially the federal government. (State and local governments seem more acceptable.)
And yet they want the things that government provides, such as defense, law and order, safe food and drugs, clean air, pure water, education, flood relief, health care etc.
Candidates, especially Republican ones, therefore, have a hard time.
Romney promises "strong leadership" but leaves us in doubt about where he would take us or how he would get there.
He shies away from his Massachusetts health care law mandating insurance for all, even though he seems to feel it was a good idea.
He does not want to get caught saying anything positive about government.
One is reminded of the Tea Party fellow who said, "Don't let big government take away my Medicare."
After trying to shut down the EPA, Ronald Reagan said: "Government is not the solution to our problems; it is the problem."
And speaking of the institution he had been elected to lead, he said, "Government is like a stray pup. If you feed it when it comes to the back door, it just comes back for more."
He deregulated far and wide, leading to the collapse of the Savings and Loan industry in the late '80s and to a subsequent government bailout.
This was the first of many financial catastrophes, culminating in the meltdown of 2008, spawned by the anti-government climate.
The irony is that whatever the rhetoric, the size and cost of government has risen to record levels during the past 30 years.
Because we have refused to tax ourselves for it, we have been running ever-greater deficits.
In the first three years of the George W. Bush administration, government spending increased a record 21 percent.
Our anti-government proclivities are one of the tenets of Individualism along with the idea of property rights as a natural right and the "free market:" the belief that unrestrained competition among individualistic proprietors to satisfy consumer desires in an open marketplace will insure that the good community unfolds.
If a firm cannot compete, it should die.
But we have come to realize that in the real world the sum of consumer desires does not necessarily meet community needs for such things as clean air and water, that regulation is required to make food safe, and that when a firm is "too big to fail", it must be propped up.
Worst of all for the ideology of individualism, it is government that must do the propping.
Along the way, property rights have been limited, and the very idea of a corporation as property is in jeopardy because in the case of large publicly-held corporations, shareholder/owners are hard to identify and they have neither the will nor the means of governing what they theoretically own.
No ideology has a monopoly on virtue.
Two tenets of Individualism, property rights and the limited state, were employed to justify slavery....
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2012/10/american-ideology-we-dont-prac.html
Surveys reveal that most Americans don't like government, especially the federal government. (State and local governments seem more acceptable.)
And yet they want the things that government provides, such as defense, law and order, safe food and drugs, clean air, pure water, education, flood relief, health care etc.
Candidates, especially Republican ones, therefore, have a hard time.
Romney promises "strong leadership" but leaves us in doubt about where he would take us or how he would get there.
He shies away from his Massachusetts health care law mandating insurance for all, even though he seems to feel it was a good idea.
He does not want to get caught saying anything positive about government.
One is reminded of the Tea Party fellow who said, "Don't let big government take away my Medicare."
After trying to shut down the EPA, Ronald Reagan said: "Government is not the solution to our problems; it is the problem."
And speaking of the institution he had been elected to lead, he said, "Government is like a stray pup. If you feed it when it comes to the back door, it just comes back for more."
He deregulated far and wide, leading to the collapse of the Savings and Loan industry in the late '80s and to a subsequent government bailout.
This was the first of many financial catastrophes, culminating in the meltdown of 2008, spawned by the anti-government climate.
The irony is that whatever the rhetoric, the size and cost of government has risen to record levels during the past 30 years.
Because we have refused to tax ourselves for it, we have been running ever-greater deficits.
In the first three years of the George W. Bush administration, government spending increased a record 21 percent.
Our anti-government proclivities are one of the tenets of Individualism along with the idea of property rights as a natural right and the "free market:" the belief that unrestrained competition among individualistic proprietors to satisfy consumer desires in an open marketplace will insure that the good community unfolds.
If a firm cannot compete, it should die.
But we have come to realize that in the real world the sum of consumer desires does not necessarily meet community needs for such things as clean air and water, that regulation is required to make food safe, and that when a firm is "too big to fail", it must be propped up.
Worst of all for the ideology of individualism, it is government that must do the propping.
Along the way, property rights have been limited, and the very idea of a corporation as property is in jeopardy because in the case of large publicly-held corporations, shareholder/owners are hard to identify and they have neither the will nor the means of governing what they theoretically own.
No ideology has a monopoly on virtue.
Two tenets of Individualism, property rights and the limited state, were employed to justify slavery....
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2012/10/american-ideology-we-dont-prac.html