It works like higher education, if you can afford tuition, you get education at a discount, at taxpayer’s expense.Those who can afford it don’t want to pay anything to help those who can’t. Especially if they aren’t “nice, middle-class folks” like themselves. But of course, they feel perfectly entitled to those government subsidies.

Workers afraid of losing their health care make docile, quiet employees who will put up with any shit on the job rather than risk their families’ health. This keeps salaries down.

No, the opposition to this is from the same crowd who fought the Child Labor Laws and every other social legislation that has made life tolerable in this nation for a century. And for the same self-serving reasons. “It will be the end of freedom and civilization if my taxes go up.”

We are not Steppenwolves. We are simians. We have always lived in bands. We take care of our aged, our weak and our sick like we take care of our young. Without that, we are no longer human. And those who cannot accept humanity as the price we pay for civilization are not human either.

I made a statement on the need to decentralize power and programs in this country.

Even a chimpanzee might have caught himself before he furiously pounded out counterexamples like police, roads, fire departments, schools, and utilities.

Should there be a National Police Force? A Federal Fire Department managing every station from Florida to Oregon? Should all our schools be run by a Supreme School Board in Washington? Appointed by our Federal leaders, of course, not elected like our local ones.

Do you see any difference at all between food stamps to help those who really need it and a National Affordable Food Program to provide “free” food to everybody in the entire country?

When somebody’s knocking at my door, I’m going to call the local city police, not the goddam Marines.

We have government healthcare for the poor. We have government healthcare for the elderly. Hundreds of billions a year. Government already covers almost half the medical spending in this country.

Our system worked pretty well as it stood. According to polls, most people were quite happy with the health care they personally were getting. Even a majority of the uninsured.

A reasonable person might have looked at the remaining cracks people could still fall into, and ask how they could be filled. But there’s no power to be had in solving the actual problem, is there?

A lunatic would decide we need to burn the whole thing to the ground and raise Pharaoh Barack’s Legacy Pyramid in its place.

Dude, Obamacare slid into the ditch and caught fire the day it started out. It was amusing because nobody was depending on it yet. It won’t be so funny ten years from now.

I was right before. This nation is going to die of stupidity.

Denying it has nothing to do with “freedom”. It has all to do with YOU not wanting to be taxed for someone elses health care.

Health care is a right. It is just another public utility, like public education, roads, and police or fire protection. It is not to be reserved only for those who can afford it. In other words, “witholding services”. THAT is truly the ultimate “death panel”.

You can extend that same logic to the rest of your complaints. Government exists because the private sector cannot, or will not, provide all the services people need. If health care was affordable, we wouldn’t need Obamacare. If jobs were plentiful, we wouldn’t need social services or welfare. If people weren’t going hungry, we wouldn’t need food stamps. If the ocean was waist deep we wouldn’t need the Coast Guard.

Underneath all your pious humbug about freedom is the fact that you simply don’t want to pay for other people’s benefits–people who through no fault of their own can’t get them from the private sector.

But when you wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of someone breaking into your house you’re going to reach over for that phone and call the STATE, and you will expect it to deliver immediately.

You are the record multiple times as supporting increases in government power at many levels. I could go back and pull quotes to show I’m not “making this up,” but I shouldn’t have to. Primary among these is enthusiastic support for a total government takeover of the health care system.

This does not match with “I don’t trust politicians.”

It’s as though I said “I don’t trust businessmen” and then turned around and declared that everyone in America should be forced to buy all their computers from Microsoft.

We have seen only recently how government power is used to “punish” Americans by withholding services. You really want that power dangling over our health care system? When they run the whole show, what gets cut off next time an administration demands more loot? Oxygen in hospitals?

I do not trust politicians. I simply trust businessmen less. Like lawyers, they are careerists, middlemen, essentially non productive parasites living off the labor of others. You will note I did not say they did not work hard, or skillfully. What I said was that they primarily live off the labor of others.

And politicians aren’t non-productive parasites living off the labor of others? Wealth in this country is generated by the private sector. All politicians do is take it and pass it around in return for power. The only difference between the parties is who gets the bribes. It is no coincidence that damn few people in government have ever run a business.

And finally, here’s the big one:

Politicians can be controlled by constitutional limits. Failing that, they can be voted out of office. Failing that, you can have a revolution and force them out at gunpoint. With businessmen, you have no choice but to put up with them until they go broke.

That’s mind-boggling. I’m trying to remember the last time I heard of anyone, employee or customer, having to hold an election or an armed revolution to shake the dust of a crummy business off their feet. Maybe back when Mother Jones was alive.

Employees quit and go somewhere else. All the time. I showed you the turnover statistics in this country, all the way down to blue collar workers.

As for customers, if I don’t like a corporation’s product, I go down a few doors or flip to another website. They’ve got nothing to say about it.

I don’t have to trust businessmen. It doesn’t matter. I have free choice, not to work for people I hate, and not to buy products I don’t like. In spite of your myth of millions of workers chained helplessly to their jobs while overseers whip them to work, they have no real power over us. There’s too many of them, competing for sales and workers.

I wish the same was true of politicians. Who was the last bureaucrat you voted for? And do you really think who wins elections is going to change the fundamental equations of state power? “Government is accountable to the people” will get you the horselaugh from most people you try that on.

What I think? Every chance we get, we should reduce the power of the central authority. Distribute it. Break it up to the states and localities again. A crackpot running some county is going to do a lot less damage than a crackpot running a country.

Anti-trust for government.

When you think about it, the reasons for breaking down Federal power are exactly the same as the reasons for breaking up a corporate monopoly. We need more choices and more ways to do things, not fewer.

Power to the people. But literally, this time.

You’re not baffled. You’re smarter than that.

Or are you telling me I don’t know what I’m thinking?

Or maybe you mean to imply I don’t know what I believe?

Or is this some new kind of Conservative Zen koan you’re laying on me?

Or have you, as I suspect, decided what I really mean and nothing I can do or say can change it? Which is, after all, exactly the point I was trying to make.

Humor me. Explain what you’re getting at, because I must confess I am totally baffled.

I gave up a long time ago trying to communicate my politics to you. You have already decided what they are and you will not accept any modifications to that preconception. I fit your prejudices precisely, I’m a walking, talking justification of the correctness of your ideas. You have no incentive to understand my opinions,

It is essential to the preservation of your world view that all those who disagree with you fall neatly into the box you have so carefully constructed for them. Empathy was never your strong suit.

I do not trust politicians. I simply trust businessmen less. Like lawyers, (and politicians) they are careerists, middlemen, drones; essentially non-productive parasites living off the labor of others. You will note I did not say they did not work hard, or skillfully.. What I said was that they primarily live off the labor of others.

Politicians can be controlled by constitutional limits. Failing that, they can be voted out of office. Failing that, you can have a revolution and force them out at gunpoint. With businessmen, you have no choice but to put up with them until they go broke.

But I will once again try, against my better judgement, to communicate to you as succinctly as possible my conception of the role of government.

The purpose of government is to protect the people from bullies. By bullies, I mean specifically, foreign enemies, domestic criminals, and unscrupulous businessmen.