[QUOTE=Airman Doors, USAF]
McCain was implicated in the S&L scandals of the late 1980s. He was a member of the Keating Five, although Glenn and McCain were exonerated from wrongdoing.
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Thanks - that article provided significantly more info than I got at the time, let alone remembered!
[QUOTE=Airman Doors, USAF]
From a purely economic point of view that’s not a bad thing. Markets (with a few important regulations) will take care of themselves. But that doesn’t take into account the social aspects, in which the Republicans have traditionally been found wanting. It’s more a question of the role of government: do you want government to make you fat, dumb and happy, or do you want them to save you from yourself? As usual, the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
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The market takes care of itself when its consumers are all fully informed - not only as to the benefits and detriments (both immediate and long-term) of products, but as to the health and safety of working environments, the long-term impact of manufacture and/or product on the environment, etc. It also assumes an “enlightened self-interest” on the part of the consumer. These conditions were a myth when Adam Smith wrote, let alone now, when knowledge and technology have increased so greatly that no single individual can possibly have even a moderate understanding of all of this.
Please, understand, I am not saying that the market system is bad. I don’t even think of it as a system; it’s just a description of what humans do when otherwise unregulated. It will out, regardless of how people may try to suppress it, as was tried for decades in the USSR. Some cultures have a greater innate sense of community welfare (such as Japan - but note that that same culture barely considered non-Japanese as human until comparatively recent times), others less, but primarily people are motivated by a desire for comfort and status/power, for themselves and their loved ones, and this will always lead to a market system, since wealth will buy both.
One question is, how hard do we try to help those who, through no fault of their own (i.e. age, health, lack of education), are unable to compete? The harder we try, the more likely we are to include outright slackers in the bunch. Our justice system was based (at least I was taught) on the concept that better ten guilty people go unpunished than one innocent person be convicted. In this time and place of lavish plenty, do we want to apply a similar ratio, or less, or more? The natural impulse is to say “I and mine have ours; screw you!” But is that what we want to be as a society?
Another question is, how do we deal with the sheer size and complexity of both our nation and our technology? I’m a computer programmer. How do I have any idea what the long term affects of, say, drilling in the Arctic are, both on me, living here and now in NJ, and others separated from me by geography and/or time? If that were the only issue, I could possibly hope to educate myself sufficiently, but it’s only one of thousands, perhaps millions of things that may have an impact on me directly, and certainly are likely to have an impact on others, whether now or in future generations. I’m moderately bright, but not smart enough to learn all that!
But even if I were, we run into the Tragedy of the Commons time and time again. We also constantly run into other ways in which people will rationalize and bullshit themselves into believing that what they are doing isn’t really going to hurt anyone. We possess the enormous ability to live comfortably here in the US. We also possess the enormous ability to destroy the entire planet for all of us. For the time being, we seem to have passed the point where we will do that militarily, but the very strong possibility continues that we will do it ecologically. This is unlikely to affect anyone alive today, except for the basically localized affects of global warming we’ve probably already been seeing, such as increased winter storm activity in the US. But a hundred years hence? Hey, I’m not only childless, but have no nieces or nephews. It’s not my descendants who are going to suffer!
And yet the Republicans, who have, as a party, done everything they could to gut environmental protection laws, are supposedly the party of “family values.” And of Christian values, as well. And yet, I, an atheist and usually a Democrat, apparently care more about their descendants than they do. So I ask Jim, who strikes me as one of the kindest and most well-meaning people I’ve known, why do you self-identify as a Republican? What is it about the Democrats that you find unpalatable?
