It’s been said that politics is war by other means (or is that the other way around?). But besides the obvious differences, one way war and politics are unlike is that, in war, losing a battle makes it that much more likely you’ll lose the next one and ultimately the war.
But in politics, every defeat sets the stage for a victory, and vice versa. All the voters are still alive and many of them will begin to resent the arrogance and failings of the party that won and took power. It’s the backlash.
People who, for example, warn that health care reform will somehow inevitably lead to broader socialism or a euthanasia regime seem to be in denial of the existence of the backlash as potent force in politics. If it’s that hard for relatively benign reforms to be pushed through, how could it otherwise be so easy to implement genuinely draconian reforms?
Legislation does not conform to the laws of physics. If it appears to be moving in a particular direction, that does not mean momentum is conserved and it will continue moving in that direction until it reaches the extreme.
More accurate is to say that every action produces a reaction (the “pendulum” model), but although it may be opposite, it’s as often as not more potent. So far we’re seeing a replay of it, but the archetypal example of a political backlash is the reaction to the Clinton health care plan. It provoked sweeping changes not just in government but in the overall political philosophy of the country.
And yet we’re still subject to this give-em-an-inch-they’ll-take-a-mile paranoia. How do people who embrace this logical fallacy rationalize it?
Part of the problem, though, is that people are, for lack of a better word, conservative. I don’t mean in the political sense, but that once a program is in place, it’s hard to get rid of it. Government programs and departments tend to perpetuate themselves, especially after people have been accustomed to them.
Take Social Security, for instance. When the Social Security Act was first passed, it was controversial, and a number of people argued it was a bad idea. Now, though, getting rid of social security is pretty much impossible.
Even a program like the Tennessee Valley Authority, which was created to electrify the Tennessee Valley, is still around, even though almost everyone in the Tennessee Valley now has electricity.
So, what the conservatives are afraid of is that, if universal health care is adopted, people will become accustomed to it, and believe that people should have a right to it, and the country will never get rid of it. It’s the fear of the one way wrench, and that it’s easier to grow the government than to shrink it.
I stand by the bad joke I posted but this thread brings to mind something that really fucking annoys me about people. They don’t think with logic, they think with emotion. Sqeels you’re right to bitch, but people feel politics. You’re asking how people can embrace a logical fallacy when there isn’t much of a logic to it. Simply put people like black and white more than shades of grey.
First case in point: Obamacare[sup]TM[/sup] wants to help the elderly form a personal panel of doctors and maybe a lawyer or two to ease the end of life. Pain medication, living wills, resuscitation and so forth so as to ease their passage that we all must eventually face. It’s a “death” panel. Oh my God, IT’S A DEATH PANEL! HE WANTS TO KILL GRANDMA! That’s not logic, it’s emotion.
Second case: I work in a hardware store in south Georgia and one of our customers the other day was a professor form Michigan. A coworker told the following joke: “Isn’t it odd that Obama signed the stimulas package on the same desk where Clinton had his package stimulated?” Bad joke, granted, but the professor went nuts. He called the guy a “redneck, fascist, right wing trogladyte” (his exact words). That’s not a logical reaction to a sex joke. But it is an emotional reaction.
No, I don’t think most people are saying that. I think even people opposed to the current health insurance bill support people having health care. It’s a very small segment of the population that like people to be sick, after all.
But that being said, there are people who have a sincere concern about the increasing size and scope of the federal government, and it’s concerning them that there aren’t plans to cover more people without increasing the size of the bureaucracy.
I’m not saying there’s not a lot of misinformation on the anti-side too. There’s a lot of bad information out there about death panels and the like. But I don’t think it’s helpful to portray the “anti” sideas wanting people not to get health care.
Man, I have said this many times, in these very boards. People think that a slippery slope argument is some kind of factual trump card. There’s a similar thing people do here (I think both debate strategies could be called classed reductio ad absurdum), where someone has to extrapolate what you’ve said to the most outrageous degree before they can engage with it. Like you’ll go, “Oatmeal makes me sick,” and someone will come back with, “Are you saying that cereal grains are toxic to humans?” or some such nonsense.
Not all that the government does is subject to vote and/or approval by the people. Look at it not as a “slippery slope” but more as a “foot in the door”.
Conservatives have been quite forthcoming and truthful about what they think might go wrong with federalized health care. Part of fiscal conservatism is the idea that the free market will invariably do better than a government subsidy. As far as they are concerned, it is very likely that UHC will drive up the cost of health care, and, once it does, it will be nearly impossible to repeal it to drive it back down.
Anyways, I find that politics is best handled by those who don’t try to vilify their opponents. Fiscal conservatives aren’t evil (wanting people to be sick), they are just misguided (thinking that UHC will make things worse).
But what is the government planning on doing once it gets its foot in the door, and what’s motivating it to do that?
As I see it, the problem with government is that bureaucrats get paid the same no matter how inefficiently their bureaus are run. OTOH, unless we’re talking about out-and-out corruption, they have no reason to do anything evil or selfish.
Nonsense. The "Slopers"TM are going on about Marxist dictatorship and euthanasia.
I dunno what the government might be planning on doing, probably nothing, but it isn’t at all unusual for a government program to expand. Usually to justify it’s existence (or at least, that’s what it looks like). Also, I understand that the current plan is to only tax those who make over (I think) $300,000 a year, but when they find out that won’t cover the cost, they will be easily able to extend the tax to people making less. Much less. Another thing that can happen would be the government essentially removing the incentive for businesses to offer group coverage, meaning more of us would end up on the UHC. There are all kinds of things that can happen once the government has it’s foot in the door.
I suppose it depends on one’s definition of evil or selfish, but it seems that the government does do selfish things at times. Voting themselves a raise is an example.
It’s one thing to for a government program to “expand” a little bit, but don’t imagine it’s so open-ended that some nightmarish totalitarian endgame is within the realm of possibility. There are practical limits to what can be done that burdens the public or restricts their liberties–even if they were heavily sedated–before the inveitable backlash takes its toll.
What tax? The Federal Income Tax?
And then they’ll be able abolish capitalism and the public won’t know about it until it’s too late?
A pretty narrow one considering that most government employees are not voting members of Congress and such raises are not a significant part of the budget.
Spending increases do not automatically trigger tax increases. We’re all worried about the balooning deficit, but tax rates are not going to be doubled. Not overnight, not 1 percentage point every 6 months. And even if they did, that’s still a far cry from communism.
I dunno. The wars we’ve had recently are causing quite a bit of burden on the public, and it doesn’t seem there are many that support the idea, yet we still keep having wars. Extremely expensive wars that end up killing many of our citizens.
Don’t know but doubt it. Can they add to the income tax of only a certain level of income and above?
I don’t know how this follows what I said…?
Whether or not any given personal advantage that TPTB give themselves are or aren’t a significant part of the budget kind of pales when one looks at how often it happens. No, not every government waste ends up trigger a tax increase, but enough of them do that we are paying way too much tax to pay for it, or it “just” goes into the deficit.
It also isn’t just the fed income tax - more and more states have their own income taxes now, as well as the sales tax being determined by the state, county and city, that gas tax (!) and all of the “user fees”.
Um, communism? I suppose a case could be made for all these people who want the rich to hand all their money to the poor also wanting a communist society, or rather a socialist society but I don’t think that is actually going to happen.
First, the slippery slope is not always fallacious. Take smoking. Many people i knew started smoking only when they were out in bars. Then it was while hanging with their buddies. Then after a meal. Next thing you know their full-fledged smokers.
Another example would be the public option as part of health care reform. The fear is that it will put an end to private insurance. Here’s the thinking. They administration argues that since a government option wouldn’t have to do marketing and be beholden to shareholders, their operating costs would be 20% less. Now, if that’s true, their plans will be near 20% cheaper. Companies looking to save money will chose the cheaper option. Eventually, private insurers will start to lose many economies of scale, causing them to either raise their prices or go out of business. And even if they raise their prices, they will go out of business. So, leaving aside whether or not it is the intent of the government health care reform to put private insurers out of business, there is a slipper slope that leads to that conclusion. Also, we’d be into government plans and unintended consequences—see “welfare”.
