Whoopie, I can choose my own doctor. Now if only there were some way for me to pay for the medical care.
To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, not an author to be set aside lightly, but hurled with great force.
So far, I have no great problem with this. Actually, I would leave some of the money & the smaller, weaker guns.
Meh. I think a superstitious belief in spirits is perhaps useful to society. It’s the combination of religious pluralism & cultured respect for a variety of inconsistent cockamamie groups that’s worrying; groups like the Org & the People’s Temple can hide behind it. (Oh, great, am I reverting to obscurantism? Apparently.) Fortunately, the example of ancient, pious, pluralist Rome shows us that the present pluralism is unstable & one fanatic group will subsume or annihilate each of the others. I shouldn’t be comforted by that, should I?
OK.
I don’t care. Bigger fish to fry.
I don’t know what this means.
I like this idea & shall sign on to it.
Erm. I don’t mind leaving PCP & the cocainoids in “controlled” status, but the DEA’s strategy does need to be overhauled.
Yes.
No.
I would say, “tax-funded, as the one way to gain actual progressivity in pricing,” but yeah.
I agree, & will go you one better. Abolish the tuition system & pay university students a small stipend (< minimum wage).
Seems unobjectionable—or rather, I wonder how those who inevitably will object think themselves plausible.
Oh, no, you’re more likely to get the pony.
You know, if you were to drop a nuclear bomb on America, that would make all that government health care really expensive.
If it wasn’t clear that “Ayn Rand reading” referred to people who agree with her philosophy, I apologize.
Even if it is useful to society, it doesn’t belong in government policy or public education (or any education) or the legal system. I recognize people’s right to worship spirits, but not their right to impose their particular spirit’s will on the rest of us.
As a form of penance, perhaps? One Atlas Shrugged = 100 years in Purgatory. Seems about right.
You’ve already got the power. As I explained before, the problem is you don’t recognize the power & equality you’ve been given.
You don’t want to exercise the power you already have and at the same time, you want all the niceties of life handed to you on a silver platter. But every human being wants gain with no pain. I want it too. No mindblowing insight there. So what’s the point of shouting out your fantasies?
Not quite sure what you’re on about here. Clearly, you have some scorn to share, but is it scorn for the “program”, or contempt for our failure to implement it on the time frame you’d prefer?
Are you with us, agin us, or just don’t give a rat’s?
… And then give the other 90% to our educational system, please. Our country has this completely bass-ackwards: education should be our absolute, highest priority. Our best and brightest should aspire to be teachers, and we should reward them appropriately. The highest paying job in any field should be that of teacher- because teachers make more workers in that field. Get some competition in there, and we’ll start seeing the best teachers.
For the most part, I agree with your list. It’s damn near impossible to achieve it, and I’m willing to bet that you know it, too. However, it’s a good idea to aim high and then reach a middle ground.
“Ayn Rand reading” and “bible thumping” are a tad contradictory.
And he’s quite wrong - him getting a pony is much more likely than any of his other ideas.
I disagree that education is the answer - or at least education in the sense that it’s being discussed here. We could all be geniuses with 150 IQs and PhDs and it wouldn’t change the fact that America’s domestic industry is all falling apart because the skilled trades are disintegrating. What we need are more tradesmen. We need more people in vocational school and fewer in college. There are thousands of college students right now who would be better off learning skilled trades and going into “hard” industry. American industry needs to be revitalized. The pursuit of alternative energy sources offers a wonderful opportunity to do so.
Democracy in action, most of these things will never happen. Some of them, curiously, already have. What you want only matters in terms of how many other voters want the same thing, and for many of your proposals I don’t think there is much chance of there being enough voter support in our lifetime. For some of them, in the lifetime of this country. We may eventually see guns banned but we’ll never see a 90% reduction in defense spending.
When I said “education”, I was also including the trades. There’s no reason why we couldn’t have colleges devoted to mechanics, or electronics, or… whatever. Agreed, we DO need people to actually make the stuff- so let’s make the highest paying job a budding car mechanic can aspire to be that of an instructor.
Throwing hundreds of billions of dollars into the bottomless pit that is our Public Education system wouldn’t solve a damn thing, only effective reforms will. And with some good reforms…public education wouldn’t need anywhere near that much money.
Healthcare isn’t the only system broken in the U.S.
What Mosier proposes is no more than European-style social democracy. America could look like that and still be America. You do understand that, don’t you?
What reforms, exactly, are you looking for?
And can you explain how giving teachers good wages won’t encourage good teachers?
This thread is why conservatives should be weary of labeling things they don’t like as “class warfare”.
Do it too much and it dilutes the term. Then it doesn’t seem so bad.
I am with you, Mosier. However, absent a social movement, I don’t think anything will change.
When a progressive tax rate is considered wealth redistribution or economic oppression of billionaires, and people earning less than $250,000 a year agree, thirty years of indoctrination has worked. Game over.
Here is the economic reality.
It doesn’t work. Many countries (including my own) have doubled teachers’ salaries in a short period of time with little effect on education.
Pay increases should be tied to effectivenss, tenure (or wahtever it’s called in schools) should not exist as an indefinite blank check; choice-choice-coice, increase the social status of teaching, make people WANT to be teachers.