Watching Americans discuss politics is like watching mentally challenged kids trying to play chess.
Hey, at least we have politics! Many other places, you have the right to remain silent, and that’s about it. Simpler, sure, but still…
Now hold on. If you say it was simply an issue of dollars spent, then this is an unfair comparison. If this were the first (or second, or third) effort at greening up corner stores, I wouldn’t object. My objection is rooted in the fact that this has been tried in numerous other places and still failed, so we know (or should know) it will fail here.
You offer up the SDI as a counter-example, but the pieces don’t match. Yes, huge amounts of money were spent, and yes it (mostly) failed. My question: did we know ahead of time it would fail? Should we have known ahead of time it would fail?
I don’t really have an answer for your other point, because answering them will cause this discussion to go even more off the rails. It’s true, for example, that everyone doesn’t start out with the same amount of money. Who cares? Equality of results is not a guarantee. I wasn’t born looking like Tom Selleck or Brad Pitt. Starlets didn’t flock to my door when I was single. Life produces unequal results. That’s life.
It’s not a problem for government to solve.
Millions of teenage boys dream of hooking up with Selena Gomez or Kristin Stewart, or in the alternative anyone halfway decent-llooking. But the government should also not attempt to make sure that they get laid. That’s a problem for them to solve, or not. Why must the government be the solution to every ill?
Outside of you denying it, the question doesn’t arise, nor will it, because, as you know full well, no one says the government must be the solution to every ill.
Because it’s the government’s job to make the country a better place.
I don’t know I’m an atheist and a liberal but I actually care about people in my community unlike a lot of people claiming to be Christians who also will let their neighbors die from lack of resources/ situational economic disadvantages(not that plenty Christians aren’t quite the opposite, gotta love those Catholic nuns). I think things have been hijacked by corruption by people who often run as democrats/liberals but that’s a problem of transparency, election funding, and democracy not the basic ideals.
All these problems we fight about are about basic BS in the way our society is structured. It’s about corruption. Solve these problems and the rest of the issues become minor.
Doing nothing is the the Libertarian solution, not the conservative solution. As your (really rather strained) example indicates. When it comes to sex, conservatives seem so very interested in making sure that teens *don't* get laid, at least until they're married. And if they do get laid, that they should have no idea how to prevent pregnancies and diseases, thus increasing the poor and obese population.
But, more cogently, as I noted, the obesity causes increased health problems in a population for whom the government is the primary source of healthcare. Does this not make it the government’s problem? Or, is it your contention that the government should not be providing health care to these people as well?
Dietary habits are really hard to break. When those habits are reinforced by financial realities, it gets nigh impossible.
Well, the war may not have been a good idea but most folks seem to think that investing in infrastructure works pretty well there (here, not so much, unless you can pay for it with cuts to government spending, particualrly the EPA).
I remember an episode of Good Times when the mom goes to the clinic and the clinic doctor berates the mom for eating meat that was too fatty. The mom had to point out that on a calories per dollar basis, it was the best she could do.
Except that you’re present that as fait accompli proven, when in fact it is very much open for debate. Here’s the relevant part of my post:
That said, it’s also unclear to me precisely what point you’re trying to make. Is it:
(1) Liberals want to use tax dollars to fix societal problems. I don’t think we should use tax dollars to fix societal problems, so there’s a fundamental disagreement there. In addition, here’s a particularly egregious example where liberals are trying to use tax dollars to fix societal problems in a way that will almost certainly fail.
(2) Liberals want to use tax dollars to fix societal problems. I would also want to use tax dollars to fix societal problems if I thought it would ever work, but it almost never does, and here’s an example of a situation in which it won’t, which illustrates the type of failure that is nearly inevitable
or
(3) Liberals want to use tax dollars to fix societal problems. I also want to use tax dollars to fix societal problems (at least some of the time). However, liberals are dumbheads and frequently pick dumb ways to spend that money, as exemplified here.
The key question here is whether you’re saying you support spending money in vaguely comparable ways to solve vaguely comparable programs, AS LONG AS IT’S SPEND WISELY, in which case this is mainly a logistical/sociological debate, or whether you oppose spending such money no matter what, in which case the primary disagreement is philosophical, and the Phildelphia stuff is basically tangential.
I’m offering up SDI only as an example of a situation in which Conservatives want to take hard earned tax dollars and spend them on what they see as a solution to what they see as a problem… just like liberals do. And also to provide some context for the amount of money we’re talking about here (SDI seems to have cost $39.7 billion over its lifetime). I agree there are many dissimilarities between the two.
Because a hot girlfriend is not necessary to being a productive member of society.
Also, getting laid in general is historically not something that individuals have trouble with. If they do, either they do not care to, in which case it doesn’t affect their productivity, or there are underlying factors which may also hamper productivity which are better attacked than the symptom of not having a mate.
Now, if it were a societal problem, say the boy:girl birth ratio became 3:1 for some reason, then the government might indeed need to step in to regulate individual unions. It might be as simple as redefining marriage to allow for 1 woman to marry 3 men, or there might be more involved agencies that handle…well, placement, for lack of a better immediate word.
But as it stands in reality, this is one of the things a human can do on his or her own that does not need any outside aid, even in today’s society, whereas a human cannot always reliably care for their own health or travel to work.
Really, it’s a crap argument you like to fall back on. If it’s not Selena Gomez, then it’s a Porsche. Why not assign everyone individual bodyguards while you’re at it? It’s facile and silly, and ignores real efforts. Transportation is essential to productivity. We don’t give people a Porsche; instead we work on mass transit and building road and rail infrastructure that’s available to everyone. We don’t assign individual bodyguards; we provide for general military and police defense available to everyone.
In the end, that’s what it boils down to: government needs to provide infrastructure. They need to set things up so people are capable of living and working. Transportation, education, healthcare, and internal and external defense are all necessities people need in order to be good, healthy, productive Americans. These are things that are better addressed at city, state, or federal levels, not the individual, because they affect everyone.
Mind, I’m not approaching this from a feel-good hippy-dippy libruhl viewpoint: I like to think I’m being pragmatic and proud. Giving our citizens the tools they need to be happy, healthy, and wealthy makes us strong as a political and financial player in the world. Even if one thinks CEOs are gods among men, gods still need employees, and corporations with happy, industrious workers are stronger than corporations that do everything they can to turn their employees into indentured servants fearful of losing their jobs and risking their family’s health.
Heck, a well-constructed federal umbrella even helps strengthen states’ rights; by removing barriers to relocation (many of which are already removed, but more could be), it becomes easier for citizens to move to the state they prefer to live in. Right now, a good chunk of resistance against states’ rights is because many people don’t have the opportunity to easily move to a new state, being trapped in a job they don’t dare leave or for some other reason. When people can easily move to the state they want, then it becomes more sensible to tell the federal government to leave some issue or another to the states.
I’m going off in several different tangents now, and this is going really far afield of the original topic, so I’ll stop. I know you’re not a Libertarian, Bricker, and not wholly wedded to the cult of the individual, but sometimes I think it does blind you to areas where a mass of individuals pulling together to support each other works better than each individual trying to go it alone. Often it’s appropriate, certainly; I don’t expect my city to implement some outreach program to ensure I get matched with a 9.5 woman, and I don’t want them outright banning soda. But there is no good reason to make an individual deal with healthcare and insurance by themselves other than an ideological determination that they should do so (and in doing so save you money in some vague way and, because individualism is the wrong approach here, costing you even more in some even more vague way).
They were mandated because people weren’t wearing seat belts. If I had any way of looking it up I’d show you a govt representative stating this in an interview. If you’re wearing your seatbelt they serve almost no use in a forward car crash.
On the other hand, watching threadshitters interrupt those discussions is just boring.
In the interest of not contributing to ennui on the board, please refrain from this sort of nonsense in the future.
[ /moderating ]
Every aspect of its failure was described in detail before Reagan even got the unworkable proposal into Congress.
Following which, much legitimate research was unfunded in order to carry it for a few more years until it could be quietly abandoned without raising the ire of the Right.
(SDI was a big umbrella and there were actually a few projects within it that were worthwhile, but the overall scheme was nonsense and was known to be nonsense at the time that it was proposed.)
(This, of course, does not make any argument in favor of the carrot and stick of subsidized carrots over profitable chips, just a point of clarification that Star Wars was known to be a boondoggle from the beginning.)
Bad example. Since the SDI caused the collapse of the Soviet Union and prevented WWIII, it is easy to argue that it was actually the most cost effective government program of all time. Surely you can find a better example than that?
SDi prevented WW3? SDI might just as easily started it, if things had gone differently.
Suppose you are a Soviet Russian, and suppose you are a paranoid. But I repeat myself. Imagine you are they. Your number one potential enemy has announced a scheme that will make him effectively invulnerable to your deterrent force. He can kill you, you can’t kill him. Thing is, nobody could do it, their scientists and mathematicians use the same numbers we do. But the other thing is, if anybody can do the impossible, its the fucking Americans. Especially if doing the impossible thing is the wrong thing.
Thats what you call a strategic imbalance. Hoo boy, is that ever a strategic imbalance. How would you like to be in their position, responsible for millions of lives and all you got is the word of the Americans that they will be nice? *Dr Strangelove *was a comedy for us. Not so much for them.
And the collapse of the Soviet Union? Trading Gorbachev for Boris the Dancing Bear and then Vlad the Imperial? They must be so grateful, now that about fifty people own the whole goddam country! Yay, laissez faire economics! Boy, those lucky duckies!
*By the by, how many of you remember that Reagan offered to share Star Wars with the Soviets after we were sure it worked, and had it all set up, ready to go, we would let them have it. They were underwhelmed.
That’s not debate. That’s the fallacy of argument from ignorance: sure, the studies look like they’re conclusive. But we’re not social scientists and we don’t know, so maybe they’re not.
In debate, you need to offer evidence. I have provided four peer reviewed studies supporting my point. You can’t simply claim the subject is still open for debate because we’re not social scientists. Find a social scientist who has discovered the flaws you speculate exists, and post his contrary study or his dissenting analysis.
Thank you. Your post is your cite?
Fine. Why must the government be the solution to this ill?