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Originally Posted by Patriam1066
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2. Healthcare isn't fixed by socialism in this country. Heard of the VA? We aren't China. We don't hire Chinese men with huge brains to run things based on talent. We hire based on affirmative action and patronage. We aren't swedes or japs. We're Americans. This means that at least 1/3 of our population is useless and given that the government will always have some of the useless demographic within it, you shouldn't place so much faith in it
- as an aside, I hate insurance companies and expanding and federally insuring + allowing the accumulation year to year and movement from state to state, company to company of health savings accounts could destroy insurance companies. I say could because who the fuck knows
Oh, and we're fat pieces of shit. It's a dick thing to say but I don't want to pay for the obesity and diabetes of others. I realize that yes, I'm paying for it anyway, but if we do socialized medicine, I want to personally choose the diet of every fat ass I see on the street.
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See now those are good reasons to disagree with healthcare reform as Sanders wants it, not that I agree with them.
Any time you reduce a central authority (like the government), you create a vacuum that is filled by something else. For example, any period at any place in the world that has had a weak, ineffectual, limited government has been rife with organized crime and/or some form of syndicate, usually economic in nature, sometimes religious, sometimes military. It is the nature of humanity to divide and conquer, to establish a hierarchy, and then exploit. I'd argue that of all the syndicates we could have, a representative government is the lesser evil. Yes, representation will sometimes be occluded by corruption, effectiveness will sometimes be compromised by incompetence or cultural issues, but our government has accomplished some amazing things that simply would not have been possible had the libertarian streak of our founding persisted. Medicare was not a bad program until people started living decades longer and costs skyrocketed (due in large part to the insurance paradigm we have going, with middle-men dipping their fingers in everything).
The New Deal is perhaps the greatest example of the value of interventionism ever recorded. Many of its programs are still in place today and enjoy bipartisan support. And I hate to use Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy as positive examples, but Hitler and Mussolini used New-Deal like programs to bring Germany and Italy out of depression in the decade prior to WW2 (construction of the Autobahn, large public works, massive purges of corruption and organized crime in Italy, job programs, cultural engineering). That said, the Axis mostly funded this with fraud and confiscation, but not so in the USA. In the USA it paid dividends.
Dwight Eisenhower once wrote:
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Should any party attempt to abolish social security and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group of course, that believes you can do these things ... Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
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Today, that splinter group is known as the Tea Party, and we can thank Ronald Reagan for laying the foundation to turn it from a splinter group to a major faction in modern politics.