Nene
Senior Member
- Reaction score
- 12
The Gardener said:
I totally understand and agree with your points about Shock Doctrine, People's History, The Price of Low Cost, and Food Inc. I totally agree. Where you and I disagree is that you see the government being a counter to these abuses. I don't. I see the government as being CONTROLLED by these entities. These entities have taken complete control of the government, and they use the government to help strenghten their monopolistic power and make the abuses WORSE.
Look at the health bill, the government is protecting Big Pharma. The FDA is complicit in many drug coverups. The government's implicit allowance for companies to offshore profits, and avoid domestic income tax on them, in effect gives companies a tax break to ship jobs overseas. And as for pollution, hate to say this, but cap and trade is a vehicle that will allow companies to pollute, and passes the cost of this pollution onto taxpayers. You also mention Goldman... the government has bent over backwards to allow the financial firms to engage in crooked economics! It's the government that allowed these firms to engage in "mark to model" fictional accounting. It was the government that repealed the Glass Steagall amendment. And, it was the government that took trillions of current and future taxpayer monies and gave them, without condition, to the banking cartel.
You are right to complain about a company ripping you off for $2000, but where is your anger at the government ripping off to the tune of trillions? What about social security... I'm guessing that through your employment you have paid into Social Security, no? Where is that money? It's gone! You've been ripped off again.
And that is the thesis of my position. If you look through human history, governments change and evolve with the society, and these changes are cycical in nature. Governments start being small, then get larger, then get monopolistic in their own right, and then they get top heavy and there is a crisis. At some point, the cycle reverts back to more honest governance, where citizens get angry enough that the government stops being a parasitic vehicle to loot the wage and salary earners of the country, and is forced back into its role of being an honest regulator. We're not there yet.[/quote:148za7l7]
Gardener, I absolutely agree that our government helps facilitate the businesses in their crooked practices. You don't have to prove that to me, I know that lobbyists are paying off congress all day for legislation in their favors etc. Trust me it's infuriating, especially with this new supreme court decision to allow essentially unlimited campaign contributions! Our system makes it too easy for government to be in the pockets of business, and in fact, if you want campaign funds it almost makes it necessary to be in the pockets of big business. They DON'T pay their fair share of taxes. People claim we have a welfare state but to me, the business is the one living off government at our expense.
Ok, where I disagree with you, is that I still consider business more dangerous than government. Business are allowed to run amuck in this country without repercussions. Now, although I do like some socialists ideas, I do believe that in some instances the private sector is in fact better than government especially when the government regulates these industries and keeps them from completely taking advantage of us. But the reason I trust government over business in something like healthcare is because their is no profit to be made which takes away the motivation to completely screw people over. You could argue that since they are already the government, they have no one to pay off and can be crooked all the please. Good point, but I believe watch dog groups, private or public, are much more likely to call them out on their BS. This is because the government groups won't have billions of their private funds to use and pay people off. I would trust a private company with healthcare if it was nonprofit, which many of them are in other countries.
As for your statement about my lack of anger for taxes, as I see it, we all need to pay our fair share of taxes. Sure I'd like to keep my whole check but then we'd have no public schools, police dept., fire dept., etc. However, I AM in fact upset about the bank bailouts, the ridiculous defense budget and these expensive wars we're paying for. Just a few of these bombs being dropped in the middle east could pay for my law school education, and the education of millions of Americans. The billions given to Israel could really help provide healthcare for those who need it. So to me if taxes is used to help ordinary Americans in need, I'm ok with it, but you are right in that it goes to ridiculous things.
