Try driving a vehicle on a public road without insurance. It is mandated. Try not sending your children somewhere for schooling. It is mandated. Sounds like socialism?
Whenever that word is used in some people's minds there is a quake of about 8.9 on the Richter scale racing through their gut, into their central nervous system, streaming to their brain cells, turning them into either concrete or jelly. Laissez-faire may have worked in Adam Smith's 18th century world, but in this day that would entail everyone "doing the right thing". The New Testament is plastered with this tenet. But for that to happen we will have to wait for the Kingdom of Heaven, Nirvana, the Elysian Fields or you-name-it. This does not appear viable today on Planet Earth.
History is replete with man's inhumanity to man. Consider the robber barons of the 19th century, making their millions on the backs of their workers. Today there is growing disparity between the wealthiest and the poorest and the middle class appears to be shrinking. Democracy is at great peril without a solid middle class. The issue, it seems to me, is not a question of less government but of better government.
When the secretary of interior appointed Wilma Watson from a key position in B.P. to assistant secretary of Land and Mineral Management, he should have been given his walking papers. That is liken to putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank and with similar results. If the regulators are in bed with the regulated, we, the people lose. A decent high school debate team could make a sieve out of the notion of a completely non-regulated society. Mankind left the State of Nature and banded together for mutual protection and in doing so gave up some of their individual freedoms. Good choice.
Studies after studies indicate we cannot have a viable democracy if our members first of all are not healthy. My husband was in an area CCU for 26 hours and the bill amounted to a hair under $3,000. One way or another, we are paying for those who cannot. We are the only country in the Western world that does not have some kind of national health care. What we do have is the most expensive system in the world but we are something like 17th on outcomes.
I am appalled at the animosity, rancor and hysterical rhetoric of mean-spirited zealots. They are shrill, irrational, Mama Grizzlies, for example. I don't want to be protected by M. G's. They react; they do not think. We need not wonder why so many of our young people are rude. Look at their role models.
For those interested in thoughtful, meaningful, reasoned debate they might tune into PBS Newshours at 7 p.m. nightly; Washington Week on Fridays at 8 p.m., read Clarence Page. There are some others out there but apparently not enough or at least they do not appear in the Times-Union.
