Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama

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If it was the case that the wealthiest get wealthier while everyone else stays the same I would be fine. What we have now is the wealthy continuing to get wealthier while everyone else gets poorer and the poorest find it increasingly more difficult to just scrape by. Remove the social safety nets set up after the 1930s and I can almost guarantee people will be out on the street living in tent cities. It will be just like 1930-1934 all over again. It's happening in places like Spain, Italy, and Greece due to forced austerity measures. You want to just throw your hands up in the air and say "well, that's just the way it is"?

What is the average wait for a precautionary MRI or PET scan?

ruveyn

It's not the pursuit of wealth that is wrong, but ignoring the plight of other people. For a long time, morality dictated that those who have should help those who don't. I suspect the fall of religion in many ways leads to a decay in noblesse oblige, supporting Danny's statement.

Marshall and I likely agree on the fundamental idea that we should help those in need. He and I differ in how that help should take place. He believes that supporting disadvantaged people should be compulsory, which I believe is a form of theft and the end doesn't justify the means. I believe that voluntary participation can handle things. He thinks I'm out of my mind. Either way, there are a lot of people who can't survive on their own and need some sort of assistance.

The wealthy like to claim they help everyone else out by investing their money. The thought that you are helping out while not really choosing to sacrifice anything is nice. The problem is most of the money goes overseas. Nothing against helping out the rest of the world, but the problem is there is an unsustainable imbalance. I'm wondering if the US is really a dying economic empire that's losing it's grip and we are screwed in any case. If everyone is going down we need to get used to sharing the burden. Otherwise there's going to be a lot of intensely angry and unhappy people and it doesn't look good politically.

I agree with your basic premise, that many wealthy people are exploiting the poor. Where we disagree is that I believe that government has been amplifying these problems, not curtailing them. Government is a much more powerful tool for the wealthy to wield than a business is. Most regulation exists to exploit the public, not to protect it.

I believe the free market will do a better job of raising living standards, as GGPViper stated. I also believe it will encourage wealth accumulation, since savings is rewarded instead of punished. And I believe that wealth accumulation will lead to more charity dollars.

I respect that you disagree with these points, but please don't infer from my opposition to compulsory charity that I want people to suffer.

adb

It looks to me like you are just repeating a theory spread by others. It is people with money and power who came up with those ideas in the first place by funding think-tanks with a pro-free-market agenda. The arguments are too simplistic to appear genuinely researched and the conflicts of interest leads me to believe they are nothing but thinly veiled propaganda put out by people who are afraid of losing their wealth and power.

The truth is most regulations exist for a reason. They exist to protect people from what are known as market externalities, hidden costs incurred on the public through business activity, often unbeknownst to the buyer or seller. My parents have traveled to Beijing, and the smog is so thick on most winter days you literally can't see to the end of the block. But who pays for the ill-effects, not just degrading property value by obscuring scenic vistas, but generating severe health problems when the air is literally hard to breathe?

I'm not going to deny that the American government has a lot of antiquated or downright boneheaded regulations. I just disagree that the solution is always getting rid of regulations. I'd prefer we fix regulations, make them smarter and more functional. The problem is our government is lazy and broken because all the electorate cares about is simplistic ideology. We no longer have pragmatic representatives who are informed or creative enough to serve the public. These days the Republican party consists almost entirely of free-market ideologues and Democrats spend most their energy simply serving as an ideological counterweight to the Republicans. As a result nothing gets done. Old antiquated regulations stay on the books because nobody can agree on how to fix them. Republicans insist on throwing the baby out with the bath water, proposing radical harmful deregulation, and Democrats have their hands tied.

Because our politicians are so tied up in BS ideological battles they literally don't have time to do their real job. As a result most of the legislation that gets introduced isn't coming from original ideas of the politicians themselves. It's all coming from lobbyists and think-tanks that can spend all their time coming up with ideas on how to regulate the very corporations that hire them. Getting rid of regulations completely and throwing the baby out with the bath water isn't the solution. Electing politicians who can think of solutions instead of idiot zealots is the only solution.

The problem when political solutions are based on ideology is that it is lazy thinking. I don't agree that it's just the Republicans either as there are a lot of cases where corporations actually play both sides. They appeal to free-market ideology when they think deregulation will help their bottom line but then turn around and make pro-government arguments when regulation is in their favor. In both cases one side or the other is appealed to.

I've never seen a time like this when politics was so blatantly slimy. In my own state the television is barraged with ads against building a new bridge to Canada (paid mostly by Canadian tax payers BTW) which would actually improve commerce because some billionaire who owns the current toll bridge doesn't want competition. If he has that much money to spend on advertizements trying to protect his rent source, couldn't he be "creating jobs" instead?

I've had a libertarian perspective for well over 20 years, before which I just didn't care about politics. I'm not a Ron Paul libertarian. I'm not a self-proclaimed austrian economist. I simply came to the conclusion, on my own, that in most situations, government causes more problems than it solves. I'm not anti-government. I'm not an anarchist. I won't sit here and say that all regulation and government should be abolished.

Protecting from externalities is an entirely reasonable objective for regulation if those externalities are defined in terms of property rights and property rights are clearly defined. But in the political world, it's all subjective based on the opinion of the majority or with some subversive behavior, the opinion of those with the most money. For me, I don't want either the majority or those with the most money telling me what I can and cannot do with my own property.

I honestly don't believe that ideology is the problem in congress. You make it sound as if the democrats are ineffective because of republican ideology, but frankly both are bought and paid for by the lobbyists and think-tanks you're describing. Being bought is the only way they get into office, since individuals don't really have the financial resources to win an election.

There are bad people and there are bad people with money. Nothing we do is going to prevent this, so it seems to me that we shouldn't enable them any more than we have to. Government is just giving them law as a tool.