fett on 24/3/2010 at 05:00

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Things I've realized gunsmoke doesn't really understand:

1) Economics

2) Forms of Government

3) Chaos Theory

4) Aging

5) History, U.S. or otherwise

6) The nature of illness, physical or mental

7) The pharmaceutical industry

8) Pain, suffering, trauma

9) Compassion

10) Remedial Sociology

Have I missed anything? :confused:

Fafhrd on 24/3/2010 at 05:52

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Oh, he'll just go in to debt! Of course! And then he'll start benefiting from Medicaid. And Disability. And Welfare. And nobody else will be effected economically, and everybody will be happy.

Waitaminnit...

Nicker on 24/3/2010 at 09:07

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The only reason that the Rugged Individualists(TM) can make the insensitive and self aggrandizing claims they do is because they have the comfortable foundation of collective human effort and accomplishment to stand on.

demagogue on 24/3/2010 at 13:52

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Another thing to remember -- America isn't libertarian, certainly not since the fall of Lochner cir. 1933.

It's a welfarist liberal democracy ("liberal" in the classic sense) in that there are certain rights the gov't can't touch, and the running MO is the gov't doesn't get involved unless there's some important public interest is at stake (risk, market failures) that private action can't solve. But if there is that kind of interest, the gov't can regulate to the proportional extent required, and maybe leave some market choice if it can. America was a forerunner of the modern liberal regulatory state at a time when Continental Europe was still picking sides between Fascism and Communism. And a public-driven health care system is well within the boundaries of the modern American tradition... It's only a matter of political will that it took 60 years to deliver.

I sometimes feel like the Tea Party movement is a little ironically out of touch with American history and tradition and has some kind of revisionist fantasy of a tradition that never really existed.

june gloom on 24/3/2010 at 15:45

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I think the thing that everyone in this thread is forgetting in favour of ideological sniping and flamebaiting is that this bill is just the first step. It may be broken, it may be successful, but some parts of it are going to be changed or amended over the next several years when/if they prove to not be working as intended.

I support the idea of health care reform for several reasons; I just don't think the bill we have now in its current form will perform entirely as promised, and I don't like the manner in which it was passed (though, realistically, I'm well aware that a bipartisan solution would have been unlikely because Congress can't stop being children long enough to get along.)

Time will tell, but Democrats with conservative constituents better start looking for another job, because they're going to be gone in November, no matter what SD thinks. Majorities always balance themselves out, and the Democrats pretty much dominated in 2008.