Ronald Reagan speaks out against Socialized Medicine, and..

[Spence]

This is what I think, regarding health care....and you can substitute most any area.


There are many health care facilities out there where the doctors, etc, feel an obligation to help those that can not afford services. They can do it on an individual basis...that is done right now.....or they can form a coalition of...."we help the needy doctors" They can set up the rules and the requirements, maybe they will contribute money to an insurance to spread the risk...will have a limit...and they can be the deciders. They know their limits and what they can do. Maybe some do not want to join..OK.......and if no one does..then the poor do not get taken care of. This works for most any issue. What happens now, is we are taxed to take care of the problem, it does not get taken care of and there is no money left for making it voluntary. Private individuals can make it happen, given a chance. I must say....in the USA today, I do not know of one person that can not get medical help even if they have no money.

I agree completely. The government trying to do what "we" (the collective we) asked them to do is the problem. We need to tell the government we have decided to take back our responsibility to help our fellow man and then follow up on it. I do think that fixes almost any issue.

[WoVeU]

We have failed in this country to understand the legitimate role of government is these affairs. There is, in my mind, a very simple litmus test if government should be involved. It is this. If the citizenry are taxed, then all citizens need access to the function for which they were taxed. E.g. Roads, everyone is taxed and everyone has access to roads, just obey a few rules and you can use them. Parks, fire department, police, armies all give benefits to all citizens. These become legitimate functions of government.

When taxes go beyond these things, government grows beyond these things and begins to compete with private business, privacy, personal interest, and personal charity. And you create a tangled web, and more of the same is generated in another iteration, a few more loops and continuous feedback and you have what we have...a quagmire!

Taxes should support systems that truly lie in the public domain. That, by there ere existence all of the citizenry derive benefit. The aforementioned criticals leave room for fat building and puffing up. Well don't we need some more things....(well that is another post.)

[WoVeU]

"another post"

...don't we need an FAA, a TSB, an FBI, an EPA, an FDA. Hmmm....yeah I guess!?!? Are we still serving the entire mass? Well, close enough I guess. Well once you have the EPA and the FDA you are going to get into other health and medical governance. And then you get into, people need to eat and have shelter...it is hard to cut the cord.

We need to approach it in the way this falls out. As we branch further and further the government part has to get smaller (pretty quick) and the government part has to be a leadership and guiding core force, NOT "THE" force! Or you are just asking for Frankenstein.

Because this all quickly unravels. You get Health Care and Medicine of high structure and regulation...then you get the greasy sales guy/banker with his new title Insurance Man...and this is the beginning of the end. You set up economic agencies and regulations and you have your FED and Central Bank...then more regs and increasingly entangled and fancy financial instruments and the next thing you know Ole Jed's a Millionaire and you have Investment Banking and they are, or part of, or holding hands with the Insurance Guy and the whole thing is just a nightmare. And the bigger these things get the more they have the Great Pyramids and fat cats sitting at the top making 356 Million a year. The whole thing is one big institutionalized slipper slope. It then gets counter play of the socialist form to hold that in check...and then it just becomes a picture of big fat cat's and the poor dirty and hungry alley cats. And in the middle are all the people that make it work...the 42% doing the mouse killing and covering our own poop and licking our own a553s...and we keep finding ourselves waking up with more a553s in our face waiting for their turn! After a while you get a $h!/ taste in your mouth!

[WoVeU]

Eric...the problem is not one of 51% or 49%.

It is one of the top 1/5 of the country's people having 80% of the wealth. It is the fact that between 1975 and current, the bottom 80% of the income brackets have seen a decline in their income. Bloomberg.com recently reported on a study showing that "top private-equity and hedge fund managers made more in 10 minutes than average-paid U.S. workers earned all of last year". We have princes and serfs.

It is a fact that the rich have been getting richer and the rest poorer. And maybe that isn't a great thing for America. More of us are beginning to believe that. Not that it has changed our attitude about government's role in attaining a more equal distribution of wealth.

Americans are far more likely than Europeans to believe that individuals, not society, are responsible for their own failures. It is inbred, part of our cultural tradition. If the individual fails economically, we believe that he is at fault. If he had worked harder, gone to school longer, been wiser, he would have been successful.

I don't get it BB? I know Doss, Derek, Spence, myself and others to some degree have seen many, many, many people...family, extended family, acquaintances, neighbors, neighbors of family, friends of family....we are talking personal witness...of people who play the system! I never heard much witness form you...are you writing from 1935? How is the weather? Do you miss the flapper girls? Did you hear about that big Dam and the TVA...man so much you must be seeing!

I am talking about people who uh-hmmm "borrow" from family. Go to churches and get food, get food stamps, get unemployment or low earnings (working a whopping 22 hours a week) or don't work and have a welfare check, getting medical cards, their kids get free school breakfast and lunch and free supplies at school...then back to the church again. And guess what...got beer in the fridge and a $50 bag of weed in the boot behind the recliner and some recreational scrips (brought to you by your friendly neighborhood medical card of somebodies somewhere!) Oh, yeah, and they sell "just a little dope", sew the insurance company here or there, and some got hurt a few times and have medical problems so they get a SS check too. Then the ones that work 350 to 1600 hours a year at a BS job file taxes and they get 7,500 back some how after paying in 2,250.

And don't get me on the Old Folk. How many people do you know down there that worked a cumulative 0 to 11 years their entire life and they get a Social Security check. I had these in the family too! I had more physical work under my belt by the time I was 22 than 15% of the people I see getting checks...and you can take that too the bank!

BB, I really love your view point on a wide variety of things but I don't know where all of these "poor down trodden", "taken advantage of", "never had a chance coming out of the gate" people are! Because the ones I describe to the ones you outline in my experience since the mid-80's is about 25 or 40:1.

[Dossenator]

WoVeU....great post. I currently know many people capable of working...they don't because why work when the government gives you everything you need. They somehow have the money for big screen tvs, new vehichles, lots of soda/beer, some cigarettes, trips on weekends, etc, etc...but they take food stamps, kids get free or reduced lunches, go to free clinics for health care, etc, etc....and they too get back more money from taxes then they pay in. The system is broken.

Thomas Jefferson: “A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.” (This is the path our country is headed down.)

Margaret Thatcher: "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money"

[Derek]

Reagan was rich most of his life...living his final years of dementia on a palace of a ranch.

I am more concerned with the fact that the avarage retiree from the state of Florida has a retirement of less than $18,000 and insurance payments of $6,000 per year.

Rich people can afford to have a different ideology...one former rich lady is quoted as saying..."let them eat cake"....the Reagan of her age.

Except that you interpret the events the wrong way.

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/let-them-eat-cake.html

I believe this phrase is misunderstood and used in class warfare.

[Eric]

It's true that there's no proof that quote was ever said by Marie-Antoinette. Capitalism as an economic policy is a lot different from feudal tyranny

[billybud]

Capitalism as an economic policy is a lot different from feudal tyranny

And can have many similarities. That is what has given rise to the term "feudal capitalism".

A system where a minority aristocracy controls an inordinate percentage of the wealth and resources.

[Spence]

Capitalism as an economic policy is a lot different from feudal tyranny

And can have many similarities. That is what has given rise to the term "feudal capitalism".

A system where a minority aristocracy controls an inordinate percentage of the wealth and resources.

That is basically the definition of how any socialist county in this world works. You have a controlling group and the people. I see this as exactly what the liberals in this government want. They promote the dumbing down of society to make people dependent on the government. They control most of the wealth in this country. There are more liberal mega rich people in this country then there is conservatives. They want to promote a system that doesn't allow anyone they don't want to join them in. The whole goal of a socialist government is to make the people so dependent on government that the leaders can not be removed from power. This country has been in a downward spiral since FDR and his progressives came to power. It only excellerated under LBJ and since. Even the mainstream Republicans have fallen under the spell of keeping their aristicracy in tact. Our "leaders" in government have completed a total takeover of this country and we as a people are too stupid to kick them out. Now we have aristocratic families that keep promoting their own into government as a matter of birthright and we are the sheep. We have let them take our freedoms away under the guise of keeping us safe. We have turned our lives over to them and now we are trying to give them the power to decide whether we "deserve" to live or die.

[donovan]

Someone explain to me the difference between Big Government, Big Business, Big Unions, the Democrats, the Republicans.

Seems to me, they all have one purpose and unitedly fight for it. Maintain the status quo.

[Spence]

Someone explain to me the difference between Big Government, Big Business, Big Unions, the Democrats, the Republicans.

Seems to me, they all have one purpose and unitedly fight for it. Maintain the status quo.

That is exactly it. The trees in the forest just parted.

[Eric]

Someone explain to me the difference between Big Government, Big Business, Big Unions, the Democrats, the Republicans.

Seems to me, they all have one purpose and unitedly fight for it. Maintain the status quo.

Well, as I see it, the type of "capitalism" that liberals like to denigrate is the kind that not one American supports besides big business, and that's "crony capitalism" or a "corpotrocracy". Such as Michael Moore's new documentary, which does not focus on actual capitalism, despite its title. Liberals confuse that for actual capitalism, which is just another form of big government playing around with your tax dollars. Want to know what this green movement is all about? I hate to sound like a McCarthy guy, but it's an eco-marxist tinged movement at its core; but politicians don't care about that, they are exploiting it for more power and backhanded deals.

[Spence]

Big business is not on the side of capitalism. They are as much socialist as mister Obama himself. Small business is where capitalism works the best.

[donovan]

Someone explain to me the difference between Big Government, Big Business, Big Unions, the Democrats, the Republicans.

Seems to me, they all have one purpose and unitedly fight for it. Maintain the status quo.

Well, as I see it, the type of "capitalism" that liberals like to denigrate is the kind that not one American supports besides big business, and that's "crony capitalism" or a "corpotrocracy". Such as Michael Moore's new documentary, which does not focus on actual capitalism, despite its title. Liberals confuse that for actual capitalism, which is just another form of big government playing around with your tax dollars. Want to know what this green movement is all about? I hate to sound like a McCarthy guy, but it's an eco-marxist tinged movement at its core; but politicians don't care about that, they are exploiting it for more power and backhanded deals.

It is easy to have a clean sheet of paper philosophy and I think we should...grounds us. Corruption is a cancer to good ideas as well as bad ideas.

The only companies this country has allowed to fail, are the small businesses that are the backbone of our economy and the solution to what Mr. Billybud indicates are the problems. Allowing them to fail, which is OK, and not the large corporations, which is not OK, only makes it worse.

Laissez-faire has never been practiced in this country in many lifetimes. Austrian Economics of Von Misses & Haycek hold the economic solution for the this country. Their institute is in Auburn, Alabama. http://mises.org/

[Derek]

Capitalism as an economic policy is a lot different from feudal tyranny

And can have many similarities. That is what has given rise to the term "feudal capitalism".

A system where a minority aristocracy controls an inordinate percentage of the wealth and resources.

That is basically the definition of how any socialist county in this world works. You have a controlling group and the people. I see this as exactly what the liberals in this government want. They promote the dumbing down of society to make people dependent on the government. They control most of the wealth in this country. There are more liberal mega rich people in this country then there is conservatives. They want to promote a system that doesn't allow anyone they don't want to join them in. The whole goal of a socialist government is to make the people so dependent on government that the leaders can not be removed from power. This country has been in a downward spiral since FDR and his progressives came to power. It only excellerated under LBJ and since. Even the mainstream Republicans have fallen under the spell of keeping their aristicracy in tact. Our "leaders" in government have completed a total takeover of this country and we as a people are too stupid to kick them out. Now we have aristocratic families that keep promoting their own into government as a matter of birthright and we are the sheep. We have let them take our freedoms away under the guise of keeping us safe. We have turned our lives over to them and now we are trying to give them the power to decide whether we "deserve" to live or die.

Exactly...and the members of the Communist party live in poverty just like the rest of the Soviet Unions population.

There is no difference. It's class warfare, except the rules don't apply to the ruling class.