[quote name='thrustbucket']Imho, the larger the government, the more you invite corruption. The only way to truly set up a large government and have it possibly be more fair and successful is to make all the citizens employees of the government, but switch to a moneyless resource based system.
I've recently been trying to figure out where exactly things turned to shit and the election process was hijacked by corporations and lobbyists. I have it narrowed down to the mid-late 1800's, but nothing more specific so far.
Good question. After a certain point (Just after lincoln, imo) I would say yes to most policies that really mattered. If you can think of policies that wouldn't take money away from the corporations/central banks or wouldn't benefit them - then probably those.
It says that on a long enough time line, once you have grown enough super-rich lobby groups, it really only makes sense to fund and support no more than two parties. It's much easier to hedge your bets with two, while still letting the people think there are differences.
It would be far more accurate to say that Government is burning it to the ground. Pinning it to a political party just makes you a tool (no offense meant). That's why just about every 10 years we are sick of one party and ready for the other. For some reason we are incapable of seeing the larger picture; that it isn't a particular party
ing things, it's the entities that got them elected and pull their strings.
Times change. People change. It's been said that the liberals of today will be the conservatives in 20 years. I think that's mostly true, and mostly always has been. There is a roughly two decade lag in political, thus party, stance. This also means that the most conservative folks die off, as the rest slide more and more liberal.
But really, like I said, I'm pretty fully convinced now that elected politicians are irrelevant to major policy. Pay very close attention to how many, and which, politicians slide in and out of corporate elite positions before, in-between, and after their political appointments. There is a reason for that and they never really stop working for the corporation. Cheney is the most popular and visible example, but this is prevalent across the board.[/QUOTE]
Obviously we disagree on the extent to which either party is equally bad or culpable for the state of things (I mean, I think it's not counter-intuitive to hold the position that a Democrat is as perfectly capable of being corrupt or unduly influenced as anyone, but only one party actually makes the granting of power and benefits to large corporations a core, exhalted position), but those are all fine answers. Thanks for taking the time on them.
[quote name='bmulligan']Capitalism, or free enterprise, is the natural state for men who desire to profit from their own effort and self determination. When we start believing we know how to spend someone else's profits better than they know themselves, we become tyrants, not liberals.[/QUOTE]
That sounds great in theory, but in practice, all you get is "privatized profits, public losses." Our current economic crisis is an obvious example. Even if we accept that letting Wall Street collapse would be too harmful to the rest of us, the question still remains: how and why did we let them become so vital to the rest of the system in the first place? Even if you believe we should cut all these failing corporations loose, we would have needed oversight to ensure we didn't end up here in the first place. Any way you shake it, regulation enters the picture at some point.
At the end of the day, I fundamentally disagree with Marxist theory on how value is created, but I didn't throw out the examples above just for shits and giggles: we have weekends, standardized work weeks, and child labor laws thanks to
Socialist ideals (and in some cases, the actual party). Neither government (for the lefties) nor the market (for the righties) is the perfect solution alone. In tandem, however, they're pretty damn good.
