(08-21-2016, 06:47 AM)Mikebert Wrote:Quote:The common red / blue difference is in beliefs in how effective the government can be.Are you sure about that? Seems to me folks on the red side have no problem with government in the military and criminal justice sphere. We maintain by far the largest military establishment on Earth. Did the Red side oppose the Reagan buildup? Did they oppose the Gulf War, Afghanistan or Iraq? Did we not engage in a massive expansion of the correction system in the 1990’s. Was that opposed by the Red side?
Could it be that the Red-Blue split is on whether people have or lack optimism in the general goodness of human nature, with the Red side have trust only in those who have already proved themselves competent in amassing wealth or exercising power without judging how those 'competent' people amassed their wealth or how and for what purposes the powerful exercise their power, and the Blue side that those who have wealth and power are to have some accountability to the rest of us?
Government can be very effective if it fosters the power of elites and rewards those elites well by exploiting, intimidating, and repressing the masses in an anti-egalitarian society (fascism and neo-feudalism) or one in which life is a privilege contingent upon obedience to political and bureaucratic authorities (Marxism-Leninism, Baathism)?
Quote:The Red side opposes government doing stuff they don’t approve of. So does the Blue side. Here is where you could invoke values. For example, much of Trump’s appeal is because a lot of folks are sick and tired of progressives stuffing PC down their throats. Now we are supposed to celebrate men wearing dresses? What the fuck is wrong with America?
Which is not to say that the Red side has developed its own set of 'politically-correct' values. It will be very easy to give a strawman description of right-wing PC... the common man has his noblest purpose in enriching and pampering extant elites, ideally traditional ones. Economic gain for the elites and their consummate indulgence form the noblest objective in life, and suffering for it is the duty of us all. The economic bottom line is the noblest of all truths, and anything that gets in its way --even science -- must be shown the error of its ways. Anthropogenic global warming is a myth because it runs afoul of some corporate profits.
Quote:Quote:For someone embracing red beliefs, government is inefficient, corrupt and ineffective.When it is doing Blue team projects. Conservatives don’t make as a big issue about inefficient, corrupt and ineffective Defense or Corrections spending. And ditto for the Blue team.
That's about how it goes. It is easy for the Blues to attribute economic and cultural sadism to the Reds -- a world reminiscent of the Jim Crow South in the South and the nastiness of the Gilded Age Up North... and in return people not in the elites get pie in the sky if they have lived in accordance with the demands of the economic elites and then die. But if they fail to comply, they go where the Nazis and Stalinists are. The Reds, on the other side, see a world of intoxication, abortion, homosexuality, fornication, riot, inadequate wealth and indulgence for God's chosen elites, weakening of religion, and above all else -- free-thinking, should the Blues get their way. To prevent such the Red side needs some real dungeons and torture chambers that scare people into submissive faith and productivity, the latter without asking any questions of the purposes of that productivity.
The nightmarish depiction that Marxists have of capitalism at its worst is a non-solution. Marxism is itself a non-solution because, like capitalism at its worst, it creates irresponsible power in bureaucracies. The ideal of the monastery or convent that denies the world is at most for a few (Odin and I would have probably been sent in such a direction... nothing could have better fit autism in those days than copying manuscripts by hand, I suppose).
American institutions, at lest outside of the places of heavy slave-use, were made for yeoman farmers and small shopkeepers who lacked the means to buy lobbyists. They were made for a candle-maker, a tavern-keeper, or a farmer not known six farms away -- and not for Exxon-Mobil, Koch Industries, Procter&Gamble, Wal*Mart, General Motors, Bank of America, or Microsoft. They were not made for expressing 'class' interests, either. Government representing economic interests instead of people, whether Mussolini's fascismo, Tito's Socialist variant, or the mess that we have in America as government by lobbyist, is a perversion of Jeffersonian democracy as our civics texts told us in high school.
Of course corporate subsidies, enforcement of unconscionable contracts, and wars for profit are lucrative. Those need to go. How well this Crisis goes will depend upon how well we divest ourselves of bad habits that we have accreted in recent decades.
Quote:Quote:Tax and spend is anathema.Yes because of what they want to spend it on.
Quote:When in doubt, cut taxes and force the government to cut services.On stuff they don’t like, such as programs for the poor, education, safety, environmental, and the regulatory state in general. They generally have supported expansion in Defense outlays. Blue folks will say similar things about spending on Red priorities, but the fact is the Blue team has a lot more priorities they want paid for by other people than does the Red side. So they do not beat that drum nearly as much.
Quote:On the blue side, there is a belief that the government can do much good.Is that really a belief any more, or just wishful thinking? I support the ACA because (1) it was my team and (2) the Medicaid expansion benefits family members. I do not support it because I know it is a good program. Those folks I know who are not on Medicaid and who use the system do not have good things to say about it, even with the subsidies. I know exactly how they feel. When I was in grad school I went without insurance during the years I was on a NSF fellowship (TAs got employer-provided insurance). When I had been in college (and was on my parents plan) there were student medical insurance plans offered that were very reasonably priced. The reason was they could only be used by a student population who were young and healthy. But then the state government mandated that these plans cover mental health issues. Now students are at a higher risk of this, and so the premiums shot up to unaffordable levels. Now the government is mandating that my 20’s self should buy this expensive insurance that covers stuff I don’t have to worry about. I would also note that back in my 20’s I was a big fan of Free to Choose.
The problem is our blank-check medical system. Anything can work very well when it is given unlimited funds with which to do what it deems appropriate. Give me unlimited funds and I just might write a symphony. But that would take ten years or so (with the unlimited funds I would take care of myself very well), and it would largely be a plagiarism. Healthy economies do not depend upon the blank check; they insist upon cost constraints. That's how we avoid having banal cars that cost ten years' pay for a barber. Competition keeps prices from soaring into the stratosphere.
Quote:I was unwilling to subsidize other people’s health care back then when I was poor. Now that I am rich I have no problem with that and am perfectly willing to pay the taxes for single payer. But I can completely understand other rich folks who object to being forced to subsidize other people, particularly when it is in a program rife with rent-seeking. They see it as theft—that is, immoral. Here’s another values issue. If we get single payer someday it’s is not going to be because the folks who objected to it on moral ground have changed their minds. It will be because they were defeated.[/quote]
... and I figure that if I paid my full share I would be subsidizing people who have had lives of smoking, drinking, whoring, drug use, and extreme obesity. At the least I have "Mormon lungs" and a "Mormon liver". Had my autism been caught earlier instead of being badly diagnosed as problems of dealing with anger I might have gotten some appropriate direction that would have saved me much grief and made me a productive contributor to our society instead of shunting me off into ill-paying jobs that I could never hold. Maybe it is a good thing that I never married and sired children, except that I really am good with children. There was adoption, and maybe my wife (likely a fellow person with Asperger, as likes tend to seek out likes at the least in culture) might have gotten some dirty looks as we raised children who look nothing like either of us.
I would rather have Asperger's syndrome than low intelligence, sexual sadism (arguably a definitive evil), substance abuse, paranoia, schizophrenia, sociopathy or psychopathy, or even pathological narcissism. I am rational and intelligent; you can trust me driving you and you can trust me with your children and your assets.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.