The Partisan Divide on Issues

[Bob Butler 54]

(12-19-2020, 11:26 AM)beechnut79 Wrote: Over on the 4T website I brought up an issue that doesn’t get nearly the coverage that it should, and that is the lack of affordable housing and how developers are hamstrung by restrictive zoning laws and homeowners associations.

Also feel it is time to legalize or at least decriminalize sex work. The PTB now should realize that prohibition of this activity hasn’t been any more successful than it was with liquor a century ago. And yet some sex workers themselves don’t want legalization because then they would have to start paying taxes on it.

Perhaps the legal drinking age should be lowered as well to bring us in line with the rest of the world. The US is just about the only place in the developed world where you have to be 21 to have a drink. And it is being enforced in a very draconian way. Where I live if you purchase alcohol products at the grocery, if the cashier is less than 21, he or she can’t even ring up the sale. A manager has to be called, thus holding up the lines.

I would also like to see us move away from a strict at will employment model towards a system where a just cause is needed for employers to fire somebody. Several years ago I wrote a book titled JUDAS TIMES SEVEN, which deals with the dark side of office politics. Should have become a best seller but didn’t have the necessary funds for prom and still don’t.  Maybe if I win the lottery.

Will leave you with these four but I am sure there will be more.

I don’t really see those as crisis issues.  They are worthy issues, perhaps.  But none of them have killed as many as COVID or a crisis war, and none of them have drawn as large a set of protests as Black Lives Matter.  I could see them as minor planks in a major party platform, but not as leading off big deal planks during critical times.

I may be biased in that I am looking at crises as a way of moving further from the Agricultural Age and towards the Information Age.  Broadly, the issues you suggest are not doing stuff like getting rid of slaves, kings and dictators.  I have my arrow of progress: human rights, democracy and equality.  None of your issues scream of those.

Your four at least might be lumped broadly together as deregulation.  At various time people thought they had a good idea, but maybe it wasn’t a good idea after all, and maybe times have changed.  Freedom from the government intruding on people’s freedom, hurrah?  Banning dangerous and harmful behaviors, hurrah?

I do want to regulate safety, though.  If some elite values profits putting worker lives at risk, I want the government to come down hard on the side of the worker.  If another elite wants to play loose with the stock market or other banker stuff, tough, I don’t want an economic collapse due to greed.

On the other hand I wouldn’t think much of regulating morality or taste.  If some Bible thumping fundamentalist wants to ban whores, or some neighborhood association thinks it would be neat to paint all houses in the neighborhood white, I will be very dubious.

And some things change.  Drunks responded to poor working conditions in the Gilded Age by beating up their wives were a real problem once.  We are now far more moderate in our alcohol and drug abuse.  We also recognize that prohibition does not work well, that people get what they want, and criminals will profit by it.  Rules which seemingly looked wise once now look less wise.  Neither extreme of prohibition or rampant public abuse seems desirable.

Again, you present some interesting ideas, but not crisis problems.  If after the COVID vaccines get plentiful enough to make a herd immunity, and everyone declares the crisis over and wants to binge getting high and whoring, we are not apt to stay in crisis mode just to get rid of the regulations against drugs and whores.