This weekend Congress will vote on a universal health plan.
It’s not actually a health-care plan- it’s a health-insurance plan, but, it’s at least a step in the right direction.
The fear mongering by Republicans has reached full scream, and many, even those who are uninsured, are screaming along with them. This has been positioned as the “all in” bet for the Obama administration.
All of that aside- I’d like to point out that there isn’t a single government worker who lacks health insurance. If the Republicans are against government provided health care, the first thing they should be forced to do is to cut all government spending on health care for every government employee. Leave the VA and the Military health care alone, since they have their own health care systems, but- all the rest- fend for yourselves.
The current “system” is absolutely a failure. With the number of uninsured continuing to climb, along with passing the costs on to those who are still able to afford it, the system is speeding the economic divide in this country.
We’re headed for a class war- the über rich, the great poor and the Government worker. Let’s force the largest union, government workers, to have to pick their side. Who will they want to administer health care? The corporate insurers who have paid executives millions, or government workers like themselves, who believe that they work in the best interest of this country (or so we hope).
Put this argument on the table and see how much support the “Party of NO!” gets for its anti-government-run health care program gets.
Me thinks, things would change.
If you like this idea- please forward it to everyone you know. Time is of the essence.
Classic DL as stated earlier………..wait and snipe at a tertiary topic. :) ………just pickin.
Short answer, Jesse is not compromising David. He has a choice, but neither choice includes freedom. The following I believe covers his list of actions:
1) Pay taxes
2) Not pay taxes
If he chooses #2, he eventually will be captured and detained. His assets will be liquidated and taken and he may spend some time in jail. Or……he may choose to pay his taxes and avoid the consequences of choosing #2. Do really feel this was a meeting of the minds? That Jesse choosing #1 is a comprimise on his part? There is no such thing as a compromise when the initial premise is do what we want you to do or we take everything from you.
Do you understand DL? Your premise is incorrect.
Robert, you do have a point — the choices available to Jesse given his position are not attractive, but others in history have faced similarly unattractive choices.
Gandhi thought the British Empire’s salt tax was wrong, and he knew the penalty for not paying it was imprisonment. Did Gandhi compromise his principles, continuing to pay the salt tax? No, he did not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Satyagraha
http://www.thenagain.info/webchron/india/SaltMarch.html
It’s one thing to say, as Jesse did, that “It is either you or them, compromise is impossible in this realm.” It’s another thing to actually make the choices one makes in life match one’s words.
David,
People seem to take all of my quotations out of context. I said, “To whom does your life belong? It is either you or them, compromise is impossible in this realm.”
I can be forced into two (three tops) acts that are both objectionable to me. 1) paying taxes, 2) imprisonment, 3) (resisting imprisonment and facing) death. All of these are me being coerced or forced. It is not an option for me to 1) not pay taxes, 2) not be imprisoned for not paying taxes without 3) being killed for resisting imprisonment. If there was a choice that didn’t involve me being coerced, I would obviously opt for that choice.
Gene,
You can argue that less tax is moral but what makes your desire for taxes for roads, or police different than David Esrati’s tax for…you name it? It seems to me that the real question revolves not around on what the money is being spent but in how it is procured. If you concede the right for others to determine what they will take from you (without your individual consent) and spend it on whatever they want (without your individual consent) which is, by definition, what taxes are, then you don’t have a leg to stand on. You end up being one more person trying to get me to mix in your poison to my milk because it is “less poisonous” than the Davids’.
I think most adults understand the big difference between “important” things and “non-important” things. I just threw out roads and schools becasue it is often used in arguments. But you are right, I don’t want taxes to go to schools and a lot of other things. Roads though are not owned by individuals so the roads we have are owned by government and in order for me to get my GD beer I need trucks to deliver said beer to places I go, so dammit roads are important, otherwise no beer.
You need to play the game of “There will be taxes, what do you want them used for…” This is a different game then not wanting taxes. I am working within what is happening, and what is happening is I am taxed $.21 for batteries that cost me $2.99. That will not change soon. So I argue to lower that tax and question how the tax is used. That is the game I am in. You can sit with Plato and argue why “thought is more important than previous thought…” while I will try to work within a given system and argue to change it. No man is an island unless they don’t want to play the game of “life.” Well, looks like you are sitting alone.
To be a part of this game called “life” people remove Plato’s thought and instead work with Obama thoughts. I agree with you philosophically, but right now I am concentrating on the here and now, and that is we are taxed, we are taxed too much, and our tax dollars are being wasted.
Gene,
Ask for David L to let you borrow the new book he just bought when he is finished. :)
Glad that you adults understand the difference between “important” and “unimportant” things.
I will not play that game and I think others would choose to come sit with me on my island.
A book by Plato? or Socretes?
I am happy to decide what is important and what is not. Beer trucks need roads, not parks. That was easy.
Happy tax collecting…..
(Melissa Harris Lacewell comments) that Tea Party participants are “arguing that this government has no right to levy taxes or make policy” out of a “rising tide of racial anxiety” and “bigotry” that remind her of the 1916 film Birth of a Nation. (David Lauri)
So Professor Harris-Lacewell sees bigotry (without defining it) in the Tea Party movement? Could be, but if Harris-Lacewell is anything like the other intellectual lilliputians who dwell within the academic fraud known as black studies, she sees bigotry in everything from the English language (why do they call it a ‘black hole?) to the colors of rainbow (no black there, either). Fact is, the Old Bandito used this forum just after the Great Helmsman’s election to predict that when the feel-good of the election faded, and the failures of Obama’s philosophy started to snowball, that all of the voters inevitable criticisms would be dismissed as racism. As a tactic, this has been the tried and true strategy employed by the left for years not just for limiting debate, but for discrediting and minimalizing the opposition. No more. Like the protagonist of the tale by Aesop of the boy who cried wolf one too many times, the opposition has used up all their credibility by trying to smear the most productive and law-abiding of this society. Will it get ugly? The Old Bandito guarantees it…..