We all expect help for most citizens.

December 2, 2012 By 13 Comments

I’m getting annoyed at the swaths of people saying that those who cast their vote for a Democrat just want the government to take care of them.  Yes, we do.  That’s the government’s job.  And don’t act like you don’t want people taken care of; you just think we should give tax cuts to the wealthy so they can create jobs and such (i.e., so they can take care of you and the vast majority of the country that is not rich).

It’s all a matter of who we choose to take care of 99% of the population.  I am just slightly more comfortable giving much of that responsibility to the people whose sole job is to increase the quality of life for American citizens.  I’m more content to believe help will more readily come from the entity that gave us the minimum wage, rather than from a group comprised largely of people who would pay their workers less than minimum wage if they could.

Filed Under: Politics 13 Comments
  • Uncle Bobolink

    The only trouble is, a government powerful enough to do anything for you can do anything to you.

    • http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wwjtd JT Eberhard

      That makes absolutely no sense. Our government handed out a stimulus, but it could not (without revolt and without getting shut down by check and balances) kill gay people as a matter of principle.

      We should deny power just because it’s potentially a double-edged sword. We should be critical and informed about who gets it.

      • Uncle Bobolink

        JT, I think you misread me. I said “a government powerful enough to do anything for you” and that is obviously not Our Government. Our Government can not even provide a health care system that does not kill over 100,000 people a year with malpractice, or a system that is even affordable. Social Security is a joke; even people who have payed in a maximum their whole lives can’t have a good retirement on that. So by no means is Our Government powerful enough to do anything for you.

        But a government that was that powerful would also be powerful enough to tell you how to live and when it was time to die. Heck, it could even allow for genetic engineering to eliminate people who did not meet the proper profile. (Which is already being done to some extent through selective abortion.)

        As to the “checks and balances” that can all be derailed by Five People on the SCOTUS. Hell, the great atheist Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes decided for forced sterilizaiton. (Buck v Bell)

        • Amyc

          “(Which is already being done to some extent through selective abortion.)”
          Are you trying to say that some women are forced to get an abortion? You do know we have a mind of our own right? And sometimes we decide we don’t want to be pregnant/have a kid.

          And if you think SCOTUS is somehow playing politics, then you don’t really know how they work or reach decisions.

          “Our Government can not even provide a health care system that does not kill over 100,000 people a year with malpractice, or a system that is even affordable.”

          Our government doesn’t provide a health care system right now. The closest they come is Medicaid/Medicare, which most people don’t qualify for (even with the new laws, I’m in Texas, so I won’t qualify for it). Maybe you should be griping to the private industry that is running health care in this country.

          As for Social Security–it was never meant to give anyone a good retirement, it was put in place to keep the elderly and other disadvantaged groups from starving to death or becoming homeless. That’s about it. It’s a bare-bones as one could get from a government social program.

          Also your loose definition of “do anything for you” is a little messed up. You seem to think that the government has to be able to do everything for you before it can be said that it can do anything for you. I’d say the government does a lot for its citizens right now: public school system, SNAP program, Pell grant system, etc.

          • Kodie

            I don’t know that it is currently happening, but it has happened in the US.
            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_sterilization#United_States
            I’d read some of the other subs while I’m at it – we’re not the only country in the world to compare how this scenario plays out.

            I think the theory is if you are comfortable, you might be complacent. If this is not happening to you, it might become ok with you if it happens to someone else. You may be unaware of things the government does as long as it doesn’t affect you.

    • Baal

      I’d like to second that Unkle Bobo’s statement is irrational. It’s very easy to imagine a country where the government is free to whatever it damn well pleases to you including torture, murder and disposal at sea, cf. Pinochet’s ‘disappeared’ in Chile. His government wasn’t all that ‘powerful’ at providing food aide, health care, education, roads or other ‘socialist’ stuff. Said the other way around, the governments power to abuse you is independent of its power to help you. The mechanisms are different.

      Your argument would be more interesting if it was from a dependency angle than a power one. You could argue something like, “if 47% of the population gets 85% of its calories from government food programs, the 47% would be at risk. The fed budget can only support 50% of calories for 35% of the people. That overage could crash tomorrow, think of how many children would starve.” We could talk about those (made up) facts and whether or not food aid makes sense in that context.

  • iknklast

    I think the government should propose a test run. We’ll do a week during which the government stays out of your life totally. I give it about 10 minutes before everyone runs screaming to the government for help. When they get up and their lights don’t come on, their water doesn’t come on, and there is no heat in their house. Their toilet won’t flush, and the whole town smells like sewage. The roads are closed, and theyhave to pay to drive on them, probably many times, because it’s unlikely any one person or corporation would run the entire transportation system, so every time you got onto someone else’s stretch of road, you’d have to pay again. Your child is presented with a bill when they get to school, provided theyget there when the bus doesn’t come. Food prices skyrocket, because subsidies have been withdrawn. I could go on for hours, but I’m preaching to the choir, so I’ll cut t off here.

    • machintelligence

      When the Republicans tried a shutdown of the Federal government, it didn’t work out well.

      When the House Republicans, under Gingrich’s leadership, forced a three-week government shutdown in the fall of 1995, it was generally viewed as a disaster for his party. He, not President Bill Clinton, got all the blame. And his little adventure almost cost the Republicans control of the House in the 1996 elections.

      • iknklast

        I’m not really talking about a government shut down. I’m talking about citizens getting what they claim to want, so they can see how it goes. I know it won’t ever happen; it just irks me living in a red state that wouldn’t survive if it wasn’t for government subsidies, and hearing them moan about how they don’t get anything from the government, while they drive on government roads, put their kids in government schools, and cash government farm subsidy checks.

        • John Horstman

          I frequently have this fantasy, that for some limited time in some reversible way, the Right Wing could get what it thinks it wants. Since statistics and historical precedent are out as ways of understanding the world, I hold out hope that perhaps a confrontation with the actual (entirely unconsidered) impacts of their ideology-driven policy might change their minds.

  • John Eberhard

    Part of our problem is the hyperbole of terms like “anything” and “everything”. No one is proposing a government who can do either “anything” or “everything either for you or to you. It annoys me when any blending of capitalism and socialism is immediately branded as socialism/Communism/Marxism or represented as government doing everything for you. Arrrggghhhh.

  • smrnda

    The problem with the notion (commonly advanced) that as the government does “more and more things” it eventually turns into this huge behemoth that crushes everybody is that it imagines ‘government’ as this totally external thing in which people have no input. I mean, we don’t get as much input as we should have but it’s obvious that governments can do an awful lot without really infringing on anybody’s liberties. It’s all about having the proper checks and balances on power.

    I mean, corporations are pretty powerful and they tread all over people all the time. Government, to some extent, exists to police private sources of power like this.

    The other problem is that the attitude theorizes that people without government are free. No, they’d be living like nomadic hunter-gatherers pretty quick, or else you’d have some wealthy people who own enough infrastructure and guns living at a high standard of living and that would be about it, and as the world around them fell apart they’d eventually realize that their plans of going Galt and letting the ship sink just sinks them in the end, since a high standard of living isn’t possible without massive amounts of cooperation that just can’t be had without a functioning government. Worst is, if government gets replaced by some private, tribal affiliation, you’ll have to fall in with a tribe and their party line or be out of luck. If anything, the bureaucratic welfare state grants a person the right to not conform but still benefit from membership in society.

  • RuQu

    I love people who criticize the government, or want to eliminate it, but have no idea what it actually does. Remarkably, this extends to some members of Congress and a surprising number of government employees who think their agency is critical but all the rest are wasteful spending.

    The government provides surveys of coastal waters to keep shipping safe, prevent groundings and oil spills, etc. Due to the idea that the private sector can do everything better for less money, we are required to contract out half of the work. This is despite GAO analysis that shows that our in-house surveys are cheaper to conduct and a better value. It also completely overlooks the fact that contracted surveys still require substantial government staffing and maintenance of expertise to review and QA/QC the product. It takes far more effort to review a contractor survey than an in-house one. Why? Because contractors are constantly trying to cut corners, cheat the system, and provide the cheapest product they can to maximize profits. The in-house work is done holistically within the agency, with an awareness of the requirement for value and minimizing work further up the pipeline.

    There are also numerous government programs and agencies that provide services that simply make little sense as private ventures. Look at GPS vs Galileo for navigation satellites. The US runs GPS for free through the USAF, and it provides massive value to the entire global economy. The Europeans want to charge for the use of Galileo, and arguments about the system are part of the reason for massive delays. It also raises a massive ethical question when the information is present but requires a purchase to unlock, and that information could have prevented an accident or disaster (ie if a ship runs aground because it was using the lower quality data when the data was present to let it know it was off-track). That’s a major negative externality because the shipping company decided to cut corners and the ESA decided to try and profit off a communal good. (Let’s ignore for the moment the ability of the US to make increased tax revenue off the economy that the EU as a whole has more difficulty with without a common taxation authority)

    Whenever I hear someone complain about the government, I quietly thank them for allowing me to save time by flagging them as too ignorant to be worth arguing with.