Text 3485, 294 rader
Skriven 2006-07-07 13:39:00 av Robert E Starr JR (3958.babylon5)
Ärende: Re: Atheists: America's m
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* * * This message was from Josh Hill to rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.m * * *
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On Wed, 05 Jul 2006 09:55:00 -0700, Charlie Edmondson
<edmondson@ieee.org> wrote:

>Hi Josh,

>I hereby apologize for accusing you of class envy. 

Hi Charlie,

Thanks again for the apology, and, again, no problem -- it's clear
that it was just  a misunderstanding, and I'm probably as much to
blame as anyone because when I get into an argument I tend to forget
the nuances and qualifications and go full bore.

Anyway, let me try to take this one by one.

> It is now apparent 
>that your disdain may stem more from guilt, or maybe you have been more 
>exposed to the 'parasitical' element of the upper class.

I don't think I'm primarily motivated by guilt, although I'm not
without it: I do ask myself why or whether I deserve more than others,
and in some cases it doesn't bother me much -- forex, I tend to work
harder and longer than most people -- hell, I even do that when I'm
"playing" on Usenet, as the volume of my posts attests! But in other
cases it does, because when I earn in an hour or two what other people
are earning in a week (and amazingly enough what some people in third
world countries earn in a /year/) it just seems wrong to me.

I mean, a lot of that -- most of it -- is just that I was lucky enough
to be born on the right side of the tracks in the world's richest
country. I think we tend to forget that, to underestimate its
importance. I mean, my grandfather was born in 1895 in a place that
had no running water, electricity, printed books, or books other than
the Bible. He did well because he came here, but had he stayed, he
would have been limited by his environment. And I have the impression
that more than a few white middle class suburbanites have forgotten
that. They seem to assume that the kid who grows up poor in Harlem has
the same opportunities they do. But, you know, he doesn't, not by a
long shot.

And beyond that, well, I do have some personal gifts that suit me well
to our society, as do I imagine most of those in this educated,
literate group. I can master tasks that most people can't in little
time and with little effort, and I'm rewarded commensurately. Or I can
take a year and just work on some problem that interests me, can say
"Hey, I've always wanted to write a science fiction novel" and take a
year off and do it. And that may make sense within our economic
system, because incentives encourage people to do their best. But are
we really so dog-eat-dog that ability should completely transcend
human values, that my friend the receptionist, say, shouldn't receive
something for her contribution?

It seems to me that while the market is fairly efficient from an
economic perspective (though far from completely so -- compensation
can be surprisingly decoupled from market forces and I've noticed that
the market itself can be surprisingly decoupled from actual worth), it
isn't always efficient from a human perspective, or a social one.

But mostly, I think, I'm motivated by a powerful idealism rather than
guilt. I was raised to care about others. It was and is a strong part
of both my cultural and family ethos, of my values. So it's not so
much that I want people on Park Avenue to give up Park Avenue, but
that I want everyone to live on Park Avenue -- or something enough
like Park Avenue so that it doesn't really matter. And I think we were
coming close to that during the great progressive era of American
politics, when poverty was slashed and the working class moved into
the middle class for the first time in human history, and that that
progress stopped and started to ebb with the "Reagan revolution."

> But remember 
>Josh, there are parasitical elements at every level, because they are 
>people, and some people are just like that.  That is why you have the 
>welfare frauds of folks that manage to game the system to earn large 
>sums, why there are traders at Enron who find no problem in creating 
>blackouts in California, why every workgroup has a 'Wally' that does as 
>little as possible, but somehow never seems to be fired or laid off.

Sure. But that was pretty much my original point, wasn't it? That
heirs are like welfare recipients. I don't advocate welfare dependency
in /either/ case, and I certainly don't advocate fraud. I do think
that we often let well-to-do fraudsters off more lightly than poor
ones, to police and prosecute blue collar crimes more insistently and
harshly than white collar ones. Microsoft is a good example of that:
judging by the settlements, their business tactics cost competitors
billions of dollars, and I suspect that to the extent their monopoly
was due to illegal practices it's cost the public a lot more than
that, because they're able to charge uncompetitive rates for their
software suites. But what happened to the people responsible for that?
Nothing, really. Or what about the tobacco company executives who lied
about the addictive nature of their product and its health hazards and
knowingly marketed it to children? I see lots of drugs dealers serving
long terms in prison. How many tobacco company executives? One could
say the same thing about asbestos makers, or the mill owners who let
their employees get brown lung disease, or the companies that dumped
Dioxin. Or the coal plant operators who pour mercury and other
pollutants into the air and abused the Clean Air Act to get around its
requirements. The list is a long one.

>But, we differ in how we think this should be handled.  For some reason 
>that I haven't figured out, you seem to trust government to handle these 
>problems.  You believe in a benevolent beaurocracy (sp?) that will 
>handle problems, dispense money and justice, and help us.  We are from 
>the government, we are hear to help you?  I accept the fact that we need 
>some regulations and laws, but feel that we need a LOT less than we have 
>now.

I'm not sure that that's quite my view -- not sure that I ever thought
about it quite in those terms. To me, the arguments "government is
good" and "government is bad" just aren't realistic ones, because
they're too broadly brushed to be accurate. I happen to think that
government is good at some things and bad at others, and in every case
I think the decision about whether government should do something
should be based on the specific situation rather than any ideological
preconceptions.

I'd say that I grew up with a liberal's faith that government was the
answer to most social problems. But by my 20's I'd started to see the
shortcomings in that approach. I lived in a city where something like
1.2 million in a population of 7.5 million were on welfare, a city
that had to raise taxes so high to support its poor residents and pay
its unions that it was destroying its tax base by losing businesses
and prosperous residents. I saw multi-generational welfare dependency
destroying whole generations. I saw municipal unions becoming so
powerful that they drove the City into bankruptcy. So I understand the
problems and limits of government.

That being said, I've seen government do enormous good as well. It
educates our children and keeps businesses from dumping poison into
the air and water. It defends us in wars and takes care of us in old
age with greater efficiency and reliability than any private pension
plan could. It protects people from systematic discrimination and the
worst effects of poverty.

So while it isn't without its bad points -- we've all ranted about
them at one point or another -- I don't see any evidence that
government is intrinsically bad. And, for that matter, I don't see any
real evidence that most conservatives do, either. They simply want to
use government to do the things they favor, e.g., a strong military,
barring people from burning flags or marrying people of the same sex
or doing what they want in the bedroom, rather than the things that
they don't. And their representatives are even more partial to pork.

What I do know is that we can't do without some degree of regulation
and intervention. Everyone chafes under arbitrary rules and excessive
paperwork, but the collapse of the stock market and the nation's
banking system at the start of the Great Depression taught us that
laissez-faire economics just doesn't work. The release of dangerous
chemicals into the air and water taught us that companies can't be
free to pollute. The death of workers from mining accidents, black
lung disease, brown lung disease, and asbestos exposure taught us that
we need workplace safety regulations. And of patients that we need to
regulate drugs, and Jim Crow and child labor that we need to regulate
discriminatory practices and labor practices, and so forth.

So I'd concentrate on pruning the government programs that I think are
wasteful and the regulations that I think are onerous while extending
the ones we need, rather than making blanket assumptions.

>I wonder what you consider the 'ride' that we have been taken on?  Are 
>you speaking of GWB?  I would not classify several generations of wealth 
>as nouvea.  Is there some other ride you speak of?  Pray tell.

I was referring to was the systematic effort by the powers-that-be in
the Republican Party to convince the general public that they have
their interests in mind, rather than the interests of big business and
the rich. And they've used all sorts of tactics to do that, including

- The systematic assertion that liberalism is bad or that it failed,
when history shows that it was anything of the sort -- that the
greatest and most successful presidents of the 20th century were
progressives or liberals, and that they were enormously successful in
most of what they did, literally bringing the working class into the
middle class for the first time in history

- Using issues that most of them don't give a fig about to fool voters
into voting for them, among them abortion, flag burning, prayer in the
classroom, and gay marriage

- Taking advantage of racial prejudice to attract older working-class
voters (and now prejudice against gays) to a party that doesn't serve
their interests

- Portraying the party of the little guy as being in the control of
elitists and radicals, portraying moderates as much farther to the
left than they actually are (and note how that spilled over into your
assumptions about my beliefs!), and portraying themselves as somehow
closer to the people, e.g., by dressing up the preppie Yalie Bonesman
George W. Bush in cowboy boots and having him buy, at great expense, a
ranch.

- Turning spin and deception into an art with the same purpose;
smearing opponents to make war heroes look like shirkers and honest
men look like liars while making their own shirkers look like war
heroes and their own liars look like honest men; using Orwellian names
to disguise legislation which was written to serve special interests,
e.g., cynically calling a forest-industry-sponsored act to permit more
logging a forest protection act

- Lying about the purposes and effects of their legislation and
programs, e.g., referring to tax cuts that disproportionately affect
the rich as "across-the-board tax cuts" and campaigning on tax cuts
for the middle class, knowing that the middle class won't actually see
a net tax cut and will probably actually end up paying more

- Misleading the public about the justifications for and success of
the War in Iraq and portraying those who oppose it as, in effect,
anti-Americans and traitors, sometimes for suggesting the same things
they're actually doing, e.g., drawing down troops

- Using unwarranted scare tactics and misrepresentation to fool people
into dismantling successful programs that benefit them, e.g., Social
Security, or oppose programs that would benefit them like universal
health care

- Lying about important issues like global warming to benefit
industry, misrepresenting the conclusions of government researchers,
muzzling researchers

- Invoking religion to justify their acts, the false implications
being that they're more religious than the opposition and that
Christianity is somehow connected to right-wing ideology; pandering to
the religious right, sometimes with awful consequences, e.g., the
difficult of stem cell research

- Using suggestive insults in place of substantive arguments and
knowing oversimplifications to convince people, e.g., terms like
"small government" that actually mean "big military and corporate
expenditures and a reduction in social programs", and going back on
their supposed principles whenever it suits them, e.g., saying they
support state's rights until they want to ban gay marriage or contest
the Florida election in the Supreme Court or ban flag burning or limit
eminent domain or ban medical marijuana or overrule a state judge and
state law to keep Terri Schiavo on a respirator

- Convincing people that the responsible press is systematically
biased, thereby alienating them from informed professionals who are
far more likely than politicians to have the public interest in mind,
while setting up overt propaganda outlets to carry their message,
e.g., Fox News and right-wing talk radio; paying columnists hundreds
of thousands of dollars to run pro-Administration columns; having
shills masquerade as reporters and ask pro-Bush questions during White
House news conferences; systematically sliming and discrediting
public-spirited people who tell the truth to the American people
(Joseph Wilson, Richard Clarke, any number of others); sending
pro-administration propaganda clips to TV stations to be aired as news
items without identifying them as having been made by the government
as the law requires, etc.

- Lying outright for political reasons or changing their positions, as
forex when Bush promised in his second presidential debate to mandate
controls on carbon emissions and then reneged on it (to the
embarrassment of his own EPA head, Christie Todd Whitman, who
eventually resigned)

I could go on, but I think this is representative. Bush Administration
officials have been known to laugh at reporters who asked questions
about one or another misrepresentation because they were "reality
based." They're laughing at the public, but they've done such a good
job with their propaganda and with the decline in newspaper readership
people are so starved for solid news at this point that many people
don't catch on to that.

The bottom line is that, however they disguise it and despite the
occasional exceptions, the RNC represents the powerful while the DNC
represents the little guy, but that the RNC has against all
probability managed to convince many Americans that the opposite is
true. That's starting to change, I think, but only because nothing
they do, no amount of spin or lies or Bible thumpin' or portraying
Democrats as lily-livered latte-sipping France-worshipping elitist
girlie boys can hide the unfortunate consequences of six long years of
Republican rule.

-- 
Josh

"I love it when I'm around the country club, and I hear people talking about
the debilitating
effects of a welfare society. At the same time, they leave their kids a
lifetime and beyond
of food stamps. Instead of having a welfare officer, they have a trust officer.
And instead
of food stamps, they have stocks and bonds."

- Warren Buffett
                             
--- SBBSecho 2.11-Win32
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