An excellent post by Violet, with a great cartoon.
Teaser:
It’s not a question of trusting goverment. It’s a question of using government for what it’s best at, which is managing shared resources and doing things which require society’s collective action. Government is just society imposing its will as a group. Good for building roads (and pyramids and water irrigation channels and rockets to the moon), setting standards for food safety, pooling funds to pay for the indigent, making sure everyone gets healthcare. (That last thing is something we know from studying every other industrialized nation in the world; we don’t have to guess.)
These are the things for which private enterprise is not suitable or is inadequate.
A drawback in this country is that government-funded programs are susceptible to political attrition, particularly when Republicans get in office; but at least we have recourse in terms of voting. Which, I note, we don’t have with huge corporations. Huge corporations can only be controlled by government regulation, which in turn is only distantly controlled by voting. The more layers there are between the ballot box and the bottom line, the less control we have. [...]
But read the whole thing.
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Taking for granted
Many other liberal democracies around the globe take for granted the fact that they understand the place of government in our society. It's sad when we have to explain this again and again and again in this nation.
Things like health care, mass transit and other types of shared infrastructure built for the basic functioning of a developed society simply aren't to be controlled solely, if controlled even a little bit, at all, by the private sector.
But, we've always been at war with Eastasia...