Just wanted to say I agree in full, that I came to similar conclusions about Ron Paul after the same sort of doubts, and that I hope he runs again in 2012.

http://www.facebook.com/groups.php?id=689213406#/group.php?gid=52641754495

Man i love reading your blog, interesting posts !…

I don’t know that I’m so worried about communism as I’m worried about basic human decency and genuine equal opportunity. Unequal entities – and the our states are not all equal, either economically or socially – can’t offer equal opportunity. To tell some unwed pregnant teenager from Alabama to move to New York if she wants an abortion is unrealistic, impractical and perhaps cruel and New York would soon start protesting the influx of unwed mothers from non-abortion states. Or some moron would make laws forbidding abortions across state lines so we would live in a country where inequalities which already exist would become more rather than less pronounced.

The other thing I would add about public assistance and health care is that being stingy with such things is a false economy. A destitute and ill population is not productive or creative. Lifting people up out of poverty lifts the whole society up. How many great minds have languished for want of breakfasts to nourish the body that holds the mind? How many productive members of our society have become permanently incapacitated or died because they didn’t have access to care early on when they could have been helped? That kind of stinginess causes not just psychological and personal harm, it causes economic harm to the society.

We are rapidly returning to a society of serfs and kings, where the poor working class are expendable pawns that exist only to enrich those in power. I don’t remember that the middle ages had that much to offer that we should have returning to that way of being as a goal.

I guess I’d rather live in a world where we spend too much on people who don’t deserve it than too little on those in true need. Inept as I think the federal government sometimes is, I believe over-riding WELL RUN (and it can be done) national system still has the best chance of offering the best and most economical answers for health care and other issues.

What some libertarians don’t seem to understand is that welfare and health-care provide a bulwark against communism. I just don’t think ‘liberty’ means quite the same thing to someone without decent health-care, housing, etc. Of what value is freedom without the economic wherewithal to exercise it? The poor value liberty less because they have more compelling needs. So they will be more receptive to a Castro figure if one comes along. Communism will not die until the abuses inherent in capitalism are reformed.

But that’s just my opinion.

Martin

You are wonderful. You offer logical, cogent arguments where I just offer enthusiastic passion.

I so disagree with Vegan girl and Ron Paul about the idea that states can do a better job on things like health care. The Federal government – well run – is capable of doing a more than decent job when it puts it’s collective mind to it. Medicare, even with its flaws, runs pretty well. Give everything to the states and you have the potential for 52 badly (or well) run and unequal programs.

You’re young, healthy and a free spirit so packing up and moving sounds easy to you if you don’t like what your state is doing, but not everybody has the physical, psychological or financial ability to do that. Do we really want a country where inequality is greater than it already is? Where you can get an abortion if you live in one state but not in another? Where you can have medical care if you live in Massachusetts but not if you live in upstate New York or Arkansas?

The programs that work worst in this country (as far as I can tell) are the ones where we offer help grudgingly like needing help is a crime committed by the poor and the ill. In those programs we waste more money making sure that nobody gets something they don’t “deserve” than we do helping people. Cutting out some of that kind of bureaucracy would go farther to making the world run better than fragmenting programs even further. Food stamps – the federal program – runs much better than the social service programs which are more localized and have different rules even from county to county.

Bad as things are now in this country, I think they could be much worse if we delegate everything to the states. They might be better (as they are now) for some people in some states, but on the whole, I think it would multiply rather than diminish chaos.