Some fellow Fire Fighters recently criticized me for embracing socialism and supporting Obama, here is their comments and my response. So I have written a response to them and posted it here so they might be led to daily kos and maybe they will begin to creepa around and read some.
Below the fold:
Them:
...the reality is this:
–The state may think that socialism will satisfy its lust for power, but, in the end, it will eventually collapse under a mountain of debt or a corn crib filled with IOUs. As Margaret Thatcher once said, "social...ism works until you run out of other people’s money." Eventually, the colony begins to starve.
–Man will not enjoy working his tail off so that someone else who is not working can reap the fruit of his labor. James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers that they were establishing a government that had balances of powers because men were NOT angels.
–Work is not oppressive and cruel, but it is exactly what the poor need...not only to be able to produce their own corn, but because we were made by the Original Worker to work. We are happier and healthier when we do.
and -
YES!!! Thank you Mr. (*****). You are truly a wise man to have provided a brief history lesson on socialism. Hopefully some socialists (Me) will read this and gain from this wisdom and realize their foolish endeavors to make this country c...ompletely socialist is never going to work. Do we have some government mandated socialist programs?Yes. Do they work? When properly funded I would say for the most part they do. But the difference is that in Social Security you get out what you put in. The major problem with these types of programs today, is that the funds which had previously been set aside to keep those programs solvent and able to provide some financial support after retirement has been spent and the account is full of IOU's. We (the nation) need to get our house in order, get our debts paid off, and stop spending money which we don't have. If the federal government was forced to run its finances the way I have to in my home, the government would have had to file for bankrupcy many many times over. A Socialist government and economy is not the answer to any of our problems. It will only make the problems worse and make them worse faster.
my reply:
There are many countries that operate very successfully with varying degress of socialism. Norway, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Canada and others. Many of them have more cost effective health care than we do, better educational systems, higher per capita incomes, are rated and better places to live, better press freedom, longevity, lower infant mortality, higher percentage of college educated and are less polluted. They are rated as happier places to live. We have a lot to learn from them. These countries have been overall finacially successful. Socialism works, there are many examples of it. Fascism and Dictatorial Stateism (USSR, China, North Korea, Romania, Yugoslavia, Brazil and Argentina Under the military) do not. Bush's granddaddy was a Nazi sympathizer fascist. The new GOP is full of Anti-Democratic Theocrats (Palin, the C street crowd) The GOP and Blue Dog Democrats not pro Democracy, they are Corporate Stateists. Any working class conservative that votes for the GOP is voting to erode personal freedom and economic democracy. Are Dems better on this? Yes, but sometimes not a lot, that is why Obama is only a step in the right, er, correct direction.
The Bushes and Reagan were the prime examples of capitalism run amok taking us into the maw of oligarchy. I could go on. Capitalism has its upside, but many downsides too. Obama is no socialist. He is a moderate-centrist. We should go much farther to the left than he has taken us. Are the banking robber barons your heros? What about war profiteers like Haliburton, or polluters like Dupont or Exxon? Do you admire Monsanto, that is destroying our genetic diversity and patenting pollen? The Conservative supreme court just said that corporations are persons and protected their freedom of economic speech over our right to know who is manipulating our election process. Is this not judicial activism?
Is broadening income disparity here and abroad your desire? Fire Fighters happen to be on the short end of the stick on this issue, yet many of us seem to want to slit our own throats and help impoverish our own families by voting for a party and a platform that does all it can to weaken the midddle class in the US. Read a little about how income disparity, wage growth, debt, deficit, savings, and labor rights and safety fare under the the two different parties. For each of these issues, historically the GOP is not the friend of the working family. Education goes both ways. Obama has not made nor propsed a single rule restricting gun ownership. The Fire Service is the ultimate socialist organization, a government run monopoly with no competition. How do you think Houston or New York would fare with an all volunteer or a corporate fire service? Refer to Scottsdale, Arizona. Subscription services in the fire industry are real winners, aren't they? As my cousin's husband said to my dad once, "public employees are leeches on society". Those Fire Fighters that choke on the thought of socialism and have unyielding ethical standards might consider employment in the private sector.
I am in favor of a business model where pollution costs are part of the cost of doing business, not where profit is privatized and pollution and debt are public burdens. I want an economy where everyone can make enough from wages to have a dignified living and support a family, not where tennis shoes are cheap and the people that make them can't afford to buy them, where 12 year olds have to quit school to work so the family doesn't starve. How about an economy where local businesses aren't run out of town by big box stores and then everybody gets minimun wage and then no one can afford to buy anything. How about a country where banks aren't allowed to rob the entire country blind, throw millions of people out of their homes by fraudulent means and be rewarded for this by record profits? That is what it has come to. This situation was installed and serviced by GWB, by the way. Capitalism creates wealth, but unbridled capitalism creates bad democracy and few rich and many poor and destroys the middle class, socialism is the check to greed, and an education at FOX News or Glenn Beck U. isn't going to educate you to the hosing the GOP has been and will again give the 95% of US citizens that can't offshore their labor costs and eliminate tax burden.
Under Obama's tax plan, milionaires will get about a 6,349 dollar tax cut, under the Bush plan, they get about + or - $103,835 to my best recollection. The difference for a family income of $200,000 is about a $400.00 in taxes. Bush - Obama tax comparison.
What is a fair tax burden? Historic tax rates for the wealthy. What are we wiling to pay for? I am willing to pay for a country where people work, even if the Government has to help out once and a while. I am willing to pay for trains that run safely and fast, planes that are safe, bridges that don't collapse, an army that is adequate but not bloated (this, by the way, is the ONLY way to really bring down the defecit). Remember that both Regan and both GWB built up more defecit than all previous presidents combined, and GWB dumped a county on the brink of a great depression onto our backs. GWB's job growth in his last year was over negative 400,000 a month. Obama's has been plus 95,000 a month in private sector jobs. I am as a rule against defecit, but at times the government must intervene to pull us back from disaster. It is called promoting the general welfare. Defecit history, US Inflation Adjusted Deficit History (With parties in power indicated.)
Oreos, the budjet, and military spending. eight true things
I could show many more charts and facts and reports and explainations, but you gat the idea and you probably don't care and won't change your mind anyway, so go look up some more facts yourself, if you do care.
I want a government that promotes the genral welfare, not the corporate welfare. I don't believe in what's good for General Bullmoose is good for the USA.(This reference is to Lil' Abner, in case you missed it.) I believe that is is ok for the government to feed lunch to and help educate our children, I don't think it's ok for them to intervene in when we have babies or not. It is ok for our government to give small businesses tax breaks to help small business pay for health insurance, but it is not ok for them to lie us into a war that bankrupts us and ruins our foreign relations and kills or maims 10's of thousands of us and millions of them just to protect oil resouces that we should be replacing with our own resouces anyway. We should catch terrorists where they are, not where they weren't until we got there. I want a government that enables business to create jobs here, not pay them to ship them overeas. I also want an American populace that can see past their own noses once in a while.