A common sign at Tea Party rallies is “Live free or die.” But when you carefully examine their positions on public policy what they really mean is “Live free and die.” Granted, governments can be evil and oppressive but good governments can do great things.
For a long historical view on the benefits of government, I recommend reading Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday: What we can Learn from Traditional Societies and Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. I have no desire to live in a society with a weak or no government. Think Somalia.
More recently and here in the USA one can easily list many government programs that improved and saved lives. Just a few include rural electricity, GI Bill, EPA, computers, internet, Interstate system, weather satellites, medical research, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.
Tea Party and extremist GOP shotgun attacks on all government regulations are the true death panels they scream about. Obamacare’s health insurance regulations are not the first, nor will they be the last, incidence of government restricting our freedoms, as they define freedom.
Tea Party sponsors are the same folks who pushed tobacco addiction. They even defined “freedom” as the addicts’ right to fill your air with carcinogens.
My 1962 Bel Air was grand fathered in with no seatbelts and my current 1991 Camry has no airbags, but auto companies can no longer make these cars. Why am I not free to buy cars without these features?
I’m not free to paint my walls with lead paint or burn leaded gasoline in my lawn mower. We’re not free to enroll kids at a day care without fire extinguishers or escape doors. We cannot even work in those environments. Unlike Europeans, I’m free to give children toys with carcinogenic phthalates. American women are free to buy cosmetics with these chemicals. There is a cancer risk and their male offspring have smaller penises, but is that any of the government’s business?
Now, they are trying to define freedom as the right of bakers and food companies to put trans fat in my food and the freedom to not tell me what’s in it.
Those are not freedoms I want or think anyone should have.
More disturbing they are so worried about our corporate citizens (remember corporations are people, too) losing their freedom. The promote policies to handcuff or even abolish the EPA because it infringes on the freedom of petroleum and coal companies to pollute our air, water, and soil with their toxic wastes. What can you do about it? We non-corporate citizens are told we are free to move to countries where Big Brother limits freedoms like fracking and pollutants.
Freedom has such strong political connotations. It drives me crazy when it is misused to promote policies that kill rather than actually promote the general welfare.