[karajorma]

If you don't like the way a particular business is doing things, you can simply avoid that business.  You can't avoid a monopoly.

Unless you have a pre-existing condition. Then see how many insurance companies will cover you.

[Slasher]

That altruism died out a looooooooong time ago. If the average American with the same do-it-yourself spirit actually cared, then why are fifty million of your people without medical coverage?

To add to this, at the grocery store I work at, sometimes I have to man one of the checkout lanes.  The first week of every month, when government aid is distributed, maybe about half of the people that go through my line are paying with EBT cards (food stamps), and a smaller percentage are using WiC checks.  We are talking hundreds and hundreds of dollars in foodstuffs here.  I seriously cannot see how private, local level charities could meet this kind of demand.  If we got rid of welfare, would people really be willing to spend the money not lost to taxes on equivalent donations? 

Maybe it's just how I was raised, but if I can't buy a computer game or a large pizza because someone had to buy fifty dollars worth of Infamil for their baby, I could care less if the state/federal government pried some money out of my cold, dead paycheck.  Hearing people who make >$250,000 a year, which is x amount more than I make (x being a big number), whine about the tax increase in the future causes the blood vessels in my brain to tie in a knot.  Unless you have three kids, a huge mortgage, and live in the middle of Manhattan, a little more money to social services isn't going to hurt you.  I can understand where people who worked hard for their money and don't want to pay into this come from.  I see people purchase necessities with food stamps and then blow twenty bucks on a box of cigarettes and roll my eyes too.  But there are many who need this kind of assistance, and many other people who are selfish pricks that want to deny them help because of soshalizeem.  Sometimes we can afford to drop the "got mine, **** you" attitude, believe it or not. 

I'm not saying government is the answer to every problem, but let us not kid ourselves that absolving us of these taxes is going to make the country better.  And we are not suddenly the Soviet Union because tax rates on certain income groups went up.  My rant is over. 

[Polpolion]

America either needs to accept and embrace an effective socialisim, or it needs to cut a bunch of these government run departments.

I don't know much about economics in this sense, but I'm pretty sure that just all of a sudden switching from what we have now to a fully free economy would only hurt the middle class and poor. AFAIK, the only way to effectivly have a lassaiz-faire system is to have everyone start out perfectly equal.

In a perferct world, no government regulations would be necessary. Welfare would come in the form of purely voluntary charity, mostly paid by rich philanthropists. Large companies would actively try and protect the environment and not totally gouge consumers. Education, while probably not public, would be cheap, thourough, and effective. Higher learning would be both a place to learn for a job's sake and a place to learn for learning's sake. The government wouldn't dictate people's morals by banning abortion or gay marrige, simply because no government is fit to arbitrarily decide the morals for over 300,000,000 people. If people don't want abortions, then they don't get them, and they do the best to convince everyone else otherwise.

The government would still consist of what it does now, but it'd be more focused on preventing people's rights from being infringed upon. It would be able to have a standing army, and able to call up a larger one when and if necessary. Laws would be formed on the basis of "Would this law be hurting the potential criminal's freedom more, or would not passing it be hurting the potential victim's freedom more?"

In a perfect would, America would be a place where you could do whatever you want.

But this isn't a perfect world. That couldn't happen even if people wanted it to happen, because people at the bottom are so down there, that they pretty much wouldn't be able to bring themselves up with charity (Most of them aren't even able to with welfare). Even if they had the capability, if people didn't want to (which some of them don't), it wouldn't happen because people will spend the welfare on crack and never even try to bring themselves up.

In reality, people are neither capable of doing this, nor do most people want to do this. What we have in the economic facet of the government is a group of people who want to force everyone to do all this philanthropy, and a group of people who want the opposite. Unfortunatly, neither methods will work. This transfer of wealth must be voluntary, or all of a sudden your stealing the rich's money and infringing upon their freedoms. But everyone has to start out in a lassaiz-faire system more or less equal, and all with an ideal to succede and live life to its fullest, otherwise you'll have people *****ing about starving in the gutters while there are people who have enough money to feed the entire nation a 7-course meal.

In short, the only way to get a truly free society is for everyone to really want it, and for everyone to voluntarily work towards it for the decades and decades that it takes to achieve.

Yeah, we're ****ed.


EDIT: I hope I didn't kill the thread.