Republicans hate welfare -- unless, of course, it's welfare for the rich stealthed as Defense Spending, useless Cold War gargoyles and boondoggles, and an archipelago of bases girdling the globe to no purpose, an endless sinkhole of money larded out to subcontractors (not to mention an endless undertow of secrecy, hierarchy, and mercilessness tugging at our fragile democratic institutions and culture).
Republicans hate welfare programs that actually help the struggling poor to get back on their feet and contribute their measure to the shared work of progress -- they strongly prefer to warehouse their precarious peers in prisons or onto the Streets at incomparably greater expense and to little discernible benefit, especially when prisons can be privatized for profit and their brutalities shrouded in secrecy.
Republicans hate the very idea of healthcare programs that actually lower costs to ensure universal coverage or encourage early detection to prevent problems before they become insurmountable -- they strongly prefer to shuffle the catastrophically ill and dying into already overburdened Emergency Rooms at incomparably greater expense and with the worst imaginable outcomes, especially when this ensures that the bulk of American healthcare dollars (a greater expenditure than anywhere else on the planet) are siphoned off to for-profit insurance companies that profit most when they deny or delay the provision of care altogether.
A pattern emerges -- not just the usual soulless profits over people that lead Republican President Calvin Coolidge to assert that the business of America is business" back in the 1920s -- but an especial eagerness to disable our solving of shared problems precisely to enable the profit-taking of a few, to deal dirty in Washington so their cronies can steal ugly across the world.
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Carrico: A pattern emerges -- not just the usual soulless profits over people that lead Republican President Calvin Coolidge to assert that the business of America is business" back in the 1920s -- but an especial eagerness to disable our solving of shared problems precisely to enable the profit-taking of a few, to deal dirty in Washington so their cronies can steal ugly across the world.
True but what does one say to people who honestly believe that legislating the redistribution of money is not justice and that it doesn't produce equality?
It depends. I think fewer people honestly believe this than say they do, and many who do are so stupid or so blinkered it doesn't much matter what you say, one simply needs to marginalize them through better arguments directed at better people, or insulate majorities from the harm they cause in their ignorance by means of better policy. But, okay, to that vanishingly small minority of decent intelligent people who believe "redistribution" is unjust, the question to ask is why exactly it is that one always treats the story of redistrubtion as one beginning with the apportionatement of resources, authority, capacity and so on that represents the status quo, even though it is easily demonstrable that the status quo is a historically constructed state of affairs, depending on any number of factors that have nothing at all to do with earning or merit or use at all. Why always assume that "redistribution" is a matter of taking away privileges from some for others rather than noting that some have more than others because some preferentially benefit from historical accomplishments from their predecessors or denigrated contributions to civilization from their peers? Why isn't the distribution represented by the status quo not itself depicted as a redistribution of the commons that demands justification rather than being treated as beyond question?
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