Seeing with the Third Eye
It's time for a reset....
When you're not a member of either "major party", it's easy to see how all their fun and games is in pursuit of an established duopoly. They simply don't care what happens to the rest of us. We're the "chips" they play with between themselves, for votes and campaign contributions (which amount to extortion, not bribes, as those providing the loot used to think).
So, we're all being exploited, and it's a negative-sum game even between the D's and R's (ever wonder where that R2-D2 came from?). EVERYONE would benefit by a reset. We must redesign the game for Pareto Optimality (everyone is better-off, instead of some being sacrificed to others - with added incentives to "help the poor", promote culture, etc), instead of this mindless gang warfare, which doesn't even compute on a level of 7th graders, let alone "responsible adults."
And we need a different legal system, obviously. The one we have panders only to political demagogues, and has almost nothing to do with justice, fairness, sympathy, morality, or any of those good things usually attributed to courts of law (but not by those who run them). Without an ethical society with ethical values shared by nearly everyone in some form, there's no point in having a legal system like we have, now, which is little more than organized gang enforcement of its edicts and territories. No one here has any real "rights" or "protection under the law." You only get what you pay for, or can extort from others.
Ayn Rand and socialized medicine
If you're wondering why we don't have anything resembling "socialized medicine" in the US, it's the same reason behind the current obsession with "the failure of the public schools" (which are, in fact, "socialized education"). The only people who opposed socialized medicine originally were some of the wealthier doctors, or more accurately, the "consultants" they hired to identify and promote their interests, which they took to be monopoly control of the supply (and even the definitions) of medicine, in order to maximize their own wealth and power.
Enter Ayn Rand
Her essay, "The Forgotten Man of Socialized Medicine, the Doctor" (c. 1964) became almost a manifesto to "block" or "repeal" Medicare and other "paths to socialized medicine." The fact that Ayn Rand squandered her vast personal fortune, and had to rely on Medicare in her old age is beside the point. This occurred when she was dying of lung cancer - no doubt a karmic consequence of her advocacy of smoking, which was based on totally wrong arguments that cigarettes represented "power" or "man's control over nature," instead of the social rituals which some Native Americans still practice.
The Crows (into which Barak Obama was adopted, probably because of the Unitarian Mission School which influenced their subsequent development) held the Tobacco plant sacred. There's even a Tobacco Root Mountain Range in Montana/Wyoming, and it was Montana mythology and real history which inspired a lot of Rand's work - mainly because of Jewish-Scandinavian Baltic culture which was also transplanted here.
Anyway, I'll see if I can find a link to the "forgotten doctors" essay. Of course, "Objectivists" claim absolute property rights over every word their prophetess has written, so you might have to buy or check out the book. Can you find Rand's works in your local public library? It's doubtful, which is why taxpayers no longer want to fund them (the libraries, I mean), and why they have been turned into corporate work-slave-stations, or free video-rental stores (a function which Netflix will soon have eliminated). Now, it's the NSA which can examine anyone's library records without a warrant, and the librarian can be prosecuted for telling her clients that they are on a "watch list" or otherwise "a person of interest" to "the authorities." Surely we must all want that - to be a "person of interest."
Of course, everyone agreed to Medicare because caring for one's elderly relatives was a major burden, now assumed by the Federal Government. Local communities which had county rest-homes and other successful local program (usually discriminating by race or class) were soon bribed or coerced into selling them to private companies, who had "more leverage in Washington". The Democrats ran on the "socialized medicine" gravy train for 50 years, until they were finally forced to promote the reductio ad absurdum of corporate medicine, "Obamacare", with all its racist and classist overtones. And now, all the drugged, dumbed down, middle class "liberals" are out there selling it like snake-oil.
Even people like myself, with a degree in Economics from a leading university, can make little if any sense of our overall "welfare system." It is positively designed to fail, and those who end up taking it over (corporate "contractors" - often major banks, credit card, or even aerospace "defense" contractors like Grumman-Northrup) have no incentives other than to maximize their own "cut" of the loot - often about 20-25% of the "gross" as a "commission" or "service charge." And in the case of Medicine, the doctors are anything but "forgotten." Instead, they are further empowered to loot and bankrupt the patients whose fees were already supposed to be paid by Medicare or Medicaid.
How is this possible? It really does have a lot to do with Ayn Rand, who is believed by conservatives and liberals alike to have been fundamentally evil and malevolent, albeit for different reasons. Now, that doesn't matter. Rand (and the Greens) are the New Reds. We're the bad guys, by definition. So, anything we do or say will be tainted, with each side of the duopoly blaming the other for the bad parts, and taking credit for the good. I formulated a principle maybe 25 years ago which says this:
Each major party is half-right and half-wrong. They run for office on the good half, and after winning, then proceed to implement (with the assistance of the losers) the bad half, so that each side has an even chance (to begin with, anyway) in winning the next election, since no "track record" of good leadership by one party will be allowed to exist.
Enter Baucus and the other "bi-partisans" who "broker" these deals to maximize the errors and subsequent policy disasters so that there can always be a cry for "more money" and "more programs - more jobs" for those who serve the state so dutifully.
Ultimately, it gets down to that - serving the state, and in the particular case, party loyalty. The only party besides the Greens where I ever participated or held leadership positions was the Republicans, so even when I despise them, I respect the real Republican tradition. And this was where Rand and the Libertarians in general were correct. Their arguments go back to Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith, and other Enlightenment thinkers, as well as Marx and the many Left critics who saw only misery and disasters in the "unbridled capitalism" which Jefferson and Smith supposedly endorsed (actually, they warned continuously about the power of business and trade elites, and their motives to enslave and impoverish the rest of us). Abraham Lincoln, who may be counted as a founding Republican Intellectual, actually read and corresponded with Marx, and always claimed that "Labor is Prior to Capital," and Labor's interests the more important in government decisions.
Intellectuals, the workers, the taxpayers, the drafted or bribed soldiers, spies, and Homeland Security Gestapo all have the same interests. To make sure that the owners of capital and war profiteers do not take over the state, by impoverishing and demoralizing the rest of us to be their slaves and cannon-fodder. For reasons listed above, that has not happened. The Ruling Class, supposedly glorified in Rand's "superman" novels, has consolidated and concentrated its power and control in ways that more resemble Fascism or Stalinist totalitarianism than any sort of "freedom" or "free enterprise." Our first Black president (we'd call him a Metis in Montana), instead of acting to reverse some of the murderous "foreign policy" as well as domestic Gulag of the biggest prison system the world has ever seen, has become its best (or worst) practitioner, until finally even a few of the hardened party operatives have conceded that this might be a good time to reduce the prison population, and quit prosecuting the slaves of the drug cartels who are themselves a creature of bought and paid for legislators. Unfortunately, no such sanity or remorse extends to the victims of US-Zionist foreign policy, which kills 100's of thousands each year.
I was reading Jessica Mitford's "Cruel and Usual Punishment" from the early 1970's last night. We think the Prison State is a recent consequence of the "war on drugs" or the worship of wealth and power in general, but it was all there in 1970, with the largest and most corporatized prison system in the world, at a time when the Chinese and Soviet Gulags were the main objects of American media attention. Mitford is an institution in herself, and so the book was widely read and discussed, and she got access to people and places which even then was unprecedented. Someone should suggest it to the First Family as a "must-read."
