It's oft-repeated because it's the ultimate end-game of liberalism. Control does that.
You're really funny! How stupid the kids are today.
Bullshit. It relies on the stupid assumption that an the more power government has over the individual's life, the better that life will be.
Government has never lifted a person from poverty or provided a dime's worth of healthcare, either. It's really good at both, though.
If they want to control everything too, they are not conservatives, much less libertarians.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
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James Arthur loves to confuse communism with "neo-libralism". Scandinavia a nd Germany are probably the countries he ought to be using a examples of "n eo-libralism", and none of them are famous for their efforts to "control" t heir populations. Germany is enthusiastic about getting its population educ ated - and more of them have some form of tertiary education than any place else - but they don't seem to gone in for any form of compulsion to get th ere.
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It's certainly one of the ways in which society gets to perform better.
Despite John Larkin's claims, the printing press wasn't invented because an ybody saw huge market for cheaply printed books, and Jacques Vaucanson didn 't invent the modern lathe because he saw a commercial advantage in kick-st arting the industrial revolution. In fact Vaucanson invented the punch-card controlled automatic loom in 1745, but it took fifty years before Jacquard refined it enough to start making money out of it.
China had skilled artisans and a free-market economy from way back, but the y utterly failed to create an industrial revolution. Now that they have see n how it's done, they are making up for a few centuries of lost time.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Over here they are both conservatives and Conservatives, and their agenda is to allow their cronies to be given lotsa dosh to be in charge of and control everything. But there is no accountability, which is definitely A Bad Thing.
The consequence is that people have predictably and unnecessarily died in industrial accidents, through medical negligence, and through general negligence.
They frequently fail, and when they can't syphon off sufficient profits, they simply throw their hands in the air and hand the contracts back to the state.
That has very visibly happened with at least one major part of the railways, several parts of the healthcare system, and several parts of the social care system.
The Establishment Republicans here are not much different from the Democrats: addicted to taxing and spending, buried in complexity, only with slightly different prorities. It's the Power Corrupts thing. Trump and Bannon are getting major pushback from mainline Republicans as regards cleaning things up.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Wells Fargo created millions of fake accounts, without customers' knowledge, to charge more fees. That is Grand Theft and Conspiracy.
Nobody has been criminally prosecuted. WF did fire 5000 underlings to show how sorry they were.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Hear Labour has disappeared up its own fundament and ceased to be an opposition; even its MPs are appalled at its leader's ability to miss sitting targets.
The Conservatives are dividing into two. Hard brexiteers say everything will be fine even if the worst happens. The rest say, correctly, that they don't know what they are talking about. E.g. the minister for Brexit(!) has admitted his department for Brexit hasn't costed what might happen if we don't reach agreement with the rest of the EU. Gawd help us.
There is a significant chance that the UK and/or Great Britain might cease to exist in a few years. That is being openly discussed, and even the Prime Minster has to resort to phrases including "the precious, precious Union".
Precisely. Labels are a tribal distraction; people are people.
From what we hear over hear, the pushback is because of Trump's policies (esp. w.r.t Russia) and team (esp. because they lie under oath). There could well be a hidden agenda, of course - there always is in politics!
I suppose if someone wanted to charge you $80 a month to breathe clean air and drink clean water you wouldn't feel offended, rather you'd be impressed at what a great deal you got!
Pro tip: "neoliberalism" is not "liberalism":
"Neoliberalism is a controversial term that refers primarily to the 20th century resurgence of 19th century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism. These include extensive economic liberalization policies such as privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade, and reductions in government spending in order to enhance the role of the private sector in the economy."
The current Conservative party are the best "neoliberals" that there ever were.
The sad part about insurace-based healthcare isn't that insurance companies make profit for being total middlemen who don't contribute a dime's worth of value to actually taking care of people, but that it's for such a pitiful amount of profit at the end of the day.
$300 billion/yr overhead worth of regulations, red tape, thousands of computers grinding 24/7 processing millions of claims and 47,000 different plans, tiers, pre-existing conditions, and subscriber packages to make like $10 billion/yr in profit. Barely enough to keep a half-dozen billionaire tycoon's lifestyles operating smoothly.
Was that supposed to be on-topic, relevant, or even sensical?
The Conservative party doesn't exist in most of the US, so the conservative wing of the Republican party has to do.
And government is better? At least there is a choice with insurance, at least until Obamacare wiped it out.
A mere bag of shells, compared to the US government waste and abuse.
As opposed to what, the National Socialist wing of the Republican party?
Yeah, the top 10% income bracket might get an actual choice worth mentioning, everyone else gets "So how you wanna get f***ed, with lube, or without?"
Absolutely. I do pay roughly that much directly to have clean, tasty water piped into my houses. And I pay taxes, and higher fuel prices, for clean air.
I think we'll install serious HEPA filters in the HVAC system in our new building. It's near a freeway and I'm concerned about particulates. It won't be cheap to install and maintain them, but it's worth paying for clean air.
If you want health care, somebody has to pay for it. The issue is whether various parties are allowed to compete, namely give you options.
My great primary MD retired, so they assigned me a new one. I didn't like her, so I called Kaiser customer services. A really nice lady talked to me, read me some resumes, and let me pick a new one.
I think the USA should have a free-or-cheap drop-in clinic system, staffed by nurses. But it should be subsidized free enterprise, not run by politicians and unions. There are some of those already.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
No, the Democratic wing of the Republican party.
More leftist lies from shortrex.
oh okay I see lol, I'd comment more but I'm too busy fueling my Falcon 900
Oh, sorry, I didn't realize this stall was taken.
I meant it as a pejorative for the chameleons / hermit-crab philosophers who keep decorating their cynical, distrustful philosophy with sunny phrase-shells that are the opposite of their actual dogma. "Progressivism" (which is atavistic, not progressive), "liberal" (which is anti-liberal), or "democratic socialists" (who are anti-democratic and anti-social) are examples of stolen terms. So I'll re-phrase:
The smug, self-superior American left wrongly imagine themselves "progressive" or "liberal" do *not* rely on the intrinsic "goodness" of people, but the opposite. Their philosophy beings with the assumption that ordinary people are evil, incompetent, untrustworthy, unable to run their own lives; ill-intentioned. "Progessivsm" means seeking to restrain, control and corral one's fellow men, a.k.a. one's "inferiors."
Examples: Progs don't trust grown-ups to be armed, to be responsible enough to save for their retirement, to buy the 'right' toilets, or buy the right health care; progs want to monitor and surveil and Big Brother everyone, don't trust parents to feed or teach their own children, don't believe minorities are smart enough to get I.D. cards, or hillbillies smart enough to vote their own interest. And so forth.
And progs believe collections of people who have banded together to produce a product are inherently evil, and must be controlled by groups of morally superior bureaucrats and politicians.
It's a very cynical, negative, *dis*trustful philosophy; not trusting in the goodness of man *whatsoever*.
It's also *not* progressive, but regressive, a leap back to when men were ruled by People Who Know Better.
America was the idea that men could rule *themselves*. And should.
Cheers, James Arthur
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