The stance of the Republican party has always been to abolish all social institutions run by the government. They opposed the formation of Social Security, and later, in the 60s, the formation of Medicare and Medicaid.
Ronald Reagan said in the 80s that if we didn't abolish Medicare, our children and grandchildren would never get to live in a free democracy.
I dislike the confusion between democracy and capitalism. One is a political philosophy, the other an economic one.
I do not equate the two, and neither does anyone I learned political science from.
But, the attempts to abolish Social Security or Medicare in the past by either legislation or common vote were never passed. I leave it you to figure out why.
Every other industrialized country in the world has universal health care, whether its run directly through the government or by private entities regulated by government.
There's a reason for that. Many decades ago, some of these countries discovered that when they left health care to big business interests, they were, as is normal for a purely capitalistic system, to be self serving. The tendency to profit to the disadvantage of the consumer is a feature of capitalism that one cannot escape.
In other words, pure capitalism with no government regulation is great if you're benefitting from it, at the top of the pyramid, or let's just say it, wealthy. The purest form of capitalism is feudalism, which humans practices for centuries under oligarchies and plutocracies of various kinds.
There was a landed gentry or aristocracy who profited by capitalism, and there was a working class of serfs that only benefitted from it at the whim of the gentry. They could prosper somewhat but there was no room for advancement in class or financial stature.
Along came the merchants, artisans and craftsmen of the period and they fit into a new category of someone that the aristocracy needed, but they did not directly control. That was the beginning of the middle class. But, they still lacked a say in the affairs of government until they realized that money is power. Some of them became wealthy enough to buy influence, even land. They became the New Rich. But, they lacked social status, still.
Many of those people came to America, along with many many poor looking for something they had never had before, land and the opportunity to free themselves from what was basically the purely capitalistic systems that had held them down for centuries.
So, is it any wonder that the poor and a good many of the middle class, who outnumber the wealthy but lack their financial power, would choose to vote for any system that would benefit them over the wealthy? Actually, that defines democracy more than anything, that the common man, the poor man can have a somewhat equal say to the wealthy? That is what a degree of socialization does...it gives the ordinary citizen more say in government, not less.
Giving more financial power to the weathly and big business through deregulation does not ultimately profit the poor or even the middle class. It creates a larger division between the economic classes. That is what has happened the last 10 years when business and the financial sector was deregulated. We now obviously have a good many more poor now, inflation, and a decreased market. Welcome to unregulated and pure capitalism, my friends.
Nice, isn't it? For the wealthy.
I can't see why this is a goal for anyone except the wealthy myself. I cannot figure out why ordinary folks would keep voting for a system that would increasingly disenfranchise them except for the promise of more "freedom". The freedom of capitalism is an illusion for the poor, simply because of how it works. Wishing to be free from government regulation and imposition is a decent goal, and I love that idea, but unfortunately, in the economic sense, deregulation of business and the financial sector is a separate issue that gets lumped together with the freedom to own a gun, freedom of religion and other freedoms.
Economic issues are separate issues. Don't confuse capitalism with democracy, people. Democracy is the freedom to vote in whatever system you like, and keep your right to do so. Capitalism is a nice word for a pyramid scheme when it's completely deregulated. As Allen Greenspan said, "We forgot to factor in greed." when speaking of the deregulation under GW Bush.
I always factor in greed when it comes to money. Big Business doesn't quit taking advantage of you unless someone else puts their big foot in the back of it's neck. The only thing big enough to do that is government, and remember, as long as you are voting in the people who best represent your interests, that is democracy in action. It's still YOUR government.
If you don't like the current one, vote it out. That is also democracy in action. But don't give your wealth and economic freedom to big business. They'll ass rape you until you're dead. That's what they do, and history shows it over and over again. We'd still have children working in factories and indentured servitude if big business had never been regulated by government. No one would give a damn about your health and safety, what you had for retirement in your old age, and definitely not whether you could see a doctor or not if the government hadn't regulated big business.
The wealth of this country was owned by an astonishingly small group robber barons a hundred and twenty years ago. Do you really want that back? Because that is what total deregulation of the financial sector and insurance companies and big business will do.
