ANS -- The Real Choice

this is a simple, fairly short, blog-post.  He explains some stuff pretty simply -- easy to understand.  the real choice isn't between Capitalism and Socialism, it's between taking care of corporations or taking care of people. 
find it here:  http://wordsaboutamerica.com/2011/09/15/the-real-choice/  
--Kim

The Real Choice

leave a comment »

The biggest difference between progressives and conservatives is that one believes that government inherently infringes on freedom and the other believes that government creates the conditions for it. After the sub-prime debacle, conservatives had so discredited the idea of "hands off" government in regard to financial security that the public was ready for a new narrative about what government should or shouldn't do. The people watched with alarm as the effects of rapacious unregulated economic forces ate away at their 401Ks, their housing values, their health insurance (if they still had it), their wages, their security and their retirement.
That is always the outcome of embracing the ideology of unregulated greed. The idea that if we just kiss the almighty brass ring of big business and entrust our financial futures to their interests, everything will be wonderful and we'll get to live in this great big marvelous utopia. If you want to lose your financial security, your job, your house and your healthcare and work for less money, it's a great ideology. In 2008-2009, we relearned the lesson of our grandparents, who lived through a time when Republicans preached the same thing in the run-up to the Great Depression.
It's time progressives wrote the narrative. Americans don't face a choice between capitalism and socialism. For many years we've been told that we face a stark choice between the free market (capitalism) and tyrannical government (socialism), but that isn't what our choice is. Our choice is between the unregulated greed that led to our recession and responsible effective leadership that protects our freedom. Unregulated markets are not free markets at all, they lead to unelected corporate domination and that isn't freedom at all.
If I may play conspiracy theorist for a minute, the "small government" ideology is merely a smoke screen, a plot by and for the super rich against the average person. They play upon the common working man's resentment toward the non working poor but somehow the part about subsidizing and bailing out the rich never gets told. Corporate welfare expenditures exceed all entitlement programs combined by almost six to one.
Taxes really are bad when they go disproportionately to finance never-ending war for conquering and subjugating other nations, then only the rich benefit from taxes. If taxes are to help the common good they should go to education, care for the elderly and infrastructure projects, such as what Obama is now proposing.They could give more education and a better future for more people. which means fewer crimes and less need to police and less money to prison systems. Less money for military might mean less raw materials stolen from the developing countries, and it would be a lot fairer world. The alternative to government for the sake of big business isn't government for the sake of big government. It's government for the average person, who actually creates prosperity by working for a living as these times are living proof.
Big government got us to the moon…we beat Russia…it could also get us new technologies so we could beat China this time around but probably that won't happen because of the hysterical hyperbole of the Tea Party.

Written by wordsaboutamerica

September 15, 2011 at 1:31 pm

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged with free market, progressive narrative, socialism