newz
May 23, 2010
From " Rand Paul and the Perils of Textbook Libertarianism" in today's Times.
Filed Under:
I'll go further: In enjoining whole-hog the straw man argument against collective legislative power, the Tea Party nitwits would deliver us completely unprotected into a bullshit corporate Wild West. The enemy isn't federal legislation or regulation, as if the opposite of regulation were somehow liberty. The enemy, as always, is oppression--in this country more often served up by business interests than government.
These folks are too wrapped up in their libertarian Id to consider what happens if and when you actually try to roll back government protections and limits on business. As if corporate concerns have any relationship whatsoever to private ones.... It's about time to stop oversimplifying the problem. It's not Big Guy vs Little Guy in any neat polar way.
From the article
These folks are too wrapped up in their libertarian Id to consider what happens if and when you actually try to roll back government protections and limits on business. As if corporate concerns have any relationship whatsoever to private ones.... It's about time to stop oversimplifying the problem. It's not Big Guy vs Little Guy in any neat polar way.
From the article
"This points to the bind Mr. Paul is in. However attractive it may be just now to depict all political conflict as a neatly bifurcated either/or, with the heroic individual pitted against the faceless federal Leviathan, the truth is that legislative battles over civil rights laws were waged within government, and between competing incarnations of it, federal vs. state."
Mar 22, 2010
Ezra Klein sez:
"Health-care reform is focused on another group: the working class. People with jobs, but not jobs that are good enough to offer them health-care benefits. People with paychecks, but who aren't making quite enough money to bear the cost of insurance. People who're buying insurance on their own, which means they don't get the good deals that big employers get, and they don't get a giant tax break to help them out. But these aren't lazy people, or layabouts. These are people who've been left behind in the system. We spend a lot more money to give a lot more help to a lot of folks who need it less than this group does. ...
These are the folks health-care reform is meant to help. The fact that they can't afford insurance, though, isn't evidence of some abdication of personal responsibility. It is evidence that they're not old, or very poor, or employed by a large corporation that offers health-care insurance. It is inevitable enough that health is not fair, but it is not inevitable that the health-care system acts with similar capriciousness. And if Democrats win tonight's vote, it will no longer be the case."
These are the folks health-care reform is meant to help. The fact that they can't afford insurance, though, isn't evidence of some abdication of personal responsibility. It is evidence that they're not old, or very poor, or employed by a large corporation that offers health-care insurance. It is inevitable enough that health is not fair, but it is not inevitable that the health-care system acts with similar capriciousness. And if Democrats win tonight's vote, it will no longer be the case."
Word.
