Any way I look at it, the Republicans are in trouble. Despite the Democrats’ best efforts to shoot themselves in the collective foot, the Republicans are looking worse. They seem to be off in some bizzaro world where facts and objective reality need not apply, egged on by the new faces of the Republican party Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh. But all is not lost. The Republicans can still come back from this but it will take something that has been anathema to them for close to three decades now: Change.
1) Look up the definition of “Bi-Partisan”. According to Webster’s: “Of, relating to, or involving members of two parties; specifically: marked by or involving cooperation, agreement, and compromise between two major political parties.” Now look at the definition of partisan: “A firm adherent to a party, faction, cause, or person; especially: one exhibiting blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance.” Which one better describes the Republican Party today? There will always be disagreements between the parties, that’s why we have parties, but the two party system only works if both parties are working towards the same goal. In the past, both Democrats and Republicans were working to make America stronger and better, they just disagreed on what that meant and how to go about it. We need to return to those days. If the Democrats come up with a good idea, the Republicans should support it. By becoming the party of automatic “NO!” they become a party bereft of ideas, doomed to irrelevance. By becoming agreeable co-crafters of policy, compromising where necessary and engaging in vigorous debate where required, they become an active participant in government and can show the American people that they are not just a knee-jerk reactionary organization bent on regaining power at any cost regardless of what’s best for the country.
2) Make a plan. If the Republicans were to somehow regain power tomorrow, what would they do with it? Where would they take the country? I don’t know. That is a problem. The Republicans are hoping that by preventing Healthcare reform, they will have a repeat of Bill Clinton’s first term and be able to take back the house and the senate in 2010, but they forget that the Republicans during Clinton’s first term had actual ideas. They made a contract with America, most of which failed to pass but they at least had a vision of what America would be like should they retake control of the Government. While I’m sure some Republicans have a good idea of where they want to take the country, they will have to overcome the fact that Republicans had control of all three branches of government for 6 years under Bush, and it did not turn out well. It’s time to articulate a new plan with some objective facts to support it.
3) Admit when there’s a problem. If you ignore objective reality and pretend that everything is fine, it eventually shows through as being out of touch at best and fiddling while Rome burns at worst. Health-care in this country is becoming increasingly expensive, and is completely unavailble for many, many people. The goal should be fixing it, with arguments and debates over what is the best way to go about it. However, many Republicans believe that America has the best healthcare in the world and wonder why we should change it. And to be fair, the current system probably works perfectly fine for them. But it doesn’t work for everyone and if Republicans continue to ignore that fact and insist that everything is fine, there will be a further backlash against them. Likewise, the financial system catostrophically failed last year. Pretending that everything is fine and we don’t need regulation is going to cause further problems on down the line and further alienate the millions of voters affected by the collapse.
4) Be the Better Party. After seeing several Republican protestors displaying the President as Hitler, the argument always seems to be that “Well, the Democrats did it when Bush was in office.” As delightfully vindictive as that sentiment is, it doesn’t really get Republicans anywhere. It’s also about as mature as a 10 year old caught punching a fellow student saying, “He started it.” Be the constructive party. Let the angry protestors know that they’re not helping, distance yourselves from the crazies. Let your constituents know that the Republican Party is better than that.
5) Stick to your morals 100% or don’t have them. As the party of family values, it’s important to stick to your morals. If there’s one thing Americans can not stand, it’s hypocrisy. And watching the same people who came down so hard on Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal admit to affairs and affairs with prostitutes, the people who were so against homosexuals turn out to be the ones soliciting gay sex in airports or having illicit relationships with congressional pages makes it hard not to scream “Hypocrites!” If you want to be the party of values, you need to lead the call for the resignation of people who don’t live up to their own morals regardless of party. It’s better to lose a Senator or a Governor in the short-term than be forever tarnished as a party of hypocrites. Or you could abandon the artificial moral high-ground and become the party of human beings with problems like everyone else. Your choice.
6) Be the party of accountability. The Republican party is the party of personal liberty (Other than, you know, libertarians.) They believe that Government too often infringes on the rights of the people, and they call for smaller government and deregulation. As such, they should be on the forefront of calling for the arrest of people who abuse the system and of calling for stiff penalties for corporations who prove they cannot handle the freedom of deregulation. They should be more offended than anyone at abuses such as AIG, Enron, and the like. Being for freedom is all well and good, but laws exist because some people cannot handle freedom and choose to exploit the freedoms they’re given. It is that dichotomy that the Republicans must face.
7) Be the party of the people. Being pro-corporation is not neccessarily a bad thing, but corporations cannot vote and people can. People who have been screwed over by corporations tend to vote against people who act on the corporations behalf. So why are the Republicans so pro-business? Ostensibly, it’s due to the absolute truth that big companies create lots of jobs. Plentiful jobs means more people able to make it on their own without depending on a government handout. So really, Republicanism only really works when there is a strong middle class. Rich people are few. Poor people, if they vote, tend to vote for democrats. The middle class is the greatest potential for growing Republican voters. It makes sense then that the Republicans would be pro-business only in so far as it leads to job creation. If a company is laying off workers, the Republicans should be up in arms against that. If a company is closing up shop, the Republicans should be concerned. If, on the other hand, the Republicans are only concerned with allowing comapnies to increase their bottom line, the number of jobs in this country will continue to decrease (Nothing helps the bottom line than cutting costs via eliminating jobs) and the number of poor, unemployed, angry democrat voters will be created.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. There are many other things that need to be done as well, but these are a good start. Hopefully the Republicans will be able to impliment some well needed changes to thier platform and rise from irrelevance. Because we need a viable opposition to the Democrats. Allowing Democrats to push through their agenda unimpeeded will give us equal and opposite problems to what we got when the Republicans had control of our Government. And if, after the enevitable failure of those plans, the Republicans regain control without learning anything from this forray into the wilderness, heaven help us.
I normally try to keep my posts to a national scale, but permit me if you will to talk about a local issue. I live in Michigan, a state with the highest unemployment rate in the nation (by a massive margin of 3% over the 2nd worst.) Our state’s economy has traditionally been supported by the auto industry, but with the economic down-turn, car manufacture has slowed to a crawl, at least the car manufacturing that hadn’t already been shipped out of state or to Mexico. 15% of our population is unemployed including, yes, me. The ISP I had worked for for the past six years eliminated my job due to financial reasons. We are hurting as a state and no one seems to be taking any steps to solve the problem. But I have a dream.
With all the talk of green jobs being created, I wonder why can’t Michigan do that? We have massive manufacturing experience, and just as in World War I and II where we moved from making cars to making tanks and aircraft, why can’t we move from manufacturing cars to manufacturing solar panels and wind turbines? I would love to see Michigan become the leading manufacturer of those technologies as well as research into making them more efficient. On the west coast of Michigan, around the Holland area, we have a massive population of dutch people. Why don’t we tap into that heritage and build a wind-farm in Lake Michigan? Put it off shore within sight of the beaches and it would be a tourist draw. Especially if you arranged them artistically. If Lansing passed a law mandating that any turbines installed in Michigan be manufactured in Michigan and gave tax breaks to companies who moved their manufacturing base to Michigan we can get there. (The income tax on the newly employed would bring in way more money to the state than will be lost from the tax breaks you give to the companies, especially the new ones we bring to the state. It would certainly be better than the nothing we are getting from companies who are not creating jobs here currently.)
As well as wind power, we should also become a leader in Solar energy. Michigan is not known for it’s year-round sunshine (Michigan winters give rival Seattle a run for it’s money on the title of “The place where the sun don’t shine.”) but if we make them affordable enough via large-scale manufacturing (more jobs), we could see a majority of houses have them installed on their roofs. If we can make enough houses self-sufficient we could transform our energy companies from energy producers to energy brokers. If a house generates more electricity than they need, the rest goes back to the grid and that home owner gets a check at the end of the month. The energy company can turn around and sell that energy to businesses and homes with higher energy needs.
These are two simple ideas that could help get Michigan back on track. It would be a massive undertaking, and I’m not sure even where to start, but I’d like to see this become a reality. Feel free to leave a comment if you have any suggestions on how to make this a reality or if you have any other ideas on how to get Michigan back on track.
#1 Obama is not a fascist or a socialist and definitely not a fascist AND a socialist. Socialism is a radical left ideology and Fascism is a radical right ideology. Saying that Obama is a fascist is like calling George W Bush a Commie. Obama isn’t exactly a Socialist either. He’s firmly on the side of Capitalism. Ask any actual socialists.
#2 Admitting something has faults is not the same as condemning it. Capitalism is the best form of economics we humans have come up with, but that is not to say it is without fault. Without some restraints, it leads to unbridled greed and a great deal of harm to all involved. Since the foxes we put in charge of the hen-houses seem to be unable to restrain themselves, having some checks on the rampant greed displayed by corporations lately is not socialism, it’s trimming the sick branches of a tree so the good parts can flourish.
#3 Health Care reform is not socialism. All the health-care bills that are currently under scrutiny are is Health Insurance reform. In order to do socialized medicine right, the government would need to set up a single-payer system where you pay taxes and the government provides you health insurance. If done right, this system could work to provide better coverage for a far greater number of people than the current system (and slightly worse coverage for a select few) but single-payer is not even on the table in any of the bills put forth.
#4 A public option will kill private insurance companies. Just like UPS and FedEx are going out of business thanks to the USPS. (For those of you who don’t get sarcasm: that was it. The public option will be just that: an option.)
#5 The brown shirts will be showing up any minute now to silence dissent. I shouldn’t have to say this, but no. No they are not. Obama, unlike his predecessor, even allows dissenting opinions in his town hall meetings. He has taken ideas from both right and left. And despite the fact that yelling doesn’t help change anyones minds, no one has come forth to arrest protesters en masse and send them to jail for expressing their opinions.
Bonus: Having your own opinion is fine. Having your own facts is not. If you would like to contribute to the discussion, you’re welcome to join but we’re discussing things in the real world, not the alternate reality where Obama sports a goatee and is spreading his Socialist-Fascist-Communist-Nazi agenda. If you want to discuss bizzarro world, Glenn Beck is there for you.
The raging health-care debate going on in our nation’s capital is bringing to the fore another debate that has been simmering beneath the surface of our culture for years: Capitalism vs Socialism. Thanks to intrepid capitalists, socialism is considered a dirty word in American politics despite places like Sweden and France whose socialist health-care systems function quite well (at least when compared to the broad spectrum of American health-care for both insured and uninsured) A socialist health-care system in America might well work better for more people than the current system, but we will never have a socialist health-care system in America. What we will end up with, what congress will push through and the president will sign into law, is a compromised system that may succeed in lowering costs a bit, but will certainly not be universal and will no doubt be underfunded. And that is the unfortunate downfall of any attempt at socialism in America, in order for socialism to work, everyone must commit to it and agree to pay for it and that is just not possible in America today. Once again, California leads the way with their push for ever-increasing social programs while rejecting any attempt to raise taxes to pay for them.
But really, if the goal is to improve the affordability of health-care and increase the level of care patients receive, there are other options. Unfortunately, the majority of those options (the ones that don’t simply give the middle-finger to poor people) upset the sacred cows of capitalism: profits. But really, if the goal of a health-care system is anything other than making sick people well, it has lost it’s way. Our health-care system has the added goal of making money. This should scare you.
Ostensibly, an insurance company would take good care of clients so as to not get sued and to attract more clients. But what if your health became a liability to their bottom line? Suddenly, you have a preexisting condition and your insurance has gone bye-bye. In the war of priorities, your health has lost out to mega-insurance-corps’ profit margin. The problem with health care right now, as well as energy, prisons, and countless other institutions that we rely on is that we have allowed them to be run for profit.
Anyone remember RoboCop? In that movie, the city of Detroit has outsourced its police force to a huge corporation. It seems like a ridiculous idea except we’ve already done that with many of our prisons. And now we have the companies running said prisons lobbying for stiffer penalties, which is of course meant to keep us safe and has nothing to do with getting more money for having more clients (IE: prisoners.)
Socialized health-care would solve the profit problem but would create a large set of other problems (for instance, how to pay for it.) There is a solution closer to the center, however: The Non-Profit. It may be difficult, but imagine a non-profit insurance company. What would that look like? By buying in to a non-profit insurance plan, the insurance company pools the resources and insulates you from the cost of health-care should you need it. It’s what an insurance company is supposed to do, but because for-profit insurance companies must also look at the bottom-line they may refuse to allow you a needed procedure (or at least refuse to pay for it which is, for most people, the same thing.) The non-profit insurance company would be free of that secondary (or in many cases primary) obligation to make money for their investors, and would be free to offer the best level of care possible.
The majority of hospitals in America are non-profit. Any profits they make go straight back into the hospital to purchase the best equipment and to allow them to hire the best people available. Non-Profit organizations like the Mayo Clinic are world-renowned for their care. Why not have a non-profit insurance company working towards that same goal? The goal of making sick people well and keeping healthy people from getting sick?
The same principle can be applied to many other areas of our country. If profits are not the goal, companies can focus on treating their employees better which in turn leads to better service of customers. Better service of customers leads to more customers and higher profits. Ironically, the best way to make profits is to not worry about profits. We in America have completely lost this. Our corporations’ obsession with profit margins have lead them to take unnecessary risks, cut costs any way they can (usually from customer service and/or by lowering the quality of their products. See: GM and planned obsolescence for the later, AT&T and Comcast for the former), and to treat the customer like the enemy. Let’s face it, if you’re an insurance company with the goal of making money and someone makes a claim, they are directly interfering with your goal. Even if responding to that claim is the stated purpose of your company, you’re going to fight it as best you can and make the customer jump through as many hoops as possible to get anywhere.
We need our companies to stop looking at the bottom-line and start serving their customers. If profits get immediately put to use growing the company, most companies would benefit and investors would get more money in the long term. It’s a smaller slice of a much bigger pie. Would you rather have 2% of a million dollars or 50% of $30,000? Looking at the landscape of our economy the last couple years, it’s clear that companies have done far more harm to themselves and their reputations and their profit margins by seeking more and more profits than they would have even by taking a slight loss to better serve their customers, clients, and employees. Their stock prices over the last year certainly show it.
I was going to write a nice long post on the Republican response to the stimulus packaged, but I’ll let Rachel handle it:
Seriously? Tax cuts? How does that help people who are out of work and therefor have no money and therefor pay no taxes. And if we’re worried about inflation due to government conjuring money into existance, how is this any different than what banks do whenever they give someone a loan? (In case you weren’t aware, banks are only required to have $1 for every $9 they loan out, which means that when you get a loan, the bank is creating money out of the ether for you. If everyone paid off their debts, the American economy would shrink down to 1/9th it’s current size.)
Who knows if the stimulus package will work or not, but at least lets get some decent roads and bridges out of it. If the stimulus package fails at least we’ll have something to show for our money instead of the smoking craters in Iraq and Afghanistan that are all president Bush has to show for the trillion dollars we spent on those wars.
Now that the Democrats are in power, I really want to back the Republicans. Please Republicans, give me something, anything, to defend you with. Give me a decent alternative to the democrats plan! Give me a reason to support you.
Well, the election is over in a resounding victory for the democrats. It’s time for me to put on my red hat and try and think of ways to get the Republican party back on its feet. We need the Republican party to balance out the democrats or all that power will go to their heads and we’ll be in just as much trouble as we were for the first six years of the Bush administration. Unfortunately, the current Republican leadership is not helping matters. After eight years of tax-cuts that didn’t help the economy at all, the best alternative to the democrats’ giant stimulus package they can come up is… wait for it… MORE TAX CUTS!
Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell recently came very close to seeing the problem before completely missing the point. He warned recently that the Republican party was in danger of becoming a regional, minority party. Given that the latest data shows a whopping 5 states are still solidly or strongly leaning Republican, that would be a resounding “no-duh.” Unfortunately McConnell proceeded to blame the Republicans’ lack of appeal to the rich, the poor, Latinos, and all other minorities as poor marketing. Poor marketing. Really? Republican ideas are sound, you just need to market it better?
Instead of a new marketing strategy, the Republicans need to spend some time, a good long time, and answer these questions: What does the Republican party stand for? Why do they exist? For whom do they exist? The current answers to those questions make any amount of marketing a moot point.
If you were to ask people on the street what the Republican party stands for you would probably get a wide range of issues but the predominant answers would be pro-business, small and limited government, anti-abortion, and anti-gay marriage. This is kind of a scary thought, and it’s no wonder they have been losing in this environment.
When people think about business right now, they’re thinking about Enron and Worldcom, Bear Stearns and Lieman Brothers. Companies who screwed over their customers, employees, and stockholders. Now is not a good time to be pro-business and anti-regulation. Yet the Republicans have not turned from their love of deregulation or offered a plan for non-intrusive yet effective regulations. Human greed makes it impossible for businesses or government to be unregulated. The founding fathers new that, that’s why we have a multi-branch government with plenty of checks and balances.
When people think small government, they have begun to associate it with incompetent government. The Republican president’s response to Hurricane Katrina for instance. They have also associated the Republicans with hypocrisy on this note since their president created a whole new Orwellian-sounding department, Homeland Security, and spent billions of dollars on a war. Small Government does not exist, and the Republican idea of small government simply means that the government isn’t going to help it’s people, it’s just going to increase the size of the military while our bridges fall down. All the actual small-government believers have jumped ship to the libertarians.
It’s sad that the third and forth answers are both anti-answers. What do you stand for? “Well, I’m against this…” This is a problem. Being against something should never overshadow what you’re actually for.
So how do we fix this? Some would say that the Republicans need to move to the left in order to appeal to a larger swath of the population. I don’t think so. We need them on the right to balance out the left, not rushing over to capsize our democracy. What we need is some things that the Republicans can stand for.
First of all, the Party of Lincoln® should stand for equality. They’ve let the democrats walk all over them on this issue long enough by trying to appeal to the “average white person.” That has led them to be associated with racists. The nearly universally white Republican National Convention last year should be a huge wake-up call that America is diverse and we need to assure equal rights for everyone.
Second, the Party of Reagan should be for pragmatic solutions to problems. Let the democrats have pie-in-the-sky plans for America, the Republicans should be the party of simple, elegant and above all competent solutions. They should be the first to speak up when something isn’t working and suggest viable alternatives. Right now the Republicans have no viable solutions and are severely lacking in authority on most of these issues due to the last eight years of gross government incompetence.
Lastly, the Republicans need a goal. They need a plan for where they want to see the country in 5, 10, 50, and 100 years from now. What is the Republican utopia? There isn’t one. The Republican view was that America was pretty good as it was and they were fighting with every ounce of their being to stave off change to the American way of life. Change came anyway. The democrats have a goal, set out in several of Obama’s speaches, of an America where everyone is equal and has opportunities available to them if they’re willing to work at it. That’s a pretty good goal. What do the Republicans have to match that? Do they have a better goal or vision for America?
If the Republicans cannot answer these core questions of identity, they are going to go the way of the Whigs and Bull Moose, and some new party will rise to prominence. The Libertarians seem poised. With a few sane voices, most likely defecting from the Republicans, they could easily rise to replace the Republicans as the new voice of the right. If the Republicans cannot find answers to these questions, or refuse to face them, I will have a hard time not saying “Good Ridance.”
There’s been a lot of speculation on how and why the Republicans lost the election. It could be as simple as the Democrats having a vastly better candidate, which certainly seems to be the case, however that does not explain the vast degree to which they lost. The Republicans went from having control of the presidency, the supreme court, and both houses of congress to losing all of them (given the age of some of the supreme court justices, it’s only a matter of time.) The speculation continues on what caused this but for my hypothosis I’d say it was the love. Republicans lost the love.
There’s a bit of poetry in the book of Corinthians that says:
“If I speak in the tongues of men and angels,
but have not love,
I have become resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.”
The Republicans have been talking a good game, they haven’t changed their verbiage since Reagan. But Reagan at least, as my friend put it so eloquently, “Believed in the inherent goodness of the American People.” While many people have issues with Reagan’s policies, he honestly believed that Americans were good people and he believed that what he was doing was the right thing to do to help the country and the individuals living in it. He loved Americans.
Since then, the love has been replaced by a quiet (and sometimes noisy) cynicism. The Republicans lost when Bush failed in his response to Hurricane Katrina. The Republicans lost when they stop-lossed our troups. The Republicans lost when images of Walter Reed hospital were released. The Republicans lost when they, as a party, stopped caring about average Americans. Their idea was give enough to the rich and the wealth would eventually trickle down to the poor. Though they gave eloquent speaches, they’re words became like clanging cymbals.
Now the Republicans are lost in the wasteland pointing fingers at each other and trying to figure out what went wrong. We will wait and see whether they find the answers they are looking for, but unless they find the love, their reason for existing as an organization, it will be very difficult for them to return to power. And really, we need the balance or the Republicans will go the way of Bull-Moose and the Whigs to be replaced by another party that finds something beautiful and worth fighting for in this wonderful experiment we call America.
Yielding to pressure from conspiracy theorists, President-elect Barack Obama exposed his genitals to reporters yesterday at a press conference held to quash persistent rumors that he is, in fact, female. Previous assurances from Michelle Obama that he was “All man” had gone unheeded. While most in attendance agreed that the president-elect does indeed have a penis, the conspiracy theorists that had brought the charges were not convinced. “It’s obviously a prosthetic!” said conspiracy theorist and Fox News commentator Harold Crumm. Another theorist, Roger Johnson was likewise not convinced. “I was watching this on C-SPAN and all I saw was a blurry spot. This does nothing to convince me.”
Given the negative reaction by conspiracy theorists, an Obama spokesperson said today that the president-elect had canceled plans to show reporters his Birth Certificate, hospital records, social security card, and other documentation that the conspiracy theorists claimed would easily show him to be a natural born US citizen. Said the spokesperson, “We’ve been putting up with these baseless accusations for months. Most we’ve chalked up to crazy people, but President-elect Obama took strong offence to this new attack on his manhood. We were also going to take on the issue of his natural born US Citizenship, but if the word of public officials who legally have access to these documents isn’t good enough for them, there’s really no point in pursuing this further. As yesterday’s press conference proved, they’ll just say it’s a fake and continue to make wild accusations.”
I sat down with one conspiracy theorist this afternoon. “That’s not true at all. It would be very easy to dispel all these rumors. He just needs to show us his birth certificate and social security card and we would believe it,” said the man identified as Barack Obama Jr. after paying for our coffee with his credit card. “Why would he hesitate to show us this documentation? He obviously has something to hide!”
The Obama spokesperson responded, “After yesterday, I’d say no. No he doesn’t.”
I read an interview on CNN yesterday where they were talking to what they had decided was the “Republican Barack Obama,” and was struck by something he said.He said that the Democratic party wanted to give a man a fish, while the Republican party was the party that wanted to teach a man to fish.An obvious reference to the adage: “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life.”(Trout starvation notwithstanding, I’ve always preferred the parody adage: “Give a man a fire he’ll be warm for a day, set a man on fire and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.”)While I don’t doubt that the Republicans favor individuality and self-reliance, I have to admit that the analogy brought two similar thoughts to mind:
1) A man stands on the beach, starving.He hasn’t eaten in days.A Republican happens by and tells the man, “I have this fish I could give you, but instead I’m going to give you some instruction that will be more helpful to you.In order to fish, put a hook on your fishing pole, put a worm on the hook, and lower it into the water.When the fish bites, pull sharply to set the hook and then slowly reel it in.”The Republican walks away feeling very satisfied that good has been done here.The starving man looks at the frozen ground devoid of worms and notes his lack of a hook or fishing pole.He glares at the retreating Republican because he already knew how to fish; he merely lacks the means to do so.
2) A fisherman pulls into shore after a long night of fruitless fishing.Despite his many years as a fisherman, he has not managed to catch any fish.He comes ashore pondering how he will be able to feed his family since the fish have simply not been biting. A Republican happens by and tells the man, “I have this fish I could give you, but instead I’m going to give you some instruction that will be more helpful to you.In order to fish, put a hook on your fishing pole, put a worm on the hook, and lower it into the water.When the fish bites, pull sharply to set the hook and then slowly reel it in.”The Republican walks away feeling very satisfied that good has been done here.The hungry fisherman glares after the retreating Republican because, while he has much more experience and skill at fishing than the advice-giver, he has simply been having a string of bad luck.The Republican’s advice was of no help whatsoever.
A democrat gives each man a fish.The starving man on the beach eats for a day and needs a fish again tomorrow.The unlucky fisherman eats for a day and is able to catch a few fish the next day to feed his family.He limps by.
A libertarian believes it is each man’s right to starve and does nothing to help.
A communist takes all the fish that were caught in the area and gives each person a fish.The rest they keep “for emergencies,” but the fish rot.
A fascist gives fishing rights only to corporations and declares that if you want to be a fisherman, you have to work for the corporation.
Follow up 1) One day a survivalist happens by the starving man, teaches him to make fish-hooks out of twigs and use vines as fishing line.The man is able to work his way up little by little till he can afford an actual fishing rod and hook and make a meager living as a fisherman, being able to eat most of the time unless the fish aren’t biting.
Follow up 2) One day a scientist develops a fish-sonar.The unlucky fisherman takes a chance and buys one. He’s better able to find fish, and his fortune improves.The sonar quickly pays for itself and the fisherman is better able to provide for his family.
Conclusion: The moral of this story is that if you give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day, you can teach a man to fish and he may still starve, but if you give him the MEANS to fish, he’ll have a much better chance of survival.
The question is, “how can the government possibly know what means people need?”They really can’t.So they’re stuck giving either useless advice to “Be self-sufficient!” or hand outs.While handouts do nothing to help in the long term, they may help some limp by until the fish are biting again.It’s better than nothing, but does absolutely nothing to help those without the means of self-reliance to gain self-sufficiency.They will be eternally stuck begging for hand-outs.A handout to a man who has the means but has run into a string of bad luck may get them through their tough time, but they will be eternally at the mercy of the whims of fate.Ultimately, it would be nice if we could see beyond the immediate need to give a person what they truly need to thrive, but that is not likely to ever come from the government. So if our options are to tell people to be self-reliant without aiding them in attaining self-reliance or just give them hand-outs and make them reliant on the government, which is the better option?
In a good economy, there are greater possibilities. The fisherman could get a loan to buy the fish-sonar. The starving man may be able to get a job, even if it’s minimum wage. It is easier to say to people “Be self-sufficient” because there are means available for those willing to work at it to be self-sufficient. When the economy goes in the tank, there is an overall loss of opportunity and maybe that loan or that job just isn’t available. Telling people to be self-sufficient in that environment just does not work. (See election, 2008.) The question now becomes, “In this era of less do we click back to the opposite extreme of government hand-outs or do we go to the center and work to meet people’s needs by giving them the means to be self-reliant?”
