(December 20, 2010 at 4:24 am)Tiberius Wrote: You mean the "anything goes" attitude towards everyone. Y'know, like...equality?
Adrian, the kind of government that, if I remember correctly, you would want to see would never result in equality. By its very nature, the unequal distribution of wealth and power results in grave inequality.
The kind of horrible power you attribute to an overreaching government would just be replaced by someone else as you remove more and more power from the government.
Barring ignorance to history and modern politics, I honestly don't see how anyone can trust trust a multi-billion dollar company to go about their business unfettered by government restrictions and controls than a democratically-elected government with a respectable turnover rate.
Hell, even if the US government has too much power over its own economic system, the US government still has an enormous problem with corruption because of the companies trying very hard to control its own regulation and buying politicians. The recent healthcare debacle in the year from the announcement right up to the President signing the bill is enormous evidence of this.
I think I and others who don't ascribe to your ideals can see just much power people and companies like that can have if the government just decided to stop regulating them. The government dictators would just be given the moniker of "CEO" instead of "Senator."
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
