If Republicans Get Their Way, We Really All Will Be On Our Own #2
I recently did a post under this title (http://themoderatevoice.com/160501/if-republicans-get-their-way-we-really-all-will-be-on-our-own/). It said, in essence, that these days Republicans seem to believe that people who get help from government for the basics of life are moochers.
I sent this post to some friends. One person came back and asked if the U.S. abides by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights any longer. Article 25 of that Declaration says:
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
I thought to my self, yeah, what about that? Then I realized that Eleanor Roosevelt helped with the drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And she was a Democrat.
In our hyper fractured politics, Republicans now appear to believe that just about anything Democrats have had a hand in putting together is so vile and wrong it need not be pursued. Even if it’s part of an internationally agreed upon code of government conduct.
Not a very responsible way to view things, in my opinion.
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That does seem to be exactly the case. It really shows that so many of us have no sense of history, even well documented history. The Great Depression was a direct result of the govt essentially being reduced to a bystander in the commerce of this nation. Taxes were almost non existent and there was very little regulation. As a consequence, the money flowed to the top at an alarming rate, the system was rigged across the board to increase investments without regard to anything the value of investments should be tied to, and the economy collapsed.
The New Deal was a powerful response to the lessons learned, its tax policy and regulations put in place to address the issues, and it worked. It worked for decades. The GOP then decided that these things were no longer needed, why I don’t know. Maybe they think that the underlying human nature has changed since then. Personally I think they just don’t remember or understand what sparked them to be put in place in the first place. Either way, they clearly wish to undo all of it and go back to the type of govt we had under Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. Although by the time Hoover got the reigns there wasn’t much he could do I don’t think, even if he wanted to. The drive to do this make no sense to me at all, and is based on complete ignorance of the past and what will happen in the future, in fact what almost happened in 2008. I believe the only reason we didn’t have a repeat of 1929 in 2008 is because unlike 1929, the federal govt was strong enough to take steps to prevent a full scale Depression.
And yet, despite the near total catastrophe of 2008 that was a result of repealing the tax policy and regulations of the New Deal, instead of being chastised, the GOP seem even more hell bent on enacted policies to take us back to the 1920′s. And a large portion of this country, not just the wealthy who will see the real benefits of it, seems ignorant enough to want to help them do so. I just don’t get it.
There’s nothing to get slamfu, people who think this way are living in alternatve universe, with alternative facts. They can not be persuaded with logic and reason. Their minds cannot be changed but their ideas can be defeated at the polls.
In their effort to never address the issue, you’d likely be met with accusations from the GOP that you prescribe to a “one world theology” or something about “international things such as this lib’rul junk threaten our nation’s sovereignty”. There is truly a bubble that has been created for the right which seems to drive them further to insane positions – Fox News, talk radio, Drudge Report, Breitbart, etc. It has been ridiculous for a while now and most of their positions are riddled with double standards (yes, yes, there are a number of “lefty” positions that have a tendency toward double standards, as well… but it’s hardly at the level of the right).
There is a belief system among Republicans and Libertarians that the great, virtually flawless system of capitalism is what made our country what it is and created our large middle class. This is not true, of course. Capitalism, tempered by a fear of communism that allowed laws to be created that gave power to unions is what created the American middle class that blossomed after World War II. Even that’s a simple explanation, of course. But it’s a major factor in the economic history of the twentieth century United States. One that modern conservatives try to wipe from history like Communist Russia would wipe enemies of the state from photographs. If you want to see what happens with capitalism that fails to develop those countervailing forces look at South America or Asia. Even with all of the talk about China’s growing middle class that middle class is dwarfed by millions upon millions of people living in poverty. When confronted with the real history of capital versus labor conservatives often say that unions had their place then but that if they were to vanish tomorrow we would never go back to the bad old days. Tell that to the millions of underemployed Americans. All the way back? Maybe not. But recent experience shows us that we don’t have to go all the way back to those times for millions of Americans to suffer.