Washington is still ruled by Reaganism — an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good. The abject failure of Reaganism in practice should have killed it but, like a movie zombie, it keeps on coming back from the dead. Full Story »
Posted by Dwight Rousu - via AllTop
The debate over the public option has, as I said, been depressing in its inanity. Opponents of the option — not just Republicans, but Democrats like Sen. Kent Conrad and Sen. Ben Nelson — have offered no coherent arguments against it. Nelson has warned ominously that if the option were available, Americans would choose it over private insurance — which he treats as a self-evidently bad thing, rather than as what should happen if the government plan was, in fact, better than what private insurers offer.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something,” said Upton Sinclair, “when his salary” — or, I would add, his campaign contributions — “depend upon his not understanding it.”
it’s hard to avoid the sense that a crucial opportunity is being missed, that we’re at what should be a turning point but are failing to make the turn.
We need publicly financed elections.