Bob

What do (and what should) conservatives advocate for?

Do or should they advocate very incremental change toward bettering the human condition in America?

Do or should they advocate removing twentieth century progressive policy, with nothing to replace it?

If they advocate dismantling progressive policies, how are they meaningfully different from economic libertarians? Why are they "conservatives" if they advocate a fairly radical departure to economic libertarianism that has never been embraced in America?

It is clear what the avowed aims of those who support health reform are, but it isn't always clear why people oppose it (perhaps this is merely because they are necessarily less coordinated for being out of power).

So, could you tell me why it is that you do not support government administration of healthcare (or other goods, like utilities or education, too, if you want)? I would just like to know where the yahoo answers conservative is coming from.

Liberals can play along too: perhaps anticipate the conservative or libertarian answers and rebut or rebut answers already given.

If possible in your answers, try to avoid strawmen, and try to use reasons that your opponents might countenance rather than reasons that only your cohorts would agree with.

I hear a lot of talk about Alinsky that I didn't hear just a few months ago, and I was wondering:

who you think he was,

what you think he thought,

and what you think he did.

I want to know what people think, so please don't use wikipedia as that would be missing the point. If I wanted to know the facts, I would find them myself.

In order to make third parties viable on the national level, we would need to change a few things. Apart from the campaign finance issues, a fairly fundamental change would need to happen in our electoral methods. In the US for Congress, we use what is called first past the post voting in single member districts, where politicians cut up the country into congressional districts and whoever gets the most votes in those districts win. This voting method tends to a two party system (this idea is known as Duverger's law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law ). In order to make it rational for people to vote for a candidate who cannot make it to close to 50%, we have to put into place some sort of proportional representation (preferably single transferable vote http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_v... ) where people would vote in multiple member districts and get to rank who they would like to represent them.

That would be something of a radical change, although it is used in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and some cities in the US.

Would you be willing to change the way we vote so that we could get politicians that better represent us?

[What is proposed here would only need an act of congress to repeal a federal statute mandating single member districts and action on any states' part to change the way they elect their representatives. It is in no way a US Constitutional issue.]

I am just curious what idea it is that people have when they say it.

Copying from wikipedia is cheating and misses the point. I would like to know what people think it is, what they think of when they say it.

What is Fascism to you?

Bonus Question:

What makes a person Fascist?

According to your idea of what a communist country is, list the countries that you think to be communist now (not those countries that are on the road to communism).

Using wikipedia is missing the point: I want to know which countries you think are communist. Besides we all know that wikipedia has a liberal bias.

I am just curious what idea it is that people have when they say it.

Copying from wikipedia is cheating and misses the point. I would like to know what people think it is, what they think of when they say it.

What is Socialism to you?

Bonus Question:

What makes a person Socialist?

Sure, if someone has a real medical emergency, they can go to the emergency room. But that is not preventative nor diagnostic care.

If you do believe that everyone should get adequate healthcare, how do you justify not supporting universal healthcare of some kind or another?

There is no Republican universal healthcare plan.

How important is human life to you?

I am just curious the idea that people have when they say it.

Copying from wikipedia is cheating and misses the point. I would like to know what people think it is.

What is Marxism to you?

Animal Farm is a book about the dangers of totalitarianism. The farm animals unite around good ideals (Orwell at least accepts the ideals as good), but allows a few of their number, the pigs, to control everything. All that is bad in the book comes from the authoritarianism of the pigs, not from any sort of socialism.

For the record, George Orwell was a Democratic Socialist, i.e. he supported a form of government wherein all productive property is collectively, in some way or another, and government is by democratic representation.

This is in opposition to the Stalinist bureaucratic socialism, which the book critiques, of the USSR. There are bureaucratic dictatorship governed while the state owned all productive property.

I think you can see the difference in the two positions. Orwell was drawing attention to the fact that authoritarianism, no matter its nominal ideology, is not the way to go, and has nasty consequences.

THE QUESTION REALLY STARTS HERE (what preceded is background that would be general knowledge if our educational system were a touch better).

Conservatives use Animal Farm without really understanding its purpose or its logic. If you take it to be some slight against socialism go back and read it, point to me where there was anything that damages the Democratic Socialist edifice. It was a tract against Stalinism and and Soviet apologists.

Nearly everyone (now if not in the mid-century) can agree that bureaucratic socialism is bad. That is the end of the critique of Animal Farm.

When people use it for the purpose of denigrating egalitarian endeavors have they not read the book, have they not understood it? How is it that they use it? How can they feel justified in using it? Help me please.

A Four-Step Healthcare Solution

http://mises.org/story/3643

It's an explanation of what the Austrian School would have us do.

Read this. It should be required reading for libertarians and liberals.

Why do liberals think it is BS, as I know I did while reading it?

Why do libertarians think it is gospel? It even ends in saying that only these four steps will bring the free-market back to health care. Why do I want the free-market in healthcare? Do I want the free-market distributing water in my community?

Why hasn't either side called for increased doctor training?

Is it perhaps that it might cost too much?

There really is a serious scarcity.

People currently have little choice in what sort of health insurance they will have. Their employer chooses for them or they choose the best plan they can afford. The plan will not restrict your choice of doctors.

What exactly is your problem with the bill?

And an extra challenge: Try using concrete terms. Try not to use right-wing ideology. Try to use language that a moderate or perhaps even a liberal will find reasonable.

Well there are 307 million people in the United States.

So, $3200 a head.

Or, the US Gross Domestic Product is $13.4 trillion. So a thirteenth of that.

Or, if instead you are interested in irrelevant figures, just 10 times the number of neurons in your noggin.

So, how much debt do you have personally? I assume at least once your yearly income, if not you're really the spendthrift. So, why let yourself get caught up in the size of numbers, when none but a few amongst us (I am certainly not among them) really understand their magnitude?

Something that bothers me a lot is how much money we spend each year keeping up prisoners. It is bad enough how high the crime rate is and all the violence that it produces, but it is also a serious drain on government budgets. So, why is there not more demand that prisons be made cheaper and perhaps even profitable? Why should we build fortresses to keep in drug offenders? Why should we build fortresses at all? It seems like we could put them in simpler housing, especially the low risk inmates and find them something better to do than stamp license plates and pick up trash. Of course the really dangerous prisoners, keep them locked up in the fortresses, but most inmates simply aren't that kind.

What do you think? Is prison reform a good way to cut budgets?

I know it is a little long, and I am sure that you can get shorter snippets on the youtube, but I think if you are going to attack a man you should have more at hand than the phrase "God [smite] America."

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04252008/watch.h...

Even if you don't agree with him, can you not acknowledge that he has an overall positive impact on his Chicago community? Is it terrible that African-Americans might have a church that is geared towards their historical struggles and those struggles that fill so much of the Bible?

And even if you do not watch the video of him giving the sermon, contained in part on the video I linked to and on youtube. Won't you read this excerpt:

"And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into position of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing God bless America? No, no, no. Not God bless America; God d*** America! That's in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God d*** America for treating her citizen as less than human. God d*** America as long as she keeps trying to act like she is God and she is supreme!"

Now I have had a little experience with some of the more fundamentalist Christians (white ones), and they have a huge problem with country coming before God. That is more or less where he is coming from. That as long as America does what she thinks is right, instead of what God says is right, America does not warrant God's blessing, as she is not following God.

So, is Reverend Wright being unreasonable? If so, why do you think he is? Why is it wrong for a member of a historically disadvantaged community wrong to read their religion from their community's perspective? Are you uncomfortable with the mix of Christianity and race? More or less, I would like to know why people think Reverend Wright is a negative issue, if they do, after getting the whole story.