Re: OT: Politics [Was:Social Contract]

On Sunday 30 April 2006 16:33, Steve Lamb wrote:


[1] To explain for any non-Americans, it's a trick question

[...] As a non-American who has been following this thread, l would like to
respectfully make a few comments.

To an outsider, the preoccupations of American politics appear to be:

-"Freedom", which seems to be code for the right to shoot people with guns;

-"Free markets", which is an economic version of the theory that a car goes
faster without any brakes.
(Related is "privatisation" the notion that subtracting private profit out of
a previously public utility increases its value - still widely practiced for
ideological reasons, despite its repeated failure) ;

-"Deregulation", opposition to any moderation by society of individual or
corporate behaviour, however selfish and destructive it may be, with the
significant caveat that laws protecting private property and the monetary
system are perfectly OK;

-An unwillingness to help those in need without apportioning blame or doing
the maths first (result: the highest incarceration rate in the world by far).

IMHO, to the rest of the world these preoccupations look mean. A functional
society rests on compassion, empathy and sharing of resources. It also means
some curbing of our individual impulses, understanding that in the big
picture, we are all better off that way.

The politics of everyone-for-themselves, devil-take-the-hindmost means that
those who live in a world carved up, bought and sold before they were born
have been robbed of their chance to have a self-determined life before it
even began. Why would anyone want to belong to a society in which they are
worse off than they would be alone in the wilderness?

And so, in the rest of the world, for the most part, we happily pay taxes for
good public education and health care and housing and water and roads, we do
not hand jails over to private companies, we do not give guns out
willy-nilly, etc. because, unlike Margaret Thatcher, we do believe there is
such a thing as society, that it is a community of people who care for
eachother as a matter of principle, and that this is how human beings live
best together.

BTW, I use Debian partly because I hold these values, so I don't think this
thread is entirely OT - but it's close! :)

.02

John


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