"Well, guys, we've got to choose"
So asserts the most irritating stop on my regular weblog rounds.
The choices we're offered are a) a government that wastes its time trying to prop up lazy loser crybabies, or b) a government that stands firmly behind responsible highly-cultured hard-working individualists with rich daddies.
Well, guy, you missed one.
At over 900 pages, Rich Democracies is a brick worthy of laying upside your head, but Harold Wilensky's conclusions are easy enough to summarize:
- Welfare states, whose purpose is to secure the lot of the poor, are unstable and full of resentment.
- Plutocracies, whose purpose is to defend and increase the wealth of the rich, are unstable and full of violence, debt, ignorance, suffering, and resentment.
- Countries in which government's purpose is to provide necessary social services to the entire nation are relatively pleasant places to live.
There are a number of services that operate more smoothly (if never as smoothly as we'd like) when not held hostage to profit-making. Education, health care, mass transit, law enforcement, and the military come to mind. And those services benefit all classes.
Or they can, when the government tends to anything other than petulance and greed.
Why, I remember a time in America when even the upper-middle-class attended public schools. Nowadays, working couples scramble to top their mortgages and auto loans with high school tuition fees, and have to hope the children will be capable of scrambling for their own crippling debts once they reach college age.
I'm not sure why they didn't teach you this at Princeton.
I can guess, though.
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