<p>Duly noted, but wrong thread.</p>
<p>Driver, thanks you’re right it belongs on the Mr. Cheney thread - I got confused because I was trying to tie into Yulsie’s bumpersticker, which was by the way very funny.</p>
<p>I like you too and don’t think you are Cruella or Coulter.</p>
<p>My favorite bumper sticker LOL was:</p>
<p>Would somebody please bl** the guy, so we can impeach him?</p>
<p>I read King’s article, and found it a bit of a caricature, particularly his assumption that liberals are as anti-market today as they were in 1968.</p>
<p>Maybe my perspective is distorted by living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area, which most people would characterize as the most liberal metropolitan area in the US. But it’s not only a hotbed of liberalism - it’s also a hotbed of capitalism. </p>
<p>I think David Brooks was far more on the money in his book from a few years back entitled “Bobos in Paradise,” in which he observed that the prevailing ethos in those famously liberal coastal cities is a mixture of the bohemian and the bourgeoisie. </p>
<p>Most of the liberals I know understand well the virtues of the free market. They’re also aware of its limitations. The fact that 11.2% of the nation’s children are not covered by health insurance is one example; the vast reduction in air and water polution in United States after the federal government began regulating such things is another.</p>
<p>“Another bias is the view that other people cannot be trusted to make their own decisions. Liberals who send their own children to private school believe that poor families should not be allowed to make the same choice.” Nonsense: those opposed to school vouchers argue that they provide the illusion of choice, and not the real thing. School voucher proposals typically don’t include enough money to finance a private school education. The real effect, the argument goes, is that they will be used to subsidize people who are already sending their kids to private schools at the expense of public schools that are already underfunded.</p>
<p>“Liberals make their own choices regarding health care, but they believe that others should have their health care decisions made for them by government.” Another caricature. My own choices with respect to health care consist primarily of being asked to pick once a year between the three plans my employer offers. Is our current system, one that expects corporate employers to shoulder the expense of providing health care, one that anyone, liberal or conservative, really wants to defend? I certainly don’t hear the managers at Ford and GM expressing delight with it.</p>
<p>Today, employers that do provide health insurance to their workers are also subdizing the uninsured, who consist to a large part of the working poor. (The indigent are often covered by Medicaid.) For many of the working poor, primary care means waiting until they are really sick, and then showing up at an emergency room. Who ultimately bears the cost of these treatments? It’s part of the overhead that’s built into the fees the insured pay for their treatments. Think of it as a disguised corporate income tax.</p>
<p>Well put, Greybeard. What a lot of people ignore is that we already do have a system of universal health care - it’s just a really, really inefficient one which punishes the responsible members of society while rewarding the greedy and irresponsible.</p>
<p>driver -</p>
<p>((Disclosure: I’m a 1968 liberal )) I never really thought about it until you posted that article, but the thought process it triggered was very insightful. On reflection, I do think that 1968 did drive my values from that date forward in ways I hadn’t thought of. But before I answer some of the points of the article, let me ask your age. I’m a little older than most parents on the forum and I was a upper-classman in college in 1968 with a low draft number. If any of the responders were in high school or younger at that time, I don’t think they can fully understand.</p>
<p>Some points made:
[ul]
[li] Anti-Communism was a greater menace than Communism. Based on a falsehood (Tonkin Gulf), the Viet Nam war was launched to fight Communism. Over 50,000 Americans died in a useless cause. On a local level, I saw a friend driven from job to job by having the police show up at his workplaces and letting his bosses know that he was a leader of the local Socialist Party. So which was the greater perceived menace?</p>[/li]
<p>[li] The planet could not possibly support the population increases that would take place by the end of the twentieth century. We’re quickly reaching a tipping point on problems directly related to population growth, including environmental problems and economic problems. Oil resources still drive our economy and costs will continue to rise creating problems that are only hinted at now. Promises made to a rapidly increasing older population will lead to huge problems ahead. I honestly don’t know scientifically or economically how bad these things are, but I do have that 1968 belief.</p>[/li]
<p>[li] Conservatives stood in the way of progress for minorities. If we define Conservatives as those who control Congress now and we define Minorities as those not in power (business and politics), then this statement is still true. Everything from tax breaks for the wealthy to changes in bankruptcy laws to attacks on our civil liberties give proof to that truth.</p>[/li]
<p>[li] Government programs were the best way to lift people out of poverty. While I don’t agree with this totally (or even partially agree much anymore), something had to be done to push for changes. Had we maintained the 1968 status quo (something the Conservatives are trying to get back to), we would not have had the swelling of the middle class minorities we’ve seen. I also think that many of the programs were implemented without small scale testing to see if they were effective or not, something that ought to be required of ALL government programs - especiall Education programs.</p>[/li]
<p>[li] What underdeveloped countries needed were large capital investments, financed by foreign aid from the rich countries. Hmmm… I agree with the first part and disagree with the second. I don’t think calls for investment were to be funded via foreign aid. The first part actually sounds like what business people have been saying all along and continue to say.</p>[/li]
<p>[li] Inflation was a cost-push phenomenon, requiring government intervention in wage and price setting. Again, this was not a tenet of 1968 liberalism that I remember, so I can’t comment on the 1968-ishness of this, but I do believe in a raised minimum hourly pay, so perhaps I prove the point on this. [/li][/ul]</p>
<p>But again - the article was illuminating because I AM much more a product of 1968 than I thought. 1968 was - for those who really lived through it and paid even a small price for political thoughts- a scary year.</p>