This relates to what I was talking about this morning:
Majority Say Not Gov't Duty to Provide Healthcare for All
For the third consecutive year, a majority of Americans (52%) agree with the position that it is not the federal government's responsibility to ensure that all Americans have healthcare coverage. Prior to the start of Barack Obama's presidency in 2009, a majority of Americans consistently took the opposite view.
As I said this morning with regard to immigration, Americans want problems solved ... until they start being solved. Then they say, "What? This is part of the solution? And this? We don't want any of this!"
In the case of health care, Americans wanted it universal, government-guaranteed, unrestricted, inexpensive, tax-free, and free of other new costs. I think they'd have gotten a better deal with single payer, but that was off the table, and if Americans want it, they haven't made themselves aware of why it's off the table, i.e., which vested interests don't want it. (Americans won't confront vested interests -- that's so last century.) Then again, Americans probably would feel betrayed by single payer (omigod higher taxes!), and yet they don't understand that the politically feasible alternatives necessarily involve compromises and require deals to be cut. So they no longer want what they wanted.
Repeat across every other controversial issue, ad infinitum.
As I've said before, "Idiocracy" wasn't a comedy about a dysfunctional futute.
ReplyDeleteIt was a 'future-documentary.'
Is it any wonder Republicans, despite their multiple follies, remain big-time playas in the game? It's because they (fraudulently but effectively) speak the language of Tough Daddy better. And that's what Americans have long been conditioned to want -- a Tough Daddy to take care of things, so that we may collectively go back to playing with our toys.
ReplyDeleteI don't think people are as overall stupid as a faulty media and education system programs them to behave politically and economically. But our road to Putin-like "leadership" seems almost inexorable.
Victor, you should read the earlier interation of Idiocracy, The Marching Morons.
ReplyDeletePlot summary
The Problem
The human population is now 3,000,000 highbred elite and 5,000,000,000 morons. The "average" IQ is 45. (Presumably compared to the true present day, as in the real world, an IQ score of 100 is average, or median, by definition.) Several generations before the onset of the story, the small number of remaining 100-and-higher-IQ technocrats, after being ignored by the general public about the impending population problem, banded together to preserve the human race. The elite work feverishly like slaves in order to keep the morons alive.
The elite have had little success in solving The Problem (also called "Poprob" in the story) for several reasons:
The morons must be managed or else there will be chaos, resulting in billions of deaths;
It is not possible to sterilize all of the morons, as there are not nearly enough elite to do the job;
Propaganda against large families isn't working because every biological drive is towards fertility (the story predates the development of hormonal contraception).
The elite had tried everything rational to solve the population problem, but the problem could not be solved rationally. The solution required a way of thinking that no longer existed – Barlow's "vicious self-interest" and knowledge of the distant history.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons
DA,
ReplyDeleteI read that when I was a kid.
Time to go to the library, and find it again!