Control

[xenologer]

Now and again when I'm canvassing for CAC, I'll have someone tell me that The Government wants to control health care so that they can control me. Seriously, they will wag a finger at me and say, "Because they want to control you! People need to realize that votes have consequences, and this government takeover of health care? They're just taking more and more control."

Leaving aside the facts (since people who fear what'll happen if the government provides health care to people who aren't elderly, veterans, active duty military, government employees, or really poor, or any of the other groups that already get it from the government are seldom actually looking at what works, but are instead obsessed with a dogmatic devotion to ideological purity and a standard of Constitutional orthodoxy about as well-informed as any obsessive attention to Biblical orthodoxy), here's what I damn near said to a guy yesterday.

Him: "Because the government wants to control you!"

Me: *thinking* "Yeah. They're always telling me that government officials have a right to make decisions for my body, they want to tell me when I'm gonna have kids and whom I can marry... Those liberals, man. When are they going to learn to let adults control their own lives?"

Do you think they'd get the sarcasm? 

Noooo, of course not. You can't tell a social conservative that there's any connection between how they feel when the government threatens to take their guns away and how I feel when the government tells me the state owns my body, or that they're the final arbiter on which partnerships are "real." 

Because that's different. They're worried about the government controlling the lives of people. Women? Gays? 

Not people. 

Comments

[safenthecity.livejournal.com]

So, if I'm a (mostly) gay woman, does that make me a Not Person Squared?

Social conservatives... I really don't have words for them.

[admnaismith.livejournal.com]

Is there any horrible thing that they claim would happen under "Goverment controlled healthcare" that is not already happening under the private for-profit system?

Rationing? We have that now.

No choice of doctors? We have that now?

Endless red tape? Got it now.

Bureaucrats just letting old people and those with odder diseases die, to save money? Been there, done it, got the footprints on my departed mother's T-shirt.

The question is, who do you trust to do the rationing, the red tape, and the other decisions? The people you voted for? Or an army of insurance industry accountants that gets paid every time someone dies from withheld treatment?

[virginia-fell.livejournal.com]

There are people who believe that the government is "greedy" and "trying to make money by taking over private industry," and other interesting things.

I don't know how they think the government "makes a profit" or how in the hell government efficiency serves the needs of greedy politicians more than it does the rest of us, but then... I don't know where these people got their civics educations in the first place.

[dekesler.livejournal.com]

Hello,

This is what I have heard.

"I don't want to pay for someone else."

What's funny is that the same person was not complaining last week when someone else drove on the road that they helped purchase or when someone else enjoyed a public park that they helped to maintain. We are all paying for many things for each other. How about we forgo buying each other another tank or two and get some health care?

Phrases like "I don't want to pay for someone else" and "The government is seeking to control you" are carefully created by some conservative think tank. They are right up there with "Why won't he produce the birth certificate?" These catch phrases are always short blurbs that have a passing familiarity with actual truth.

Regards,

Eric

[virginia-fell.livejournal.com]

Pretty much.

[x-eleven.livejournal.com]

Me: *thinking* "Yeah. They're always telling me that government officials have a right to make decisions for my body, they want to tell me when I'm gonna have kids and whom I can marry... Those liberals, man. When are they going to learn to let adults control their own lives?"

This is the A Number One problem: all too many folks out there, liberal as well as conservative, don't understand that freedom is indivisible. Someone, somewhere, sometime is going to use that freedom to say or do something that you don't like. Even if that something doesn't personally affect them, or pose a threat to their person and/or property.

Illegal abortion also means that you can't have the defective fetus removed before it dies and takes the healthy fetus with it, and possibly the mother as well, due to blood poisoning.

The WoD that keeps "kids" from dropping E also caused Mother unnecessary suffering because the doctor was too afraid to prescribe the necessary doses of pain killers.

The free speech and freedom of assembly that allows you to hold a gay pride parade also allows the same to the local preacher and his following at that parade.

If Adam and Steve tie the knot, will Mr and Mrs Righteous get a divorce?

You can't secure your own freedom without allowing the same for others.

I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.

-- Voltaire

Food for thought there.

[virginia-fell.livejournal.com]

Yep. Which is why the only right-wingers who could accuse me of "censoring" them are the ones who confuse criticism with censorship (which, to be fair, is a lot of them).

[kayay.livejournal.com]

Slap a "socialist" label on it and people start to panic. Never mind we have forms of socialism in our infrastructure already.

I'm neutral on the whole matter. It could work, or it could fail, because even the best idea on paper can crumble when we bring in politicians and bureaucracy. However... I hear they are going to send doctors around and ask people to die at a certain age. I believe it's the Sunset Squad Robots. And we're going to turn old people into fertilizer.

Worth a watch: The Daily Show: HEATHRAISER!