Originally Posted by anomaloustango
I think it's rather funny that the conservatives are always refering to the founding fathers and what not. If they even had the slightest knowledge of history they would know that the very figures that they hold up as standards and ideals were themselves mostly liberals. That's right Jefferson, Franklin, Rosseau, Voltaire, even Washington they were the fuition of a great liberal movement that started with the Renessance and then reemerged stronger in the Enlightenment. Now they were all products of their time so their liberal then is not ours now, but I can assure you that the conservatives were in favor of the royals holding all property and power and anyone who went against them was a liberal in that they believed in the equality of man before the law--a liberal--even revolutionary concept of the time--and the two great liberal movements, in France and America based themselves in a romaticised ideal of Ancient Greece and took it's notion of personal liberity from the Germanic peoples who replaced the Romans empire and who we know as all the various European strains--all Germanic--even Sanskrit comes from an archaic Germanic language. The whole movement of history is away from the conservative notions of power and toward a more equitable and higer notion of the value of a human being. The United States is already what you fear, but only for the power elite--they have socialism plus--they have just initiated the largest shift in wealth form the middle class to the upper in the history of history. Your notions of what capitalism actually is are distorted. You would not want to live in a purely capitalist country it would be hell, it would be like living in a world run by the mafia where only power and posessions counted for anything and these were continually irrevocably more and more concentrated in the hand of fewer and fewer families whose opinions would count billions of times more than you own, it would be a land were every road was a toll road and the price increased during rush hour. Listen when I was a young lad the average MD made about $25,000 a year--cared about his patients--who he actually was able to spend time with and made housecalls for a few bucks extra. Now most MD expect to be millionares by the time they are in their forties and care mostly about prestige possessions. This is just a fact when the difference between the rich and poor becomes so great as it has the entire society becomes focused on prestige possessions. When there is more equality of income the societies attentions are more focused on civic and human relationships. Also this always comes before the fall of a great country or empire, such as Rome where the income differential went from about 40-1 during the republic to the type of astonomical ratios we have today. I can't imagine how blind a person must be to be living through the first spasms of the fall of our nation as we have known it, as we are living through now, and think that the forces of unrestricted market speculation and gambling should not only go on as it has, but be more unrestricted and therefore coercive against everyone not in a privilaged position such as the CEOs and Power Elite who steer us from one crisis to another knowing we can always be divided by the slightest red herring, like flag burning, or gay marriage, so we are no threat to the shady money men who pull the strings and cause you to take up a polarized political position, which are both naive and ultimately self-defeating and futile, as regards the real values of human life and organization.
