General Music Chat

The fly in the ointment for me is the government cannot provide anything.
They do not create wealth, therefore they cannot provide a product.
What they do is take my money that I need for my family's healthcare and give a very small percentage of it to someone else while helping themselves to the lions share of the money.
Many many businesses are supported by and many many business owners own mansions on the lake, all paid for by the tax dollars of the working poor. It's called Medicare. This is a part of the problem.
More of it cannot be the solution.
If the government must be involved, let them serve as investigators and regulators. That is their function. Not providers / payor source.
Robbing from the rich to give to the poor is still robbery.
And consider this, in the globalist veiw WE ( all Americans ) are the rich.

I think we may have to agree to disagree. I see the wealthy class, who up until 1982, paid on average 50% of their gross in taxes. Since then, they've become the golden class, completely de-regulated in every aspect, from personal finances to businesses owned.

The government is only as good as the people running it. It's no secret that corporate america is running our government, so sure, let the corporations run things and you will get screwed.. oh wait.. they ARE running things and yes, we're all getting f**k pretty good.

I hesitate to say nothing will ever change until people stand up TOGETHER and change it. But the polticians, media, and countless other influences have successfully divided america into two camps - liberals and conservatives.

Most don't even understand why they are on one side or the other anymore. Most are so hateful and fearful of the others' policies that they know only that the other side is evil.

The simple fact of the matter is we're ALL conservatives, we're all liberals, we're all green, and we're all libertarians. The ideal of America (the people) was that of tolerance, making a life for oneself, freedom to choose religion, beliefs, politics, and the privacy of one's own land, home, and right to happiness.

We're all Capitalists, Sociaists, and even Marxists and Communists. We all share a little belief from each of those systems. None of those systems as a pure form is viable and will certainly end in failure. The most successful compromise of traits from ALL of them.

We're all americans, yet we cannot agree on anything anymore, simply because we've been brainwashed into believing the solution is either BLUE or RED, every goddam time.

think long and hard about it - does Canada, Switzerland, Denmark, England, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and countless other countries REALLY have that much worse healthcare than we do???

Cause , according to countless surveys, their people are HAPPIER, their healthcare is BETTER, and instead of actually giving them credit and trying to learn something, we get crap like this:

"WE'RE AMERICA.. WE'RE THE BEST, PERIOD, WE KNOW BETTER THAN YOU, WE WILL KICK YOUR ASS IF YOU DISAGREE"

Look at all the useless war and conflict, hell... the entire middle east hates us because of our own policies and actions since 1953.

I saw a bumper sticker today that summed it all up pretty well:

"Imagine what a great day it would be when the schools have all the money they need, and the Air Force has to have a bake sale to buy their next bomber"

Indeed.

Yes we will have to agree to disagree my friend. Without bombers the only thing our schools will teach is slavery to the state.
Oh wait, they are doing that already.

Si vis pacem para bellum !

I will say though I respect you for your compassion, and your passion for what you believe is right.
Disagreement aside.

The government is only as good as the people running it.

This is the thing that cannot be stressed enough.

People run the government. People just like you and me.

I've been a government employee in three different capacities in my life. My current job is the one that has gotten me closest to seeing the bureaucracy; I get to see it up close and personal.

And really - what I've seen in my time is simple: as varying as our opinions are on this message board, that is how it is in a government office.

We're all just normal people with families and mortgages and kids that need to be taken to baseball games and cars that break down and bills that have to be paid. And we all have different ideas on how to make things better.

Some people in government actually do want to make a difference. They want to do their jobs well, they want to create efficiency and they want to do what's best for the people they serve. They treat tax dollars like a precious resource and try very hard not to waste them.

Other people in government just want to pick up a pay check. They abhor change and resist efficiency. They live by the mantra "That's the way we've always done it". The actively create bureaucracy and work against good ideas to maintain the status quo.

And you know what? That's no different than most jobs. Some people have an energy and an intelligence about them and you can tell they want to make the company better and more efficient. And some people just want to show up and get paid.

But what's different about government is that it's difficult to fire people in a government job... And it's even more difficult to get rid of elected officials, especially at the local level when no one runs against them.

My coworkers and I were talking about this just the other day: What if we ran our local government like Google does? What if we only hired the absolute best and brightest minds? What would we be capable of if we had the same kind of employees that Google has?

It's mind boggling to even think about the kind of good we could get done!

Now - take that and apply it nationally to the federal government... An entire nation being run by smart Google types.

Wow.



You guys might think the government is some mysterious alien entity, but it's actually just made up of your neighbors. The people around you. The guy next door who goes out and picks up the paper very day at 6:30..

Damn that'll make an easy shot.

The government is only as good as the people running it. It's no secret that corporate america is running our government, so sure, let the corporations run things and you will get screwed.. oh wait.. they ARE running things and yes, we're all getting f**k pretty good.

Kramer, when you say corporate america is running our government, can you give some concrete examples to help me understand the problem you see?

Lobbyists are pretty straight forward, but I'm not sure I'm understanding corporate america the same way you are. Might shed some light for me.

thanks.
Chris

Chris, I think that money runs the government and big corporations have plenty to use to make sure that the government does what they want them to. Lobbyist stand in line for a place in the meetings and corporations pay people to stand in line for them to assure the top spots. This would not be allowed if they weren't pouring money into the right pockets. Also, when some corporate a$$hole can rip off billions from poor unsuspecting people and get away with it, while some poor shmuck like you or me is sitting in prison for smoking a joint, well, it just shows who has the power. May not be concrete evidence, but you can see it happening everyday.

I think we should all record a collective hum. Using sound as the piercing agent we can probably intercede any decision making thus making the Muso the most powerful person on Earth.

Yeah I just had Coffee.

Morning!!

Carefull going out for that paper Chippy.