One last question....for anyone.
Name one thing (other than MAYBE -- in part -- the military) that government has EVER been able run effectively -- i.e. without huge amounts of corruption, waste, fraud, plus their inability to deliver services??
Well, I just flushed my toilet and it didn't flood my back yard. And I just turned on a faucet and water came out. How incompetent is that? And I just looked out my window and the streetlight is on. My, my the street in front of my house is paved and wonder of wonders if I go down to the corner which I can see from here and turn onto the next street it's paved too -- good thing too since what's the worth of one paved street if it's the only paved street? Let's see what else I can see out this window...oh, there's an airplane on its descent into the airport. I wonder if it'll land safely there? Virtually all of them do and take off too without smacking into each other. Oh, I hear the ding-ding-ding of the cross arms on a railroad crossing to stop the cars getting hit by a passing train. Just a little added safety precaution installed some years ago after a carload of foolish teenagers tried race a locomotive to that crossing and lost.
Faintly now, I hear a band playing. It is faint, can barely hear it, no doubt it's coming from the band shell under the canopy of trees in the city park a distance from my house. The trees in the park are just beginning to turn and soon they will lose their ocean of leaves. I bet I know who'll clean up all that.
Let me think...I didn't worry about the food I ate tonight. It was inspected, regulated and generally trustworthy, unlike in a lot of countries. Somebody's been clearing out the rats regularly in our town and disposing of road kills so we don't have a lot of bubonic plague or cholera around here. Oh, there's my neighbor taking out her garbage for tomorrow's pickup. I bet if some bum downtown decided to make the front entrance to her flower shop his home she could call our local police and have him moved along and maybe even get him some help at some local agency before he inadvertently kills her business.
Sometimes all this is like a Charles Ives concert, chaotic and sometimes raucous but also suddenly sweet here and there.
These are the sights and sounds outside just one window in one room of my house. Life in America. Pretty much the same everywhere, or at least in the best places. And it seems like a lot of things are taken for granted around here...like the presence of the government in every single one sentence above.
But if your toilet is flooding your back yard I'm going to assume you must live in some backwater of America where there are no public services, or more likely these days where the civic realm is under-taxed, misunderstood, disregarded and in decay, and suggest you might want to call the CDC. The government doctors and scientists there might just be able to effectively figure out what that microbe is that's crawling up the inside of your leg right now before it eats out the rest of your brain.
And by the way, the military may be the least effective government agency. Talk about waste (cost overruns), fraud (can you spell Halliburton) and the inability to deliver services -- how many trillions of dollar are we going to have to throw into losing endless wars against rice farmers and sheep herders and camel jockeys before even you are able to see how much the government actually does well and how stupid and massively expensive the stuff is it f---... uh, messes up.
We agree, there are lot of things the government needs to fix, real efficient affordable universal health care to match if not exceed the rest of the industrialized world for one (it can still be the most expensive but let's knock it down six or so GDP percentage points), but the military would also be a great place to start. We could just get rid of some of the waste of redundancy there -- Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. It takes four military branch to run up the national debt and screw up the world at the same time? I'll be real radical here and say let's just get rid of one of them. Given how well the Navy Seals have performed these days, let's eliminate the Marine Corps.
Edited by diogenes227, 25 September 2013 - 02:17 AM.
