Is make america great again really make america white again

@GerOttman How do you define communism.

@Spotpot since your the expert Please tell us

@GerOttman Communist hellhole? Where in the entire continent do you see one, even one, communist? You people are so terrified of something that doesn't even exist.

@GerOttman And another right wing smooth brain that has no idea what communist means.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow I feel like if these people actually met a real communist, they'd either faint from fear, or they'd not realize the person is communist and they'd actually get along with them and agree with half the stuff they say.

@BlueMetalChick The hilarious part is the dissonance that in rural America (and Canada) their daily life is very left wing (farmer unions, coops, mutual assistance) but they have been convinced to vote against their own interests. People used to understand this. There was a reason in the US the stronghold of the communist party in the 1930s and 40s was not in big cities but Oklahoma. Try explaining that to some of these folks and point out that some of their great ideas on how to improve their daily lives could be taken directly Marx or Goldman.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow People have taken the bait if "I could be rich if it weren't for all these other middle and lower class people" and in an effort to vote against the interests of the people they view as holding them back from wealth, they also vote against themselves.

@BlueMetalChick Yep. I think it was Steinbeck who made the statement about "temporarily embarrassed millionaires." Most people update it to billionaires to fit the times but the observation still holds. It is a toxic myth.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow ZZZZzzzz... ZZzzzzz Fish on!!! Might have to tighten up the drag a bit bit to boat this dumb-bass.. LOL!

@GerOttman My stoner friends in high school made more sense than you do right now.

@GerOttman So are the 63% of americans who want single payer healthcare part of that 90% in the middle? Genuinely asking, I don't wanna come off as adversarial.

@BlueVeins people tend to want what they are told they want. political rhetoric is a shell game, just a massive con job. sure, you can make single payer sound like a good idea but the harsh reality is, the government sucks balls at almost everything it tries to run. people in power want power, they will say anything you want to hear to get power and keep getting more of it. so go ahead, have your government health care, or your free college, or forty acres and a mule. it always ends up the same!

@GerOttman A'ight now I am gonna get a little adversarial. It seems strange to imply that Americans only want universal healthcare bc they're told they want it, when the media is largely against it. I mean when even as milquetoast a policy as the ACA was passed, the Republican media shit on it 24/7 as a Communist policy, and while the Democrat media supported the ACA, even they talk about single payer as if it's the furthest edge of political debate, you know? I've even seen MSNBC hosts bash Medicare for All, and they kinda brand themselves as the lefties.

It's true that the gov't isn't a good tool for a lot of services such as manufacturing a wide diversity of products, but having studied insurance, it's kinda one of the best possible candidates for nationalization. One of the biggest expenses that private insurance firms have to put up with is underwriting expenses, but under a social insurance program, underwriting expenses just aren't necessary; everyone gets insured. Another big expense is advertising and while gov't programs engage with advertising through PSAs, it doesn't have to engage in this perpetual war to poach clients from its competitors because there are no competitors, nor does it particularly have to convince potential customers to buy its services.

From what I can see, you're an open-minded guy who cares about the issues and I appreciate that. But if all that's not convincing to you, I encourage you to look to the results on the ground. France spends about half of what we do on healthcare and enjoys longer lifespans on average. The story is similar with Italy, New Zealand, Israel, and several other countries with government-sponsored healthcare programs. Granted, none of those are a 1:1 comparison because the other countries in question tend to have better worker protections, infrastructure, and food regulations, but the fact that there's even a comparison for the price point is a monument to the sheer efficiency of single payer healthcare. Fuck, we even have a public insurer here in the US that works really well, in the form of Medicare.

If you've read this far, thank you. My point of view is that single-payer healthcare is a really moderate view in the scheme of things that kinda just gets demonized by politicians and the media because the former gets campaign donations from them and the latter gets their ad dollars.

@BlueVeins I read what you wrote, I understand your point. I don't see anything adversarial about it. I just don't agree it's the way to go in any circumstance. The USA was founded by people opposed to a large government exerting control over the lives of citizens. There were very specific protection built into the construction of the country. Many, perhaps most of these principles have been discarded, little by little and one by one. With only a little historical perspective, the erosion of both the rights and responsibilities of the individual are obvious and troubling. At least to me, maybe a few others. Social security was a mistake, however well meaning. Welfare is a mistake, however well intended. The department of transportation, the DEA, and dozens of others. All well meaning boondoggles with no end in sight and growing in expense exponentially! What do you do when you run out of rich people to tax? Who's paying the multi trillion $ credit card bill our spend happy "representatives" are running up? Not me, I'll long dead and gone...

@GerOttman The US made considerable improvements over colonial rule, but they were still a textbook oligarchy by contemporary standards. Only land-owning white men were allowed to vote, and land-owning white men wrote the Constitution, itself. While they certainly made some improvements on the US compared to colonial British rule, the system they established doesn't align with either of our values because they didn't see the poor and working class as stakeholders in the country's functioning.

I would argue that they did, in fact, agree with a large government exerting power over the citizenry. At the time, things that we consider private decisions like anal sex, interracial marriage, and working on Sundays were illegal. While property rights were largely respected, it's important to remember that property rights are a form of government intervention in itself. Indeed, the US gov't sold land unilaterally from the time of the Revolutionary War, effectively choosing who would be given power over it, and wrote the rules of property ownership in a largely arbitrary way. For example, one could legally open a factory that emits gases, which in turn create acidic rain and damage someone's roof. Yet walking onto someone's property and dumping acid directly onto their roof was illegal even though it was materially an identical case of property damage. Since the only people who would benefit from building such factories are the kind of people who are rich enough to build factories, this allowed the wealthy to transfer wealth from their neighbors to themselves, but not the other way around.

What's changed between now and then isn't the amount of power weilded by the government; it's the people who are weilding it and to whose benefit. When property laws are held to as gospel, the people who benefit the most are those who have the most property (often, on account of being given it by someone else). The idea of "no/low government intervention" sounds nice on the face of it, but it's simply not feasible in a world as deeply interconnected as ours is. Only when every American lives on their own god-given, sacred, and equal plot of land, drinks water that's never left the borders of their property, breathes air that cannot be corrupted by their neighbors' activity, and can produce everything they need on their own, will rugged individualism as a concept be feasible. Until then, we're stuck in a vast ocean of ecological, economic, and political interplay.

@BlueVeins that's a fine lecture, but I find little of value in it.

@GerOttman Uh...was that even English?

@BlueMetalChick Did ya hear the one about the roof? I'd tell ya, but I think it's over your head!

@GerOttman Well that was pretty weak but at least it was a coherent sentence unlike "bit bit to boat dumb bass"

@BlueMetalChick I'm so glad! You're response fills my heart with elation and joy. I look forward to many more equally informative and insightful respoonsis if the futre...

@GerOttman This is silly and pedantic but that should have been "Your response..." instead of "You're response." I know, kk a grammar Nazi, I can't help it.

@BlueMetalChick Thats OK, I'll keep feeding you straight lines, you just keep knocking them back! I can tell you enjoy it..