Edelman’s Moral Quandaries (Pt. 3)–B.P.F.&.D.W.
The acronym stands for: Balancing Personal Freedom and Division of Wealth.Edelman wrote: Westerners are inclined to see the political landscape as a spectrum between hard-core loony socialism (all the world’s wealth should be divided equally among its population, regardless of merit) and equally loony hard-core capitalism (everyone go grab your share of the pie, and if that results in radically uneven distribution of wealth, so be it). In Infoquake and MultiReal, I called these two poles governmentalism and libertarianism. Somewhere in the middle, theoretically, is a society where nobody’s starving and everyone can afford basic medical care, yet we still have ample freedom to make our own individual choices without governments taxing us to death. We’ve got to find that place, and figure out how to sustain it long-term. And here is what I have to say: YES! I live in a country that is so extremist and radical it’s scary. On the one side, as Edelman points out, there are the folks who want the government to pay for things that, quite frankly, it can’t afford, in exchange for sacrificing ones rights and taxing the crap out of anyone who so much as tries to earn a decent wage in a country that is growing more and more expensive. On the other side are the folks who want complete control of the government in exchange for the huge gaps we are already experiencing between the rich and the poor. This second area is one in which personal freedom means nothing even if people want it. Why? Because corporate entities have the power. Right now we don’t have a balance between the two. We have corporations trying to control things, and to some extent they do, and then we have the people who seem to want things that they really can’t have at this point. I’ll use healthcare as an example. We all want it. We all want to be able to afford it, but the problem is that the government can’t afford to adopt a socialized medical program. It can’t. You can try to run your little figures all you want, but right now, we can’t afford such a program. It will bankrupt us, and at this point we need to think of better solutions. With the Iraq War still going and Afghanistan not exactly complete, though forgotten, we have to make sure our troops have the money they need to do what they have to do. No, we cannot pull out of Iraq. I’m not a crazy Republican, but I’m smart enough to realize that pulling out at this point would permanently damage what little reputation we have. Iraq is weak because of us. Can any of you live with the idea of simply walking out of a situation we created without making sure that Iraq can defend itself from extremists? If you can, then I propose that every time some innocent Iraqi dies a letter be sent to you with that person’s picture and any relevant information about his or her life so that you’ll always know that someone died due to a cowardly act of simply walking away. We can’t walk. That’s just one problem we face right now, and one that isn’t going to go away for a few years at least. The next financial issue is social security. Baby-boomers are going to bankrupt that program so that all of us younger generations won’t have anything when we retire. Granted, you shouldn’t rely on SS for retirement, but some people need it to supplement other retirement funds. We have to fix this problem now before it can’t be fixed. That means finding new solutions that don’t involve raising taxes that can fund newer generations. An option might be a 401K type plan in which funds produced by your SS taxes are placed into considerably safe and secure stocks, i.e. low-risk companies that might lose you some money, but are very unlikely to ever just flat-out disappear. Why would this be a good idea? Well, for one, by having vast amounts of new money invested into our businesses we can expect to see our economy benefit from it, which will actually help secure your new SS funds for a much longer period of time. You’ll also be earning money just as you would in a 401K employer plan, which is good. You’re willing to take a risk there, why not with SS? If it means that more people might have even better lives in the future, so be it. That’s just one idea and there might be far better ones out there. The point is that we can’t afford universal healthcare right now, and honestly, we shouldn’t have a fully socialized health program. What do we need? The middle ground. We need a healthcare system that ANYONE can afford so that EVERYONE can get basic medical care and emergency care and not have to worry about if they can pay the bill. This means finding ways to reduce the costs of insurance programs, reducing prescription drug costs, etc. The whole lot of it has to be reduced. We need a system that still has you pay, but not pay until you can’t afford to eat anymore. How do we do this? I don’t know. I wish I did know, but I don’t, and I don’t have any viable solutions. I don’t know enough about the medical field to hazard a logical guess. I’ve dealt with considerable bills, however, and I understand what one has to deal with when you only have one health insurance card and it can’t cover the whole cost. That’s a little off the mark, but back to the topic at hand. Edelman is proposing that we find a middle ground where corporations can still bring in profits, as they should, and everyone still has a roof and food and is able to find work or get an education. One thing we should be doing is monitoring corporations, especially energy/fuel companies that claim shortages, but still bring