I love these dorm room poli-sci rap session posts
What a paradise we’d have if we just let go of the wheel and allowed the invisible hand of the market to take over everything.
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How crazy! We all know that we wouldn’t even be able to breathe if we don’t have a caring, compassionate government with the wisdom to control every aspect of our lives, including our wallets, entirely for our own benefit.
Chris is a caricature of himself.
Chris: In your libertarian paradise before the New Deal, people lived to about 45, and usually died while still working. But they did it without government handouts, dammit!!
After the New Deal and subsequent government programs to regulate industry and improve our lives, we now live to what – 75 or so, and with a better standard of living.
Oh yes. Of course. It was libbie power plays that made life better, not the actual technical advances themselves. Well I guess if Gore can claim he invented the Internet, then I suppose you can assign credit to Roosevelt for every technological advance before that.
We will just conveniently forget that it was those damned greedy market driven pharm and medical tech companies and their evil profit driven motives that did the actual development.
And of coure, war spending inWW2 didn’t actually get us out the depression. What do economists know anyway?
Good point on the Internet, Chris. The government did, indeed, start the Internet as DARPAnet. Do you think that you would be able to make yourself look clueless to so many people if the government hadn’t created it (it was opened up to the world under the recommendation of a committee chaired by Al Gore, but it sounds so much better to say that he invented it, I guess).
As for medical advances, let’s remember that the greed of some pharma companies gets us Vioxx and other forms of corruption that would be much more rampant were it not for FDA.
Daaaaaaaaaaang. That was a good smackdown.
Chris: In your libertarian paradise before the New Deal, people lived to about 45, and usually died while still working. But they did it without government handouts, dammit!!
Really? Most humans have been making it to over 70 for centuries. The statistical factoring of infant mortality is what gave those low averages.
Imagine what the average life span would be today if we averaged in the abortions.
Most humans have been making it to over 70 for centuries.
You are almost right. In 1931 if you made it to age 20, you could expect to live another 46 years to age 66. Note that the Social Security retirement age started at 65, so the payout pool was initially very small.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html
Please don’t tell the people here that Social Security was supposed to be a safety net and not a retirement fund entitlement. You will shatter their existence.
Old people everywhere bow down and apologize to Republicans for living so long.