http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Sky-News-Archive/Article/20080641293463

(It’s illegal to die in Parliament. The sentence for the crime is somewhat unclear though…)

For added hilarity, these folks also tend to be pro-military and usually pro-war.

Apparently, government is only evil and incompetent when it’s _not_ blowing people up.

This is basically thought of as making your own little slice of Heaven, so to speak. The best life is one you’re supposedly able to make for yourself. Other people can do nothing but interfere with you. The kneejerk reaction is protectionist, on the individual, community, and national level.

Of course, this line of thinking is ridiculously out-of-date. There’s no place left to go. We’re stuck here. The last possible frontier labor markets got filled up in the 40s, with the mass migration to the southwest. But we still believe that. We’ve got at least three generations here raised on that old rhetoric and they’re clinging to it.

And that reflects in our government. For all that it does, the United States government is designed to leave people alone and be left alone. And the American mindset is breed to be left alone. That’s what we need to wake up out of.

Fortunately, Vancouver is a 2-hour drive away.

Jeez, I wonder how they got so rich. Probably from meanness or something.

The system of employers providing private insurance came during World War II. The government instituted wage freezes. Employers still needed ways to attract the best employees, sot they got around wage freezes by offering benefits. Health insurance was one of the benefits that became common at the time, and it has stuck ever since.

There you have it. America’s health care debacle: one more thing we can blame on the Nazis.

On the American phobia of taxes: government services are the ultimate form of buying in bulk, which we learn in home economics 101 is an easy way to save money. The argument that you don’t get to decide what is done with your tax money is a much more reasonable argument.

I’m 32. I’m single. And I’m utterly unisurable on the private market. Meaning that for the rest of my life I have to be able to maintain full time employement at a large corporation.

Or marry a canadian and move north.

Something is wrong with the math here.

During the 80s and 90s, we went through a privatization fetish, where all industry and services needed to be privately owned and operated. We privatized large parts of Medicare, the military, the bureaucracy, tax collection, and – under Bush – we even tried to privatize Social Security. Privatization is fucking expensive (because the middle men all need to take a healthy cut), but it was sold as a way to save money.

Now, for reasons I don’t understand, people are still convinced that government run anything will fail miserably. This combines with a national phobia of taxes – again, under the assumption that if the government takes your money to do something, it’ll cost you more in the end than if you just bought the good or service yourself.

The last eight years have been the result. The government runs up a huge debt fighting abroad while letting government services languish at home. When something breaks, rather than raise taxes and fix it, we contract out the job to the private sector – giving us toll roads and ballooning energy prices and sub prime mortgage loans attached to unregulated investment funds.

We use private insurance for the same reason we’ve got Halliburton and Boeing running our military, Wall Street running our Treasury, and a handful of millionaire construction/management companies running our infrastructure. Because there’s so much damn money in milking the dumb old tax payer by charging him $5 a day just to get to fucking work in exchange for a few hundred dollars in tax breaks.

It’s not reality, but it’s a very hard mindset to shift. People are willing to believe that a change to health care is bad because of fear. If a shift in health care doesn’t work- then we have a REAL problem. There’s a lot of devil you do vs devil you don’t here.

What’s going to change the tone- swine flu combined with high unemployment. The folks who lost jobs over a year ago are running out of COBRA coverage. You have the US getting pasted with swine flu and people feeling they can’t go to the doctor because of no coverage…should make for good times.

Hey, take it easy on the Americans. After all, they’re the richest and most powerful nation on Earth. You can’t expect them to do what countries with a fraction of their resources are able to do.