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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (316256)	12/18/2006 1:48:59 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1585094

"I know it's abnormal to care about things other than yourself in today's culture, but that is who I am. " It isn't abnormal, but based on the posters on this board, feeling that way gets you labeled as a "liberal". Now in some senses, that is accurate. Trying to improve society is one of the traditional goals of liberalism. But over the decades, our bipolar approach to politics has changed the meaning of liberal to be something very different. Far be it for me to try to rehabilitate the meaning of the word, it isn't worth the effort. So I am not going to point out that you are a liberal, you aren't in the current vernacular. I think that a large part of the problem is that American politics have been taken over by the idealists. Now idealism is very laudable, especially in the young. But at some point, one has to develop a sense of pragmatism. There are just some things that don't work, or even if they work, have certain side effects. All the wishing in the world won't change this. And one extremely pragmatic observation is that the larger and more secure the middle class is, the better the country is. Not only because it is at its most democratic, but with pretty much everyone having a stake in things, the crime rate is lower, quality of living increases, people are safer and the economy performs well. Now arguably the economy can perform even better if you take all the controls off and let what happens, happen. But then you have a declining middle class, fewer people have a stake and the crime rate and quality of living decreases. So there is a very pragmatic reason to support the middle class. Even if you think your destiny is to be rich, if few others are, your destiny is a gated community and other guarded enclaves. Everything thing else is something to be avoided.