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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: skinowski who wrote (282778)	12/2/2008 9:00:32 PM
From: Maurice Winn	2 Recommendations Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793917

If somebody pursuing their private interests mucks up and harms themselves, then the rest of us aren't obliged to pick up the costs of the unintended consequences, and indeed when I messed up my Globalstar investment which went broke, I was left with the pieces to contend with all on my own. I didn't get a fleet of politicians saying they needed to bail me out with taxpayer/citizen money as GM, Citigroup, and all the others are getting. If somebody falls off a cliff and smashes themselves up, there is no obligation for taxpayers to foot the bill. They tend to do so because overall, electorates like compulsory insurance for certain risks. But because there is a limit to how much free stuff can be provided, plenty of people constantly are NOT given OPM in the quantities they'd like to handle the unintended consequences of their bad decisions. My opinion is that social insurance, cloistering and kleptocratic suffocatocracy have gone far too far in protecting everyone against themselves and generally improving "safety". For a long time during my first few decades, economic benefits were privatized and commons destruction was socialized as harbours, air, rivers were polluted. That has largely been stopped. Now it has gone too far the other way with negligible harms to the commons drawing huge bureaucratic suffocatocracy at great expense. One of the unintended consequences of all the "safety" and suffocating of children is lack of get up and go, imagination and drive. Have you heard of the global obesity epidemic? Amusingly, the answer of the state and its acolytes is even more control to fix the obesity epidemic. About 12 years ago, Lindsay Perigo of libertarianz.org.nz and Radio Liberty fame, as well The Free Radical told me that the next thing the state would go after would be diet [fat, sugar etc]. I really thought he was going to extremes. He said "You mark my words". Sure enough, the process is underway. Amazing and people are lining up like sheep to accept it all. Mqurice