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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (136538)	8/29/2013 5:57:52 PM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 149317

koan, at it's core, Socialism means making the collective decision to take money from people and redistribute it to others. In the case of healthcare for example, it's a laudable goal to have universal healthcare, paid for by the collective society. That is socialism. I'm not making a judgement here, but rather just pointing out the obvious. So think about what that means. If society decides on a socialist goal, like universal healthcare, then that quite literally means everyone's choice of health care options available in the marketplace will be replaced by a set of choices the state decides are appropriate. It also means the state has to enforce this, because there are going to be lots of people who don't want to participate. So a state apparatus has to be set up to monitor and enforce state actions against the unwilling. This is a loss of freedom. Now, we might all agree that the greater good is served at the expense of the loss of freedom. However, we have to acknowledge that there is a loss of freedom here and an increase in the expense and surveillance of the state. So with universal healthcare you take a step away from freedom and towards the collective. If you keep taking steps in that direction, it will eventually lead to the state making all decisions for you, as we have seen in Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany or Communist Cuba and Venezuela. This is the logical and slippery slope that seems to always happen in history. I do believe that in a healthy Democracy, we can have a balance between freedom and Socialism. I think universal health care is an amazing and worthwhile goal and we could pay for it without raising a dime of new taxes, if we'd just stop going to war every other year and reduced the size of our military industrial complex. However, we just need to be ever vigilant that we don't let state control and state spending to get out of bounds. Already, our government has started to destroy our liberties in alarming ways, such as the NSA spying on American citizens. How much more of this should we allow? I don't believe in accidents and I don't believe in coincidences. Why is this lurch to the far left happening all at once? Quite simply, it is the slippery slope. Once you get on that slope, things can spin out of control very fast indeed.