whatever happened to the common good...
Aug. 19th, 2009 10:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
acroyearFrank Schaeffer: How the Right and the Left Destroyed the Public Option:
BTW, one of the major factors for the ECW was the fact that much of the commons land was being sold by the crown to wealthy noblemen for development, putting farmer's livestock (and livelihood) in danger.
Under many a religious war is a social disconnect, especially between rich and poor, lurking as the root cause. Religion made it easy to rally a group to fight, but the reason for fighting was a perceived injustice irrelevant to religions.
Now in the USA we have the worst of all possible worlds: a leftist/libertarian addiction to personal private space, in which no one is allowed to tell anyone else what they should do, combined with this weird anti-Christian "Christian" right wing notion that everything -- even trains, the post office, our infrastructure and medicine, and now even a big chunk of the military (via "contractors") -- must be run for a for-profit motive.In the 18th century, it was called Enlightened Self-Interest.
The left, the right, the secular community and the religious community have denied the best of their own heritage when it comes to America. The problem of not getting a public option for health-care reform relates to a philosophical shift in our culture wherein everything has to be justified on the basis of profit and/or privacy. Result: there is no concept of public space at all. Result: idiots shout "socialism" about common sense solutions to our problems that -- very ironically -- the Medici princes of Florence and the Puritans would have all agreed needed to be matters of common public space.
Until Americans -- left and right, atheist and believing -- begin to take another look at where this road of absolutist privacy combined with absolutist profit leads we'll be stuck with the health care that's a mess, trains that don't work and for-profit lunacy: deified individualism.
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We need to get back to the idea of civic space, and public works, not just in health-care but in all sectors of our economy. It's not a question of being anti-capitalist; rather, it's a question of rediscovering a more narrowly defined capitalism that thrives because of a thriving public space.
BTW, one of the major factors for the ECW was the fact that much of the commons land was being sold by the crown to wealthy noblemen for development, putting farmer's livestock (and livelihood) in danger.
Under many a religious war is a social disconnect, especially between rich and poor, lurking as the root cause. Religion made it easy to rally a group to fight, but the reason for fighting was a perceived injustice irrelevant to religions.
