Last week San Francisco turned out for a good deed: the cheering-up of a fatally ill child in response to a request from the Make-a-Wish foundation. The wish? To be Batman for a day. Everyone from cheering crowds on the street to Police and the US Department of Justice, the Mayor and the President, all got involved. The payback for every politician outweighs the backlash: it was the Make-a-Wish version of kissing babies. The cost to the city: police overtime, cleanup, the mayor and most city officials as well as quite a few federal and state using their tax-payer-paid time to do public charity. The effectiveness: one kid made happy.
While thousands of kids go hungry, homeless and without proper medical treatment, one middle class white kid was made very happy. On TV no less.
And we all feel good.
I was thinking about that as news rolled in about the failure of the Obama Care Process: the State-mandated abortion issues, the robing of healthcare from those that already have it in the name of making sure that everyone have equal coverage while, all-in-all, only forcing all of us to pay insurance companies (rather than for health care), ie crony-capitalism. We all hear stories, over and over again, of a few poor people here and there that can suddenly afford to get Junior on a Kidney Machine or to let Mamma finally get her tubes tied.
And we’re supposed to all feel good.
Meanwhile food is poisoned and served to us by the Chinese in the name of international trade, all forms pornography (except the sexual) are served to us in the name of art by television. Sexual pornography is relegated to the movies. We pay for that too.
This helps us feel good.
And it is revealed to us – as we knew all along – that the gov’t is spying and documenting our every move – except for those being spied on by Google. And we pay for that too.
Oddly enough, we willingly pay for all of this – all of it – with either our taxes or our shopping or our freely-turned-over personal data; most often with all three.
And today it was announced that JP Morgan Chase would be “punished” by the Federal Gov’t by being forced to spend money on practices in which it was already engaged: ie, making wise economic decisions viz home mortgages, that would thus, in the long run, make more money. Sounds like punishment to me.
The Roman Gov’t used to use “bread and circuses” to keep the mob quite. It cost quite a lot of money, but the rich were willing to use their taxes in such a way. In our day, the gov’t has cut back on the bread part, giving us far more circuses in exchange, but making the poor pay for it directly.
Yup…
We’re all totally stupid.
Doxos 