Quote:
Originally Posted by Toughy
I was watching the local news this am. The story was about folks who voted Obama in 2008 and are considering voting Romney this time around. One of the guys interviewed said: Romney has business experience and knows how to make money. We need our government to start making money.
So how many folks out there actually think the government is supposed to make money like business makes money?
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I blame part of that on the twinned memes that government is either like a family or like a business and the resiliency of those memes is connected to a lack of what, for lack of any better term, I call citizenship education. We treat citizenship very casually in this country, as if it is either something akin to a biblical curse visiting upon the offspring of Americans the fruits of the iniquities of their parent and their parents before them *or* as a confection which primarily involves shouting USA! USA! because the sun happens to throw light onto the Eastern seaboard at first light. We don't actually give much thought (and even less thought) as to the nature of citizenship in a republic or of the role of government. So lacking any other, more accurate model people fall back on what they think they know which is that businesses make money, businesses can be huge and impersonal like the government, so government should make money.
Americans seem to have forgotten, despite our mouthing words to the contrary, that there's more to life than making money and that turning a profit *isn't* what governments are for.
Cheers
Aj