Please understand that I am not attacking you. I know that I can become a bit snarky at times and my current unemployment situation isn't helping my attitude much these days.
You greatly oversimplify the primary motivating factors behind the current meltdown. Chris Dodd and Barney Frank certainly played along in this fiasco, but in real terms, these bozos weren't much more than ugly cheerleaders clothed in badly bulging uniforms.
At the very foundation of this problem is the benevolence of government--a government that tried to do too much for too many people, and a government that tried along the way to smooth out the problems it caused by trying to do too much for too many people.
Your examples of government good works are mostly ill-cited. First, if a private business operated the way the post office does they would have gone out of business decades ago. Massively inefficient, it operates within a largely protected business easement, and still cannot make a profit let alone break even.
The military is a gem of our government. It is truly one of the few areas of involvement that the government should be involved in. Funny, it is the one area that Obama has identified as a place to cut.
The FDA is a disaster. It has killed many more people than it has ever saved and has created a pharmaceutical industry where only behemoth companies can survive--it starves the marketplace of ideas with its regulations and has made medicines so costly to produce that many people must choose between pills and food. It has become a tool of progressive bureaucrats to punish big pharma and to further social agendas. I am not suggesting that we kill the FDA (though many thoughtful people do say that would be a better route) but I think that the FDA as it currently exists should be given a clearer (and smaller) footprint.
It isn't that I think our current problems cannot be solved or survived, it is that I believe, by definition, the government cannot be the ones to resolve the situation. It must be fixed in the private sector. Handing over larger and larger chunks of our economy to the government will do nothing positive.
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