Liberals and conservatives each claimed "decisive" victories this week in Ohio. Liberals thrilled to the rollback of curbs on collective bargaining rights for Ohio's public service unions while conservatives boasted of the majority vote to "opt out" of the Obama administration's health care mandate. Are Ohioans sending mixed messages? I don't think so. They've just proven, once again, that America cannot be governed by extremes.
These votes merely affirm the principles that bind us together regardless of our political leanings. We are a nation founded on the bedrock of the sanctity of individual liberty. By denying public service unions the right to bargain for compensation and work rules, the state was seen as attempting to deny the right to free association, free expression and self-determination. Similarly, requiring individuals to purchase a product of specific design, particularly one as intimately related to the pursuit of "life, liberty, and happiness" as health insurance, would seem to run counter to our founding principles of limited government and maximum personal freedom.
Ohioans have spoken, but only with respect to two specific remedies; the overriding issues remain unresolved. For public service unions: One out of seven employees in America works for the public sector. As a group, their salaries, benefits, work rules and job protections are vastly better than the average of those in the private sector. Their long term benefit packages are largely underfunded and unsustainable. It will remain to be seen what Ohioans and the citizens of California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York and other states (and the cities within those states) will do when faced with the necessity to increase significantly their taxes to honor the prior commitments of self-serving politicians. Will the public exercise their sovereignty to further subsidize their public "servants" or, in an act of collective noblesse oblige, elect to "let them eat cake?"
Regarding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, popularly or un-popularly known as "Obama Care," whether it is overridden by the supreme court, repealed by a future congress and administration, or collapses from its own bureaucratic weight (currently 1,000 pages of regulations and counting) it cannot remotely survive in its present form. Yet, the problems that it was originally intended to address are acute and getting worse. Health care is increasingly unaffordable and Medicare and Medicaid as currently administered are unsustainable. Irrespective of what the constitution may be interpreted to say, Americans want the issue addressed and government is the only institution capable of achieving a solution consistent with our values as a society. While the majority of us do not want the government to "control" our health care, we are not content to leave it wholly to the free market, either. We are adamant that we will not participate in a society where the right to be healthy and, in many cases, to live is dependent on personal economic circumstances.
The solution to these and other pressing issues will not be found by adhering to extreme liberal or conservative orthodoxy. Until we seek common ground and political solutions based on common sense and shared interest, we will continue to stage political jousting matches like the ones recently conducted in Ohio, only to find ourselves back where we started and the problems largely unresolved.
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Politics1 - Online Guide to Ohio Politics
In 1992 Checchi convinced the Minnesota state government to give Northwest Airlines $761 million in loans, subsidies and bond sales in exchange for promises to build two maintenance facilities that would employ 2000 high-paid union workers.
But less than a year after the Minnesota legislature approved Northwest’s aid package the airline began backpedaling, saying the maintenance bases might not be needed afterall. Checchi used part of the state loan to pay off debt from his 1989 $3.65 billion takeover of Northwest.
Eventually in 1994, under threats that Minnesota might make Northwest pay back the loans, Northwest said they would build a single, smaller maintenance facility that would employ 350 workers “by 2000”, and also build a reservation call center that would employ a few hundred low-wage workers. In 1997 Northwest began moving jet maintenance to a facility in France.
http://www.leg.state.mn.us/lrl/issues/issues.aspx?issue=nwa
Apparently to Al Checchi, seeking “common ground” means bought-and-paid-for Democratic and Republican politicians working together to funnel taxpayer money to their corporate johns.
One side in the debate ignores inconvenient facts like how the individual mandate is actually a conservative idea that was first proposed by the Heritage Foundation in 1989, and how the individual mandate is only one of many conservative ideas that President Obama has embraced in a futile attempt to find "common ground" with Republicans.
Republicans know that they can get away with repeating demonstrable falsehoods because they know the corporate-controlled "mainstream" media will never call them on it. That's why we are still debating whether Obama is an illegal alien or whether Obama's health care reform "nationalized" the country's health care and installed "death panels" that would decide when it is time to euthanize grandma.
As it is, it is merely the most pernicious of political positions, because of the inescapable nature of politics and government in American society and the fact that we are a nation irretrievably divided between the vile rent seeking collectivism of social democracy and the freedom upon which this nation was founded.
Worse, centrism allows us to pretend that our fundamental division does not exist, while easing the transition to an ever larger and more intrusive social democratic state through incrementally shifting the middle of the political spectrum until socialism in the form of social democracy can claim with a straight face that armed robbery and indentured servitude are freedom – under the rubric of “positive” freedoms to government provided stuff paid for with other people’s money.
The idea that centrism is "incrementally shifting the middle of the political spectrum until socialism" is a centrist position is laughable. We have seen the definition of the "middle" shift steadily rightward since Ronald Reagan took office. In fact, the revered "Ronaldus Maximus", who raised taxes multiple times, offered amnesty to illegal aliens, argued in favor or infrastructure spending, bargained with communsts and compromised with Democrats would be ridden out of today's Republican Party on a rail for heresy.
The individual mandate for health coverage that you, delusionally or calculatingly, identify of as a socialist idea originated back in 1989 at the conservative Heritage Foundation. It is one of many conservative policies that President Obama has embraced, to the detriment of the country.
There has however, been one area where "freedom upon which this nation was founded' is being steadily eroded -- an area that the Tea Party no longer talks about in public (except for libertarian icons Ron and Rand Paul).
American's expanding tolerance has been eroding the "freedom" to discriminate legally against "the Other" as over the decades, Catholics, Jews, women, asians, hispanics, blacks and now homosexuals have been embraced as "real" Americans.
The issue is one of scope.
The larger the allowable scope of government, the more contentious and divisive the outcome. ObamaCare was the result of the Social Democrat Party's attempt to complete their beloved social democratic state in one fell swoop.
This desperate attempt launched the Tea Party Revolution as a reaction to the intemperance of the Obama/Reid/Pelosi troika that ignored the traditional incrementalism upon which the advancement of our social democratic state has depended since FDR.
The real issue is scope.
The larger our government, the more intrusive it becomes, whether it is implementing programs and policies from left or right.
Feel entirely free to pursue and perfect your social democratic state in Social Democratic America, while those of us who demand our freedom from its tyranny pursue and perfect the benefits of freedom in Free America.
Simply recognize that there is no compromise between our two positions and prepare for dividing America sooner rather than later.
It's solved. It's the right who are stealing our rights and liberties so go and talk to them.
As for divisions in our society, they are created from whole cloth by the 99% and promoted hourly on using their propaganda machine on our airwaves. The 1% spend more time and money keeping us divided and angry at each other than they do on anything elss. It's that important to maintaining their privlege.
If you look at some of the returns around Columbus, Ohio, you will see that many REFUSED to allow their taxes to be raised, thus many school districts are now going to lay of hundreds of teachers.
Ohio voters said, yes to collective bargaining, but they also said they are not going to be an endless money pit for those same workers.
There are other ways to balance the budget than on the backs of labor. You should be demanding your legislators look at other options like taxing the people that destroyed the economy and walked away with the loot.
The voters of Ohio rejected wing nuts. Both those on the left and those on the right. Before you flame me, I don't think Obamacare is a wing nut proposal, but it is clear that the Ohio electorate does.
These events do not bode well for incumbents in 2012. That means trouble for Republicans in the House, and Democrats in the Senate and the White House.
I suspect you and I have very different ideas about what an American is entitled to. Progressive tax systems unfairly punish individual effort and success -- just the things that made America great. Yes -- there are things we can do around closing loopholes, and providing some forms of regulation to avoid obvious inefficiencies in the system. Yes we can provide a form of social net to help people rise from circumstances that were generally not of their doing.
But you can't simply say -- "you deserve a house, a college education, a nice car, a job, food, and healthcare" - these are things that you earn. The bias should be around a person's responsiblity to do that by making good decisions about trade skills they learn, where they choose to live, the assets they choose to buy, and the lifestyles they live. It's not the role of government to make things equal. It needs to encourage opportunity, and provide safety from risks that could not be affored at a local level. That's it.
It makes everything else you have to say just so, predictable, i.e. boring.