{"id":18741,"date":"2017-08-07T09:09:43","date_gmt":"2017-08-07T15:09:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=18741"},"modified":"2017-08-07T09:12:38","modified_gmt":"2017-08-07T15:12:38","slug":"montana-viewpoint-ideology-versus-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2017\/08\/montana-viewpoint-ideology-versus-reality\/","title":{"rendered":"Montana Viewpoint: Ideology versus reality"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Jim\"<\/a>

Jim Elliott<\/p><\/div>\n

The struggle in American government today is one between hypothetical ideology and stark reality. The\u00a0ideology lives in our national and state capitols and the reality is borne by the Americans our governments are supposed to serve.<\/p>\n

Neither group seems to understand the other. Elected officials are isolated from the thinking of the\u00a0people they serve, which is laden with of fear and anxiety about their future. The elected cannot feel or\u00a0understand that except in the abstract. The people can\u2019t understand why the elected are so clueless.<\/p>\n

Government exists, paraphrasing Lincoln, to do for the people what they cannot do for themselves as\u00a0individuals. Over the centuries the needs of the people and treatment of others has changed, not\u00a0because of technology, but because of humanity.<\/p>\n

We no longer imprison debtors, we try to not let people starve, we educate the children\u2014all of them\u2014and for the most part we take care of the elderly, the sick and the infirm. The argument is not so much\u00a0about what we do for ourselves, it is how it is accomplished, which these days boils down to government or the private sector.<\/p>\n

For decades, the private sector was neither competent nor wanting to provide universal education,\u00a0affordable health care, public transportation systems, prisons, ad infinitum.
\nHowever, thanks largely to the hypothetical ideology of Milton Friedman, father of trickle-down economics, the private sector saw that it\u00a0might be able to make a buck or two by taking over those very government functions that they had previously shunned.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>Ideological ideas such as trickle-down economics or deregulation of the financial industry take a while to\u00a0put into place, and then it takes still more time to see if they actually work or if they seem to work, or if it could be argued convincingly that they might eventually work. For the most part whether they work or\u00a0not doesn\u2019t affect the life of working people in an obvious way. It\u2019s more insidious, like the death of 1,000 cuts.<\/p>\n

When it doesn\u2019t work it ruins lives of everyday Americans, but not the lives of the elected or officers of\u00a0the deregulated industries.<\/p>\n

There are some very simple solutions to serious problems that can\u2019t even be entertained because of the opposition of business coalitions with vested interests in the status quo. The most obvious of these is\u00a0universal health care, which could be accomplished by extending Medicare to everyone, regardless of age.<\/p>\n

That is totally opposed by the insurance industry. It is mighty influential in Washington, but its not influential because it has\u00a0good ideas and good arguments to support it. The insurance industry has\u00a0something better: money.<\/p>\n

The workings of government are mysterious to the common person, but the workings of lobbyists are not.<\/p>\n

America is run, not in the best interests of the citizen, but in the best interests of industry, which they\u00a0assure us is really better for us in the long run. It has been that way for a long time, but the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, that corporations could contribute unlimited amounts of money to political campaigns, really consummated the purchase of Congress by industry.<\/p>\n

For years such presidents like Teddy Roosevelt, Taft and, yes, Nixon fought the large corporate trusts for the benefit of Americans. Now it seems that the corporate trusts will be fighting the citizens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The struggle in American government today is one between hypothetical ideology and stark reality. The\u00a0ideology lives in our national and state capitols and the reality is borne by the Americans our governments are supposed to serve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":18742,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3864],"tags":[1676,2631,5754,6124],"class_list":["post-18741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-citizens-united","tag-congress","tag-health-care","tag-lobbyists","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18741"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18748,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18741\/revisions\/18748"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}