For the record 10/16/08

Vote like you mean it

First, a reminder that today (Thursday, Oct. 16) is the opening of voting season in North Carolina. Please note that if you want your vote for president recorded, you have to start by marking your choice — a straight party ticket does not record a vote for president. You have to affirm your choice manually. Please do so. It’s important.

There are more than two dozen other races on the ballot as well — everything from governor and council of state, federal and state legislative races, judges and so on.

Some of the candidates for these races are running unopposed, but since you’re in the booth, you might as well let these folks know you are paying attention. You don’t get many chances in this area.

Rhetoric redux

There are a lot of political adages that should have shuffled off to the dustbin of history a long time ago. One of them is that tired old saw in which a politician says he’d kill this or that program or, say, privatize social security, because “you know how to spend your money better than the government.”

Not trying to insult your intelligence or your acumen for the needs of the general public, but in a lot of cases you don’t.

For instance, how much of “your” money should go to schools, roads, national defense, fire and police protection and that sidewalk you want in front of your house? How much should go toward making sure your vehicle is built safely or that it doesn’t belch copious amounts of various contaminants? How much should go into asthma research or for carbon nanotubes?

The point here is that government is, sometimes, the method through which we collectively make informed decisions.

Unfortunately, we have spent the last several decades hearing a steady drumbeat from those who think government is the problem.

Recently, the Republican vice-presidential candidate ended her closing remarks at her one and only debate with her Democratic counterpart with a remark by Ronald Reagan about freedom being just one generation away from extinction. As Paul Krugman, who last week won a Nobel Prize in economics, pointed out, what the governor of Alaska did not mention was that the statement was referring to Medicare and was part of an effort to warn about socialized medicine.

Painting socialism as a specter rising to haunt this country is back in vogue among those opposed to the rising clout of Democrats.

Yet, as we’ve seen in recent weeks, many of those who’ve complained the most about the breadth of government now seek its protection. We have effectively — and one would hope temporarily — nationalized chunks of the insurance, mortgage and banking industry. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is quickly turning casual Fridays into takeover Fridays — gobbling up banks teetering on the brink for reorganization over the weekend.

The twist to this is that the deregulation and lack of oversight that the uber-capitalists insisted on and paid lobbyists handsomely to convince lawmakers to enact is one of the chief causes of the spread of socialism from Wall Street to the Charlotte banking district.
Now the taxpayers are bailing out the very people who decried big government.

This has not been lost on many. In fact, in a recent local candidate forum, a member of the GOP — yes, there are a few here in Orange County — acknowledged that it appears there are programs or missions where government actually does a better job than the private sector. Such acknowledgments are rare, but increasing. It will take years, though, for the poison injected into our political discourse to be metabolized. People will still rail about big government and taxes. But there’s a difference between pushing back in order to insist on efficiency, transparency and fairness and simply attracting the system for ideological or political gain.

In a recent New York Times column, Thomas Friedman recalled Oliver Wendell Holmes remark that “I like paying taxes. With them I am buying civilization.”
We’re a far cry from that sentiment but perhaps a little closer to understanding the role of government and how dangerous it is to entrust the whole of civilization solely to those out to profit from it.