good post.
one thing though- why do we think of social ideas as rotten (and no, i don't mean more money to a crack-whore with 9 kids)? afterall control of finances, health care and natural resources benefit all citizens and shield them from abuse and profiteering. everything else can be a free-for-all like it is now and was before, but those areas should be controlled in some fashion and that does not make you a 'commie'.
I would love to have free health care for all and other civilized public programs, even welfare, but we just don't have the resources, at least not yet. Actually I agree that those would be good services to offer the public, I do believe that in the future we will have efficient technology that will allow government run public program, in a Startrek-esque society without the spandex.
For the time being though, next 50 years or so, it's not going to be possible unless some major cost cutting breakthroughs in technology are made.
Check out the movie IOUSA , it's on google video or youtube... Basically they show you that pie chart of the US Federal budget. With the rate we're spending money on Social Security , Medicare, Medicade, and "Defense" (offense) and Interest on money owed there's no way to keep this existing model afloat. We just elect the next pre-selected liar to the White House and he steals as much money as he can for the next 4 years and band aids everything he can without fixing any long term problems, and the next liar is elected in our fake 2 party system. Even if we dropped Medicare and had people dieing in the streets we'll still get overrun with interest in 10-20 years, so government run health care will just be another social service we can't afford.
We have to cut half of this pie or more to pay for the debt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Federal_Spending_-_FY_2007.png
3 Trillion is our yearly budget, we owe $202 trillion in derivatives in notional value, with only a fraction backed up with assets.
As it stands we owe something like 1 times the GDP of the world and 4 times with derivatives , it's unlikely that we will find a long term fix and hyperinflation looks like it's going to be a reality, unless the rest of the world is dumb enough to keep lending us money.
There's also the:
China Bubble
Commercial Realestate Bubble
Derivatives Bubble
Dumping of the Dollar as the world currency
Hyperinflation
One of these pops and were really screwed, so as it stands the US government doesn't even have the money to pay for it's existing services, to add a new one would just hasten the collapse.
Also I don't trust the government since they constantly lie and just about every program they have is a disaster and they're 80% controlled by unions when compared to the private sector. Just for example most corporations have 10% of bad apples that have to be fired, they're just bad employees. Well for the whole state of California, 7th biggest economy in the world, they fired less than 80 teachers last year I believe. There's no way that's going to be efficient. There's countless other scenarios of government waste, but generally the government never does anything better than private businesses. Private business aren't perfect, but better than the US Gov. Take charter schools for example vs public schools. If you have a system where you can't fire people, with jobs for life it will fail.
