Hurrah for Paul Krugman
Categories: Protesting, Current Events, Values, Economy, Ideals
It's about resolving national political differences, and here's the crux of it
"One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state — a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net — morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.
"The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.
"There’s no middle ground between these views. One side saw health reform, with its subsidized extension of coverage to the uninsured, as fulfilling a moral imperative: wealthy nations, it believed, have an obligation to provide all their citizens with essential care. The other side saw the same reform as a moral outrage, an assault on the right of Americans to spend their money as they choose."
Krugman goes on to pose questions of hypocrisy, logical fallacies of the "I earned it and I have the right to keep it" crowd and just "how far we really are from being a society of equal opportunity."
And he concludes that we need leaders of both parties "or Mr. Obama alone if necessary" must "declare that both violence and any language hinting at the acceptability of violence are out of bounds ... an agreement that our differences will be settled by the rule of law."
Yes, yes, yes, Mr. Krugman!
Read the entire post: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/opinion/14krugman.html
Positively,
Carolan
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