Running racism in America thread

You lost me here, @Azrael .

Take "universal health care." That is not possible without making a claim on other people's time and labor. That is not just.

In reality, with the corruption and inefficiencies those kinds of socialized programs create, it's a formula for a giant mess, not even paid for entirely with other people's money. So you get some kind of wasteful, rationed system that creates shortages, for as long as you can still run up debt. Which is not going to be possible at a time closer to the future than people seem to realize, because we have functionally bankrupted ourselves and have now been reduced to monetizing debt just to service the debt we have already run up with those kinds of things.

We have an unjust criminal justice system in this country, beginning with whom police interact with and how, and ending with a prison system that has been turned into a corrupt business that needs inputs -- mostly young, black men, as matter of reality. We should be looking at how many people we imprison, who a lot of them are, and ask ourselves what we are doing.

Let's talk about that and undo it.

But don't use those kinds of systemic problems the way you just did to try to engineer everyone's lives, effectively giving proposals for replacing current injustices with other injustices that maybe you don't find as bad.

When you take that systemic injustice and use the rhetoric to try to make claims on other people -- reperations?!?!?--you are talking about replacing one immoral thing with another one. Which is going to foment a lot of the resentments that have led to some of the racial animosity that has continued in this country post the civil rights movement.

We have seen that for the last couple of decades with racial quotas and affirmative action programs that not only didn't advance progress toward a level playing field as much as more organic things have, but had the effect of creating a lot of resentments. Those resentful people are Trump's supporters, in a nutshell. They may be terrible people, as Biden said, but there are things that feed their terribleness (if that is a word). They are white trash who see the special interest politics -- the kinds of things you just advocated for -- and feel like they have been left behind in the game. They are blue collar workers who feel shafted; maybe it's a guy who took the civil service exam and was passed over for a fire department job in favor of someone who scored lower but met a racial quota.

I don't owe anyone a reperation. Nobody should have any claim on my time, labor or property. That is as unAmerican to my way of thinking as what the police are doing in some places to people protesting their government.

What I owe everyone is a commitment to a level and fair playing field at the systemic level. That is it. We still get that very wrong. That is the thing that needs to be fixed.

The key to that, which a lot of people don't seem to understand, is as little government control of our lives as necessary to try to uphold the social contract. Because government has turned into a tool of injustice, whether you see it or not. We made ourselves into country of special interests being pandered to by elected officials who wield way too much power over our lives, who pay back those constituents with the kinds of unjust things you just advocated for. It's not just, simply because you think you are advocating for a disaffected group. We've not only destroyed our country economically with tha kind of stuff, and are functionally bankrupt now, but whether you realize or it not, the consequences you don't foresee are that you end up feeding the powderkeg of resentment and hatred at the same time.

No thanks.