bowls of soup and a benjamin

Well then in short every economic system is capitalist. And every government is socialist. So that when you call Obama a socialist you are saying he is just like everybody else. And how can you speak of creeping socialism if our country was always socialist anyway. Maybe you mean to say every economic system has elements of capitalism, and every government has elements of socialism. And I suppose you could say that every ideology has elements of libertarianism. So I guess that allows you to call yourself a libertarian when you choose to, though you eschew many of the tenets. I suppose I could call myself a libertarian too because I like the isolationist legal dope part.

So then I take it you approve of social security. Good for you. Here is an example of the government making you do what’s good for you. As Bohemians, you and I, can only rue the free spending, no saving, ways of most Americans. So that at least now that they are forced to save via social security, they are not so much a drain on their kids, or a sad-eyed pathetic mob, that you and I would have to support because you can’t just let a person die for Chrissake, though some tea party types cheer the thought. I take the last example from, I don’t remember the exact occasion but it was at one of those fire eating confabs of conservatives, oh here it is:http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/09/tea-party-debate-audience-cheered-idea-of-letting-uninsured-patients-die/

My rich getting richer, poor getting poorer thing was not about the means to do something about it, but whether in and of itself we felt there was something wrong about it, something unfair. What if a bunch of people sat down at a restaurant and we all paid the same amount of money, but some of us got a lot of food, and others not so much? Would we think this is unfair? We might argue about what to do about it. Some might argue that we should take the food off the plates of the fatties, and give it to the skinnies, some might say it’s better not to cause a fuss because we will all get kicked out of the restaurant, but I think, and I may be wrong here, that most people, including Beagles would think that the situation was unfair.

But you know, examples are always misleading. What if after we shared our food, or got kicked out of the restaurant, we hit the streets and one of us came across a hundred dollar bill, would we think that was unfair? Well I don’t, except in the general sense that life is unfair. I don’t think the guy should have to share that hundred bucks with anybody else, I don’t think anything needs to be done about this.

So what is going on here? Maybe there is a difference in the way that hundred dollar bill just appears out of nowhere, it doesn’t seem to have belonged to anybody before. Maybe there is a difference between conservatives and liberals. Most liberals are in favor of redistribution of wealth and conservatives view the very phrase with horror. Conservatives think wealth can be created out of nothing, and liberals think it is created by taking something from somebody else. The zero sum game vs the non zero sum game. I don’t want to argue which is better just yet, but I wonder if this is a good model for what we have been talking about.

But I have veered away from fairness as applied to the distribution of wealth, but then we have all winter, now that summer is almost gone.