Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to Lean Left.
Or this:
Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty Lean Left.
Do not go into the Lean Left. Stop where you are. Turn away from it. Don’t even look at it.
This is a rather silly argument:
Maybe we should also make these people eligible for food stamps, housing subsidies, and free cigarettes. Why should anyone have to pay for anything anymore?
Come on, people! We’re talking about whether the government should pay for your two kids’ health insurance plans when you make more than $51,000 a year (more than the new national median income). I know that health insurance is not cheap, but neither are your mortgage and car insurance. You’re not going to ask the government to pay for those too, are you
We already do have subsidies for housing for some people in the middle class: it is called the mortgage interest deduction. In fact, a moments thought will show you that we subsidize quite a bit of middle class life. We do provide a kind of food subsidy: the cost of inspecting the food to make sure that it wont poison you is borne by the government. We subsidize the purchase of cars, sometimes directly through tax credits but more often through the road system. Highways and byways are paid for by the government and your car is essentially useless without them. We provide free education of or any child who wants it. That, too, is a subsidy of the middle class. We even subsidize health care: much of the important medicine we have today came as a result of NIH research.
We, as a society, have subsidized an enormous amount of modern life because, as a society, we have decided that it is immoral, inefficient, or impractical to leave those portions to individuals. Much of our lives are aided by government subsidies and we are better as a society and an economy for it. Arguing that middle class parents must, because they are middle class, pay for health insurance is exactly and precisely like arguing that middle class parents should pay for their own food inspection programs because they are middle class. Its a silly argument because it has nothing do with the actual reasons society subsidizes anything. If you don’t think arguments of morality or inefficiency or practicality — the arguments that have served as the basis for all good government interventions — then say so. But don’t pretend that the SCHIP expansion is somehow unique or that the government has not subsidized large swaths of American life or that those subsidies have had a positive effect on American society. Doing so just makes you look silly.
Royalty was like dandelions. No matter how many heads you chopped off, the roots were still there underground, waiting to spring up again.
It seemed to be a chronic disease. It was as if even the most intelligent person had this little blank spot in their heads where someone had written: "Kings. What a good idea." Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. It was its tendency to bend at the knees.
-- Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay
