Health Care Reform

[gas.]

Makes you wonder what would happen if you did a bill and ted and brought everyone back from the signing of the constitution and droped them in modern day washington to see how warped the goverments becoming.

They'd be too busy making sure their slaves were working hard to take the trip.

Times change, eh?

[ZERO]

Oh god and now we get into the old founding fathers were evil slave owners and therefore everything they say is evil argument. (I am not saying your actually making this argument) This sort of misleading education is one of the larger contributors to the problems facing the direction of our nation. Our in ability to not only educate the public overall in school and our total failure to accurately portray the facts of history have played into the hand of modern ignorance. For example when I started to read history on my own to get the facts I constantly had to stop and go no, no fucking way. Then after checking the sources and seeing it was true going how the fuck have I not been told about this! (Largely seen in the us history of the early 20th century which is brushed over even in the AP classes I took.)

Now back to the topic at hand:

I came across a more detailed paper discussing the problems with the rankings listed earlier in this thread: http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=...-es9kKN53GlvAw

Also as far as the founders go you can read though their individual works from the time and get a good seance for how they viewed the world and even their motives in founding the United States.


In addition here are links to the WHO docs that people seem to be pulling data from in their entirety(an easy 230 page or so read):
http://www.who.int/whr/2000/en/whr00_en.pdf
http://www.who.int/healthinfo/paper28.pdf

Note that the second link is only 13 pages with some big pics and contains much of the actual data and explanation that the longer 213+ page report is based on. If your short on time just look over the second link

[gas.]

Oh god and now we get into the old founding fathers were evil slave owners and therefore everything they say is evil argument. (I am not saying your actually making this argument.

... what?

I wasn't making any argument. Simply pointing out that using the point of bringing the founding fathers to the current United States for shock factor doesn't hold up at all. It's a completely different time. You base the country on the principals that spawned it, not what was the "letter of the law". The country would be half the size it is now if we followed their lead to the letter instead of doing what we believe is best for the country as a whole.

[ZERO]

I know you were not hence "I am not saying your actually making this argument."

I was pointing out that there are some who will read that and think you are becuase there actually are people as hard as this may be to believe who actually believe this.

Actually if your read the federalist 10 you will see how the bias for the organizational structure of our gov is to prevent the masses from "doing what we believe is best for the country as a whole." This is becuase the founders were largely afraid of people making decisions based on what they believed was best for them at that time. In order to prevent this the gov was structured the way that it is in order to slow down changes and to also allow the people making those votes and decisions separated from the general masses.

[Kavinsky]

Gas that's besides the point, that was a peripheral thing that didnt get taken care of in time and eventually became a serious part of the south's economy.

Even then during the civil war it wasnt the main focus of the battle between the north and the south. it was a war over economics and the slaves were a serious part of the souths economy and when they tried to take that away it was one of many things that irked the south and eventually caused the civil war.

My point is that they worked so fucking hard not to create a tyrannical one sided government and it seems to be becoming just that, ever so slowly except with 2 parties that are just as bad as one another.

[ZERO]

If you read common sense pain goes into how it is large governments themselves that lead to tyranny this is also the same idea that lead Washington to say "“Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.”"

Voltaire had it right: “The art of government is to make two-thirds of a nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third.”

I think this sums up the entire thread:
Supreme Court Justice Jackson, “It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error.”

[loka]

Gas that's besides the point, that was a peripheral thing that didnt get taken care of in time and eventually became a serious part of the south's economy.

Even then during the civil war it wasnt the main focus of the battle between the north and the south. it was a war over economics and the slaves were a serious part of the souths economy and when they tried to take that away it was one of many things that irked the south and eventually caused the civil war.

My point is that they worked so fucking hard not to create a tyrannical one sided government and it seems to be becoming just that, ever so slowly.

What?
Slavery was not the main cause of the Civil War, nor money. POWER. It was about having POWER. The South would have loved to use the excuse of slavery, but there was already tension between the Confederacy and the Union leading up to slavery, and it was more about militaristic power than slavery. The founding fathers wanted an end to slavery, but also wanted state unions to use their better judgment to abolish slavery. The civil war CHANGED the outcome of leaving power to the people and the STATE because the SOUTH thought "fuck the founding fathers, the constitution of 'we the people', and the Union; we can have slaves." It was about the hierarchy of leading STATE laws over FEDERAL. Which the North fully thought that FEDERAL laws should always be above STATE laws. Thanks to the Civil war, this is now the case unless both the state and federal laws are similar.

1. Taxation
2. State rights
3. Sectionalism
and somewhere in between "slavery" can be attached as a fallacy to the "big cause" of the slavery, because truth is slavery was dying out long before the Civil war began because of technology. Emancipation of Proclamation began in 1862. Civil war: 1861. And only 2.5% of the 4 million slaves of the south actually worked on plantations (see 1860 census)

[Kavinsky]

I agree but I had to point out the obivious flaw in gus' statment and either they didnt mention the state laws vs federal thing in high school or I didnt pick up on it when we were covering it.

[loka]

I learned that in college in American law and History class. The constitution will always be the supreme law of the land along with federal laws (of course except in Native American reservations; they have their own Tribe Laws). It was about state rights because the CSA (Confederacy State of America 7 seceded states) versus the United States of America (23 states). The truth is the majority of southerners who owned slaves were the politicians. Southerners were too poor to even own 1 slave. Hence why I mentioned earlier "the government works for big companies and their egos." The civil war was fueled more by a war of politicians than the public beliefs of two different states.

[ZERO]

Yea in APus we learned that it was not over slavery but states rights, although I know that most HS will teach that it is about slavery b/c most of our education system is not about teaching.