Thread: Are We Incrementally Losing Our Freedom?

=MistressNomad;567243]Depends on what about Cap and Trade you're talking about, specifically. I think the concept is sound. Not all of the implementation is.

The only concept I have seen being bantered about will do nothing but drive prices up. It does not limit amounts, it just makes people pay for higher amounts. The people who pay are the energy consumers, not the energy producers.

But just as we ban smoking indoors because of the potential health risk it possess to unconsenting parties, we have to take measures to keep industry from completely wrecking the planet.

Are people getting shoved into these buildings? Unconsenting? So the non-smoker has the right to go any where they choose without discretion? Special rights?

No matter what you think of global warming, it's undeniable that in the past (and still today, but to a lesser degree) unchecked industry has rendered entire bodies of water basically poisonous, and destroyed untold acres of previously fertile land.

And industry has put clean water where there was none, has turned millions of acres of infertile land, fertile. Has used those acres to feed millions of city dwellers that have no other means of substinance, making "civilized life" possible. Has built pipelines and canals, built railroads,tractor trailers, and airplanes bringing products from the far reaches of the earth to your neighborhood store. Has provided employment for millions of people, allowing them to work for income, to provide for responsibilities and purchase their wants. Has taken the standard of living from a one room house, to where the poor need to decide between which tv to watch. Which has basically given us a world in which we have the spare time to sit around and invent problems.

Like I've said, I actually don't think this health care bill is the answer. In the short term, it may help stop people from pre-existing conditions from simply dying off in the heat of the depression, and *maybe* it will help restore some order to our ER's (but that could kinda go either way), but really, I don't have any long-term hope for it.

Thats reassuring that we are going to be paying trillions of future tax dollars for the wrong answer to a problem that may or may not exist.

I see it as hopefully being a spring-board into something more sustainable. The fact is that now we've done it, which means we've overcome all the inertia that was holding up health care reform in the first place. So from here out, it should be easier to make further reforms as we inevitably find things about this bill that don't work.

It will definitely be a spring board, but not to what you are dreaming of, imo. The thing we would do well to remember is that we live in a precedental system. So if something has been done before it can be done again, and it doesnt even have to be the same thing or the same situation. It comes back to what thebigspendur was getting at earlier(if i understood his intent, if not sorry tbs), everyone that allows a right to be taken in this circumstance, will complain when a right is taken in that circumstance, even though it was the right they agreed with losing, that led to the one they are complaining about losing. So at some point, which I wish would of happened long ago, people will quit allowing usurptations of rights period, even when they agree that the ends justify the means, the ends need to justify themselves.

In order to *truly* reform health care, we also have to reform everything from the court system to social security. The system is broken all the way down to the bottom floor. And that's going to take time to fix.

A statement I can get fully behind, lets all gather in the lobby and start over. The US constitution as written, not as it has been perverted.

I'm not hoping for a quick fix, and this bill certainly confirmed that I shouldn't. Baby steps.

Thats good because quick fixes dont exist, its either fixed right or its still broken. Baby steps can still get you to hell, or out, which direction is up to us, but its not the way we are heading and have been heading for some time, imo.