Along the line of MSB's post above;
You speak of insurance companies and corporations as most liberals do. As if they are some sort of secret society worthy of being run out of town on a rail for some reason.
What you are failing at is realizing 'Republicans' are not protecting insurance companies OR corporations. They are trying to protect PEOPLE. Isn't that, afterall, what makes up an insurance company or *shudder* a corporation?
Bottom line is WE the PEOPLE pay. Always. You can't make it otherwise. Governments produce nothing therefore have nothing to pay unless and until they confiscate it from someONE. This is the worst mistake, in my very humble opinion, that liberals make. They try to separate everything and make groups when in fact, when you boil it all down it comes back to each and every single one of us. You cannot tax an insurance company or a corporation you can only tax people.
By the way, welcome to the board. I've enjoyed reading the exchange.
KC
I am a liberal and not a socialist. I don't want to run either the insurance companies or any corporation out of town on a rail. I support capitalism, and I support the private ownership of property. I do not favor state ownership of all property, i.e. socialism.
But I also recognize that corporations are amoral. That doesn't mean they're bad. It means that questions of good and bad are not on their radar. I also recognize that all corporations are permitted to exist solely because they are granted that right by the States. Every Georgia company, for example, in order to exist as a company, must be granted the state's permission to exist. In other words, companies and corporations exist only because the state allows them to. The state has the power, and the right, and the
duty, to regulate and/or eliminate companies and corporations if they do not serve the interests of the people.
Insurance companies, like all companies, exist for only two purposes--to make money and to protect their stockholders from liability. That's it, and there's nothing wrong with that. Companies are supposed to make money. They are supposed to be driven by profit, alone, and they should not give a darn about the public or the general welfare. And this is fine with me. But I also believe that the state has a duty to regulate them, to control them to a degree, to insure that their activites do not harm us all. Right now, imho, the insurance industry is harming us all, and both major parties, as I said, seem to be in their pockets. The state has completely lost the ability to control these companies, and this is a serious problem (from my perspective). We can vote out bad legislators. Theoretically, we have some control over our government. But corporations? We can't vote out their CEOs or their Boards of Directors. We are powerless against them, and if they control our government, then they control us. I find this unacceptable and a dire threat to the Republic whose Constitution I took an oath to defend.
That, it appears to me, is where we are right now.
As for the Republican Party, it's hard to reconcile the argument that the party is trying to protect people when Joe Barton apologizes to BP for Obama's having coerced a kind of tentative settlement out of them that won't come near to paying for the damage that company caused. Thankfully, the party spanked him for that one, but he wasn't the only one saying it. From the perspective of the left, the Republican Party, since Teddy Roosevelt, has been the Party that supports
rich people, but not all the people. At this point, it appears the Democratic Party is not very different, and that explains, in part, why I am here.
And you're right that we will pay for every injury one way or another. One way, though, there's a chance we might make the country safer. The other way, we just make the insurance companies and their stockholders richer on the public dime.
Thanks for the response.
-Laelth
