"Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good." ~ Thomas Sowell. Was Sowell right? What do you think? Compare traditions that are well known and well understood and have served people for many years to ideas, perhaps brilliant and well intentioned, created by a few and applied by government despite misgivings. Which is more likely to succeed? Which will bring us closer to our dreams?
Okay. Do you mean like replacing the parameters of a Health Insurance system covering 85% of With one designed to cover 100% of . aka ObamaCare. Will the middle 50% be able to afford it ? Just asking. Moi
The past 30 years have been about the miserable failure of Reaganomics/trickle down. Sowell is apparently renouncing his Republicanship and come to his senses..
The popular ideas are supposed to supplant less popular ones. Simply being functional isn't a measure of success for any program or service. The populace will always be resistant to change. The human mind likes to live in a comfort zone and this applies to large amounts of humans as a group too unless the situation is dire or undesireable. I think a good intention can go bad, for sure. It sounded like a good intentions to repeal Glass/Stegall...
Obamacare is a good example, but hardly the only one. There are plenty of threads debating Obamacare. I'm talking about the idea many people hold that social change can be imposed from the top down rather than organically, from the bottom up (one might call this the Leninist Fallacy); that a few people in a committee room can draft a plan and then, if a law is passed, people will quickly adapt to a new way to live. I believe that this is arrogant in the extreme, an offense to democracy, and unlikely to succeed. People understand what they already do. Something wholly new must be learned, and people don't learn easily. Something broad-based must be understood by millions of people to work. There's also the question of consent. Politicians don't acquire, merely by being elected, unconditional power over those who elected them. The Constitution prevents that, which may be why willful social experimenters seek ways to ignore or circumvent the Constitution. Some like to pretend that elections are implied referendums on a politician's ideas, but as often as not these ideas were not known during the electoral campaign, or not known in more than vague form, so the election did not approve revolutionary change. It seems to me politicians far exceed their mandate when they claim uninformed votes provide them a license to run rampant over society, imposing their will. There is a good reason for society to be conservative (with a small "c") - the cost of failed social experiments can be terrible. If an experiment is tried in a limited area or a limited way, failure can be managed. But if the whole country is plunged at once into radically new practices, discarding those that have proven themselves over time, any flaws in the new practices can have catastrophic consequences. It's reckless as well as arrogant to push people into such risks when there is no compelling need. So you see where I stand: I oppose top-down solutions to problems most people never knew they had. For the time, I'd like to avoid sidelining the thread by getting into the pros and cons of particular policies. I'm talking about the presumption that government can and should initiate unsought change. So many bad proposals would be rebuffed at once if this arrogant presumption was recognized behind them.
I think Sowell was speaking quite a few years ago, but I don't know that "trickle down" has ever been the operative government policy, not even while Reagan was President. A large social welfare edifice had already been created before him, and he did nothing to deconstruct it. In fact, social spending has grown exponentially. Look here to see over half of Federal spending going to health, pensions, welfare, etc. Say what you will, that's not trickle down, unless you see government as the biggest corporation. Conservatives talk a lot about limiting spending, but the political temptation to buy votes has always been too great for both parties. "Trickle down" is something Democrats love to inveigh against, but they do that secure in their perch atop Santa's sleigh.
If the situation is not "dire or undesirable," government has no mandate to impose change, no matter how their own ideas appeal to those doing the imposing. Not only do people resist change, they also tend to think more highly of themselves than might be warranted. The self-love of preening politicians is no reason to force the country into turmoil. I'd also add that people always do change - slowly, cautiously, and deliberately - as they see their way to improvements. The proof is in the inevitability of change. Pick any period of US history, and there are always important changes over 10 years, often less. But these are not changes to which the people have been driven, like cattle being herded. Rather, they're opportunities that have been seized. One sees this clearly in the adoption of new technologies - electric lights, telephones, penicillin, automobiles, and many others restructured the life of the people more comprehensively than any politician ever dreamed of, and did so quickly. If the people see something they want, they're not slow to take it. If the people resist some pol's inspired scheme, modesty might suggest the scheme is less grand than the pol imagined, but such modesty is rare among pols.
I'd say automobile is bad example, possibly lights as well as both were fabricated market manipulation in the grand scheme of things. People adopted but overall the same criticism you had of government decisions was the reason these specific technologies ended up gaining a foot hold: force. That's not to say at some point they'd have naturally been accepted but their place in history is littered with shadiness. Especially in the automobile. Lights, it's debatable, but what I refer to is the battle of DC and AC.
You can't stop progress. But sometimes progress can take us in bad directions. Progress might be too fast. Progress might not go far enough or fast enough. What Conservatives are telling those who scream and cry and whine and act a fool for their favorite flavor of progress or the flavor du jour, is that sometimes it's not just a matter of being stuck in our ways. Sometimes things are just really bad ideas. Unfortunately for you youngsters and America loving Libs the progress you are whining about at this moment in time is really a bad idea. But you can't understand just how bad it is until it will be too late to reverse it. And unfortunately, Obama knew you would react and respond to our Conservative efforts to stop Obamacare just as you have. He's counted on that like he is counting on keeping you in the dark about all of the nasty surprises that come as Obamacare extra baggage until after it's too late to reverse. Yes, Sowell is right. He's almost never not right. Liberals and young people are usually the ones in our, or in any society, who step out in the never ending march for social change. But never before have the implications for taking an errant step in that march been so potentially calamitous. Obama has done you no favors. And you can't even see what he's done much less what he's currently doing nor what he intends to do to you before he leaves office. I just wish you guys could find some other way to express your need for progress or else get real smart real quick. http://www.whatwouldthefoundersthink.com/a-republic-if-you-can-keep-it
I don't know that it took "market manipulation" for people to give up horses for automobiles, or kerosene lanterns for light bulbs. AC/DC is a footnote. People rushed to the new improvements as fast as they could. My mother (born 1914, she's a week from being 99) had gas jets when she was a kid. Her parents used light bulbs as soon as they could.
In general, people were fine with public transit when automobiles came along. It's always considered a 'conspiracy theory' when mentioning that oil companies bought then dismantled LA's public transit system in order to sell cars which were fueled by their product, but it's a fact that this happened. I'd call that artificial market manipulation. As far as electric lights, again, I don't see why people wouldn't move to them I was just pointing out the marketing behind both since Tesla's AC theories were shared for no profit and Edison did everything he could to profit from DC theory and electric lights. I, of course, may be oversimplifying and over-demonizing the issues as well. At any rate on the topic of the OP, good intentions aren't really the best way to look at things, I think. There are some things which started out with bad intentions but lead to good things. Such as nuclear energy. That's one thing that's got over a million deaths on it's way to being any good at all... So sometimes, in a society, you have to be exposed to bad ideas to even know what a good idea is...
You live, you learn. Sometimes you learn that public transportation can't support itself at cost in most places.
It could be supported if the entire structure of modern planning wasn't around cars and car ownership. It's when evident when you see 4 tiny stores 100 yards apart from each other that could easily occupy one small area. In America, driving in some areas is beyond status which is what cars originally were. It's down to necessity from city planning that advocated use of cars. If you look in places like NYC, you see that owning a car is like self torture. Other places fall somewhere between those of places like Houston and NYC...some areas are sprawling and spread out, others are more designed to be accessible to anyone. But that's neither here nor there.
Haha. Yeah. One of those "nobody drives, there is too much traffic". Not everyone wants to live in a city. Most people actually. Tax your own people if you want subways.
That's actually how mass transit works. You pay and get service. Houston is using federal taxes to fund their light rail. Oops.
Change is inevitable and so are mistakes , when you try to stall change you become like Afghanistan or tribal Borneo . What works now will not work forever , take for example approval ratings of governments in the west , parliamentarism is becoming less and less capable of addressing national / regional issues and soon it will be replaced by something else .
Pregnar, you are too right. People will only see when it's too late. And they'll be surprised. "Why did no one tell us?"
When automobiles came along, public transit was still horse-drawn buses and trolleys in many cities. Electrified systems like the Red Line started in 1882 and had been shut down by the 1950s. LA's experience was not unique. When I was a kid in the 50s, NYC's streets were still criss-crossed with old trolley tracks. Back then, most people were happy to be rid of them. Because they moved on tracks, they couldn't accommodate any special circumstance. The large tracks made the streets difficult to use for anything else. Replacing them was seen as progress. Easy to look back from the standpoint of a new age and lament their passing, but that's hindsight. People can always find reasons to gripe, no matter what's done. Today, a form of nostalgia has become a status symbol. If you want to join the upper middle class, you need to affect a preference for things as they were. Those old enough to remember things as they were know better.
Rarely does a Republican come to his senses. The conservatives and neoconservatives rigid mind set has been too ingrained to permit freedom of thought of that sort. There are very, very few conservatives and neoconservatives able to understand the economic crises caused by the the disastrous policies that developed from the snake oil Reagan sold the American people. The trickle-down from his voodoo economics never materialized, in fact, wealth trickles only upward when Reaganomics is in play, and poverty grows exponentially. The right-wingers posts on these message boards are proof they are blind to the truth of the dire situation that has come from the parasitic capitalism practiced by this nation for the last forty years. It began when Nixon was in office, and really got rolling after Reagans coronation.
