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Silliness and Selective Eyesight

Is it not astonishing to listen to otherwise full-grown politicians
talk about how incompetent government is at governing,
and how smart and competent private enterprise is?

In today's paper, Tim Pawlenty, outgoing Governor of our fine State,
who has made a career for himself by opposing taxes,
and who has limped along bragging about that--his virtue--
by borrowing money from our children and grandchildren,
and by imposing "user fees", which look amazingly like taxes,
although he assures us they aren't, is opening his run for President.
He says that Medicaid is broke, Medicare is broke, and
Social Security is broke, and he wonders why we would want
a government-sponsored option for health care.

Does Mr. Pawlenty not recall that private enterprise
almost brought our nation, and the world economy, for that matter,
to its knees, just a few months ago, and that the government
has had to come to the rescue and bail them out for their greed
and incompetence? Sometimes private enterprise is very
efficient: consider the insurance companies who have learned
to stand between people's money and their health care,
skimming off about 30% of the money to administer the system,
rationing health care as they can to maximize their profits!

General Motors has been incompetently managed.
So has Chrysler. Every day we watch the pirates
in the stock market manipulate the whole system
to take money away from ordinary people who cannot figure out
what a derivative is, or who do not know how churning an account
is designed solely to allow the trader to skim off another fee.
Those people went massively and royally broke!

Bernie Madoff was not a government-sponsored scam.
He was a genius at understanding how stupid people can be,
how greedy they really are, who stole them blind!

We see what we want to see.
We say what we want to be true.
We have learned, most recently in history,
from Ronald Reagan, that government is incompetent,
and that private enterprise is efficient and competent.

That is silliness, and selective eyesight.
.

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