What shape is the elephant?
Is it shaped like a wall or like a fan?
Yes.
Those who argue “the government provides essential services such as law enforcement, roads, street lights and food safety regulations” describe one aspect of government– in fact, about 10% (max) of the current Federal government spending.
Those who argue “the government takes your money and funnels it into a vast ‘entitlement’ structure, as though they know better than you what to do with it”, describe another part of government, namely the 3rd Rail: Social Security, Medicare, and the Military.
These take > 3/4 of federal government spending. Try to cut any one of them and you get:
“You are trying to throw Grandma on the street/force her to live on cat food!!”
“You are trying to cut the poor off from all medical care and cause them to die miserably of preventable diseases, when they are not spreading said diseases to all the rest of us!”
“You are trying to leave us all wide open to Al Qaeda!”
I favor good roads, fair policing, clean safe food, decent lives for grandmas, access to basic health care for the poor, and keeping the terrorist wolves from our door. However, with a current deficit that is some 10% of the overall federal budget, something’s gotta give.
No, I don’t have an answer. Maybe grandma has to live with Po’boy in a nonprofit commune with nonprofit “barefoot doctor” health care, and maybe we have to pull our troops out of most of the countries we are in, put 15% of our military on patrol at the borders and set the rest of them to work building the communes and administering the health care. Heck, if they build their own housing and live in it for free, the gov’t sure doesn’t have to pay them much.
I think it more likely that if everything does hit the fan and break down, people will re-form up pretty quickly into new organizations to ensure the public safety, police food, maintain the roads, etc. Mad Max would not remain employed for long; people just would not stand for such an existence. Vigilante committees would form up quickly to stand against the gangs; the gang-bangers might rule over some enclaves but others would be armed fortresses where they dared not tresspass. The gangsters’ main problem might become trying to keep the people in their “turfs” from migrating over to the fortresses… hmmm… the word “Mexico” comes to mind.
We (the U.S.) would undoubtedly fracture into a number of nations, each with a somewhat different way of running things, and then a number of decades or centuries of jockeying amongst them to reach some sort of semi-steady-state. Or not steady… maybe like Europe for most of its history.
Oh, and rhedda– what you describe for the ‘browns’, women have lived it for over 2,000 years– and still live it in most of the world. How do you treat your sisters? J/C.
