> Do you think the government was going to do it? That we live in a time where this question will be read as rhetorical by most people (answer = "obviously not

> Do you think the government was going to do it? That we live in a time where this question will be read as rhetorical by most people (answer = "obviously not") is proof of how thoroughly we've been had by the group of people I'm muttering about. I don't know if the government was going to do it -- if the "when" in question was after ~1970, I don't think the business elite would've allowed it -- but I certainly think they could've. And why not? We funded the government to split the atom, go to the moon, defeat the Nazis, and invent the internet. If we'd wanted it like we wanted the Civil Rights Act, for instance, or like how thirstily we murdered a few hundred thousand people and spent a trillion bucks in Iraq, we'd have gotten them to at least incentivize electric car production. We can go at historical counterfactuals til we're nauseous, but no, I don't think an Elon Musk is required at all. > Medicaid That's amazing! But you know this as well as I do: the people who live on billionaire's row do not want Medicaid or Medicare to even exist, and they'll go for the jugular when they think they can slip it past us. (See GWB attempting this move on Social Security.) > I think they deserve every penny. If they can get rich as hell in a society where everyone with a pulse can get access to the MRI's and ultrasound and not pay a penny, then take the money. Until then ... > Regardless of how we got here I've reread a couple of times and I think this phrase is at the root of the disagreement. I'm just unwilling to disregard how we got here. It's the faulkner thing about the past: it's not dead -- it's not even past. The good ol' boys who got us here still run the show and it's still working very well for them. The trouble is that if it turns out that solving these problems means that they have to give something meaningful up, we're fucked, because the powerful do not give up power willingly. Never have, never will. So until they're no longer running the show we will not avoid a 21st century that's poorer and bloodier than the 20th. And in the meantime they'll desperately continue to feed us the belief that the way things are is the only way they could ever be.