I'm still working this idea out, so it's not quite coherent. But, the strategem that's being pursued now is a familiar one.
If you can think back to the sixites and seventies and early eighties, you'll remember that most every community had one or more community hospitals, in addition to public health clinics and nurses in the school. These facilities were publicly owned and they were paid for.
Consequently, they came to be lusted after by people who saw an asset on which money could be borrowed by the owning entity, ostensibly to augment or supplement increasing demands on the budget which resulted from growing populations and population relocation (some communities started losing people).
Then, having capitalized these assets by putting them up as collateral, the financiers persuaded the communities that everyone would be better off if lazy and incompetent public servants didn't have to be in charge of such complex enterprises as hospitals and the communities sold them off. The "benefit" to the local politicos, in addition to having less responsibility for a public service, was that the sudden influx of cash made it possible to temporarily balance budgets without having to raise taxes.
That the community no longer had the assets it had built was masked by the promise of BETTER health care and a national payment program which never materialized because the private providers of health care managed to raise costs much faster than any program could be structured to provide.
The other benefit of this stratagem was that the managers, having been freed of the salary restriction of the public sector, could now take home much more money and even become part owners in their enterprise. And the whole thing was risk free because the new owners hadn't had to put a cent of their own money in--only take the profit out.
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The previous post was getting a little long-winded, but I want to make a comparison to the pattern followed in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. All of the assets that had been built and funded by the community were systematically sold off for pennies on the ruble to people who had put together syndicates of investors--i.e. other people's money.
There isn't any question that it is an attractive strategy to let the community start up an enterprise from scratch, work out all the bugs at public expense and then take it over at a fire-sale price, always conveniently discounted on the basis of how long the enterprise has been running successfully. For, instead of considering the longevity of an enterprise as a sign of sucess and an indication of value, finaciers invariably argue that age is an indicator of imminent collapse and so the longest established enterprise is worth least.
The thing about economics we have to understand is that the players always fix the rules to their own advantage. Which suggests that, whatever Bush's instinctive attitude, the "rules" he learned at Harvard obviously reinforced his personality.
Finally, we need to understand and keep repeating that these people consider failure to be a good thing, an opportunity for someone else to make a killing.
So, their antagonism towards Communism had nothing to do with human rights and individual liberty, just as it didn't with their anatagonism towards Iraq. It had to do with social control of assets that they wanted for themselves. Human rights were just a rationale that flew out the window as soon as they got what they wanted.
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Let me put it this way. If you assume that every enterprise is destined to fail, then when it does, whether it falls apart or is actively destroyed, you can't be blamed for the failure.
This is the assumption Bush and his cronies bring to the table. In addition, they argue that if failure is inevitable, they are doing good to help it along either by undermining the enterprise or institution or through a frontal attack. That's precisely the strategy that's being applied to social security.
What these people don't seem to understand is that while all individuals are destined to die or be destroyed, it is the purpose and goal of social institutions and constructs to persist ad infinitum, and they will, as long as each individual contributes his or her part to keep it going on.
When people become destroyers, instead of creators, the society which bred them will die out. It used to be thought that the dead societies of which we keep finding remnants and ruins collapsed because they were attacked from outside. Not so, the demise of societies resides in their own failure to promote and protect its own values and make sure they are transfered intact to the next generation.