From Lance Mannion:
The business of America is business. We don't make anything anymore. We don't build much of anything and we barely bother to keep what our grandparents built in repair. We grow less and less. We create fewer and fewer better mousetraps. And the only reason we make, build, repair, grow, and create the little that we do is to sell it at the highest possible price. Our economy is based on everybody doing business with one another. It's based on buying and selling. It's based on all of us looking at each other as potential customers, which is to say that it's based on all of us looking to take advantage of each other to make a profit of some kind.
(snip)
You can say that Baucus and the other Blue Dogs have been bought off by the insurance industry. But it's probably more accurate to say that the insurance industry is rewarding them for understanding how things are supposed to work. Whatever the supposed issue Congress seems to be working on, the real job of government is to keep the buying and selling going. Baucus and the Blue Dogs and plenty of the so-called moderates set to bargain the public option away understand that it is in the nation's best interest to ensure that the economy, which is based on everybody being a customer or client first and a voter and a citizen, and a human being, not necessarily last but way down the list, thrives and grows. The way to do this is to make more customers.
(snip)
Nobody expects the army to make a profit or the fire department or the highway department. No sensible person whose heart is in the right place expects our schools to make money. We don't make money off each other by protecting them from our mutual enemies or by saving them from burning buildings or by sending them out to work or to the store on safe, well-kept roads. We don't make money off each other---or shouldn't try to---by teaching each other's kids to read and do math. Why then did those people (us again) think they should make money off of keeping each other alive and well?
And the answer is because our economy is based on our treating each other as customers and commodities not as fellow citizens, not even as fellow human beings. If it fell to us to write the Constitution or re-write it, the preamble would be changed to "We the Consumers of the United States, in order to purchase a more perfect union, pay for the a criminal justice system, buy and sell the weapons and equipment necessary for the common defense, make money off of insuring domestic tranquility, get rich off of promoting the general welfare, and secure for those who can afford the high price we're going to charge the blessings of liberty for themselves and their lazy, arrogant, good for nothing but asserting their own status and special privileges progeny, do agree to this contract, please read the attached terms and conditions and check the box marked 'accept'."
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