Quote:
Originally Posted by dreadgeek
I blame part of that on the twinned memes that government is either like a family or like a business and the resiliency of those memes is connected to a lack of what, for lack of any better term, I call citizenship education. We treat citizenship very casually in this country, as if it is either something akin to a biblical curse visiting upon the offspring of Americans the fruits of the iniquities of their parent and their parents before them *or* as a confection which primarily involves shouting USA! USA! because the sun happens to throw light onto the Eastern seaboard at first light. We don't actually give much thought (and even less thought) as to the nature of citizenship in a republic or of the role of government. So lacking any other, more accurate model people fall back on what they think they know which is that businesses make money, businesses can be huge and impersonal like the government, so government should make money.
Americans seem to have forgotten, despite our mouthing words to the contrary, that there's more to life than making money and that turning a profit *isn't* what governments are for.
Cheers
Aj
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You know I've long thought this. Particularly with regards to, well, education. There's a lot of talk thrown around about whether school prepares young people for jobs, but the
original purpose of free public education is almost never mentioned at all--namely, that free public education was not originally provided to prepare young people for jobs, but to
prepare them for participation in a democracy. But it's not profitable to prepare the common people to participate in democracy, as that might lead them to vote their own interests and not those of their corporate masters, and so it's no longer a priority. (And this is why government should never, ever be a business.)