Amazing

I am not really convinced that it is something new. Garrison Keilor once suggested that people have an amazing ability to ignore what they do not want to see. I am suspect he is very accurate with that comment. What has brought it to my awareness is the resumption of the debate between Conservatives and Liberals.

Here we have just had one of the largest and most difficult crisis in the financial systems of this country and there is lots of talk about how to fix the problems. On the one side I hear from the Conservative side that we need to leave it to private enterprise. "Government Control is Socialism. Government has never been able to run anything well. Do you want your finances run like Amtrak or the Post Office?" We need to get government out of it. The same argument is made about the auto industry. The government is trying to take over the auto industry and run the whole show. We need to leave it to private business. So the argument goes.

But the facts seem to me to be that it is private business which got us into this mess. Wasn't it private banks, real estate brokers, and all manner of creative unregulated financial people who created this mess? Wasn't it the Board of Directors of these auto industries who managed their companies into problems?

The facts just never seem to make any difference in the debates. The Liberals never acknowledge the facts against their arguments either. There seems to me to be enough facts that the more programs you develop to help those in poverty the more people we have in poverty. And we have been funding major social programs for ages and the numbers never decline. Every N.C. governor has wanted to be the Education Governor and the improvement never seems to match the investments.

I do not have any solutions to all these problems but I suspect that we might make a lot more progress on the issues if both sides would allow the facts to affect their theory. I do not see the facts that say Tax Cuts produce jobs. We just finished eight years of Bush cuts and somehow we ended up with a major economic collapse. The facts seem to suggest that it will be a lot harder to close Guantanamo than the liberals thought.

It is an amazing thing to me how we can continue to hold to our pet theories and ignore the facts that ought to make us consider that we need to somehow adapt or change or modify what we want.