Entitlements - what's so bad about them?

I've often wondered the same thing. My answer is that political beliefs seem to be as irrational as religious beliefs. It seems that more than half of the population makes a habit of supporting political sides that are seemingly against own national interests. For example minorities are seemingly more socially conservative than is typical, yet those feelings don't cause them to vote republican in any significant numbers. Similarly, the poorest states in our country are happy to support the republicans who place GM and Exxon's interests ahead of theirs every chance they get.I spent some time last night trying to figure out to much spreading around of wealth to the masses resulted in what happened to North Korea, but I gave up once the effort as impossible. And there's not much point in asking for an explanation because Coyote rarely gives one.Coyote's as smart as anyone here, but he cites mediocre fiction when it is time to illustrate his political beliefs. Impossible to understand.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Neither, I would think. I don't see any evidence that studying science makes you liberal. I think it more likely that people with liberal mindsets gravitate towards science and away from creationist beliefs. There is also the fact that people have defined science based mindsets as liberal.There is also the issue that science generally requires a type of boundary pushing and questioning that seems incompatible with creationism. Many creationist seem to have no use for huge chunks of science, yet some scientific topics seem, to me at least, to be gateways into interest in science in general.And of course, once you've screened out a bunch of creationists you are going to screen out a bunch of at least one type of conservative.

I'll say. If someone were to ask me whether a highly paid archaeologist is more productive than a slightly above average high school math teacher or a girls' track coach, I would surely have some sorting out to do. I'd probably come down on the side of one of the folks having a direct impact on my daughter.I was watching old 'The Young Turks' on You Tube last week and they played a clip of some Fox guy ranting and raving about how some Obama policy was going to result in stopping businesses from labeling ordinary workers as 'managers' so they could avoid having to pay the workers overtime. In my mind, this guy is advocating stealing from workers, but apparently the Boss is the producer, and the manager off the deep fat fryer is just a non-productive layabout. Now explain the mindset that 'promotes' a guy to manager then calls him non-productive all in the same gestalt. Because I cannot do it without lots of invective.I appreciate reading Coyote's viewpoint, but it just reminds me that there is more than one kind of way to feel 'entitled'.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Sounded good up until that point. You certainly have explained why people who never lift anything heavier than a crayon deserve lots of money. But the idea that the people actually sweating do not is quite beyond belief or serious consideration. Perhaps you should try again...

Thanks. I was just going to talk about that. What the heck is productive, inventive, or innovative about Bank of American. As best as I can tell, the only thing they've ever invented are ways to dip into each of my accounts once per month before I finally moved them to a credit union.I just don't get the mindset that working hard does not earn you anything. We used to suggest that owners were taking all of the risk and could possibly lose everything, while workers always get paid. But I don't recall any Big Bank execs losing anything, while plenty of their associates were dumped out on their butts during a recession.

Yes, you can only think of one. But then you could not find anything an astronomer since Galileo got wrong despite having searched for it. So perhaps we should not just rely on your imagination. So your answer is liberals suck. As always...

Because the two types of mindsets are utterly incompatible. I was sure that even you could see that. To be blunt, creationist beliefs do not stand even a moment of scientific scrutiny. Breaking away from those kinds of beliefs is the start of questioning the entire mindset of people who hold those beliefs. There is no way to give you an answer that you'll like better than one that assumes liberals are the great evil.

He cannot. He has done the best he is going to do.Marc9000 is correct when he says that liberals and conservatives talk past each other without understanding each other. But the reason seems partially to be that one side cannot explain their motivations and truisms in anything like rationale terms.Supposedly big government is bad because it produces bad results. How dare you point out that even more of those 'bad' results were produced during times of small governments. You must be a commie.

"socialist agenda"I knew it. You just want North Korea and Russia to come here and take our shit. Pinko.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Apparently you believe that the constitution does not simply enumerate federal powers, but that it also enumerates which areas of concern the government may address. While that's clearly wrong, it hardly matters because the constitution does not define things like General Welfare and Commerce in any way that limits the federal government to addressing things other than Post Roads and a Standing Army.And your description of the constitution seems to ignore the fourteenth amendment which specifically charges the federal government with acting to prevent discrimination. It actually turns out that the founders never believed reference in the Declaration of Independence really applied to all men, and that only the near destruction of the union informed us of the evil underlying that. For predictable reasons conservatives simply hate the 14th amendment and never speak about the historical reasons why it exists.And whenever a conservative starts screeching about the 9th and 10th amendments, you know he's off track. All they know is that those amendments addresses some limit on federal power but they never discuss them in terms of their actual text. Because unlike amendments 1-8 the text of the ninth and tenth put absolutely no limits on any power listed in Article 1, Section 8.As for historical limits on the General Welfare among the founding fathers we can note that Hamilton and Madison disagreed over the matter, with Hamilton's view prevailing in the early part of this countries history and being later repudiated, before being reaccepted in the early 1900s. The argument that Hamilton's view is non-traditional or unconstitutional is simply without substance or merit.I listen to NC republicans ranting about how the state government should be able to outlaw the use of contraceptives. We should understand from that that conservatives talk about freedom and limits on federal power are just fradulent, because they are happily willing to endorse tyranny on a state level.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.