Secondly, would you really want the pretence of popular, (very) moderately redistributive government taken away overnight? What envious energies might be released if this happened? How many Russian or Somali mercenaries would it take to fend off the mob, angry at being sundered from the miserly teat of state? Would it not be costly to pay, yourself, for the vast apparatus of historical / nationalist legitimation that keeps these people mostly quiescent?

Brilliant! Exactly! I argued 15 years ago that the purpose of the so-called "welfare" state in the United States is to keep the poor, the working poor and the occasionally poor from riot and revolution, while the U.S. Congress is busy handing off wealth by various tax mechanisms and laws and outright giveaways to the rich, who did not earn it and to whom it rightfully does not belong. All the programs designed to "help the poor"? They're hush money.

I don't want to live in the kind of world that you would make.

If you don't like it, establish a freedomless, sacrificial dictatorship

You see Jack's got no problem with 'freedomless, sacrificial dictatorships' so long as they're imposed by the wealthy. (American health care delivery system anyone?) It's just when the government does it that he start to balk.

Life is hard and unfair.

And to whom is this moral lesson aimed at? Me? Well, how could I have missed THAT! You work hard and then you die? Tough noogies, huh?

Thank your for driving home Mr. Sirota's point.

I don't hate the rich because they have money. I'm not impressed with wealth, neither the accumulation of it nor the strategies employed to amass it. A great deal of it is misbegotten, and more than a little of it is due to pure dumb luck, either through birth or just being at the right place at the right time. I don't envy wealthy people because they have money. More than a few of them are dumb as toenails. I'm pissed off at them and their handmaidens in the government because they are greedy, selfish bastards with ALL the money!

BTW, if you gross less than a million dollars a year, or have assets worth less than a few million, to my mind you're not wealthy.

You whining folks out there can't see that whatever tiny percentage of your income ends up keeping someone else healthy is less than you're losing by allowing your fellow human beings to struggle and remain sick and die? You don't only lose money. You lose your humanity.

They believe in the world according to Hobbes, the dog-eat-dog, competition for the highest place in the hierarchy, brutish, ugly, remorseless, unconscionable nature; and believe it justifies their greed and exploitation of other people's disadvantages. BTW, so do a lot of poor and working class people, who angle for advantage in their limited way and argue for their desires to the same degree as wealthy people, and who can be just as, if not more greedy, but with nowhere near the same impact on the larger society. But that is why we need a well run, intelligent, fair minded government: to govern the competing interests, ambitions and desires of The People so that one does not overwhelm the other. We haven't had that kind of government in the United States since Reagan took office. From every marker, every indicator, every accurate assessment of society, it's the poor and working middle classes who have lost the most ground.

PS "bollixed"? What the hell is that?

It's a British term, meaning "all effed up".

When are the people going to get together and shame our congressmen into doing the right thing?

Congressmen cannot be shamed. They have no shame. The only issue in the United States in which you might be able to shame a congressman is sex. That's the only thing in the U.S. that is cause for shame. All other immoral, unethical or undemocratic behavior is excused.

is it better to get a bill passed even if it is fatally flawed and hope to reform it in the future into something better with effective cost controls or is better to have nothing at this point.

I've often thought that myself. Maybe the bodies need to be piled a little higher before we do the right thing. This is after all the United States we're talking about and we don't do anything right until enough people have had their lives mangled or completely destroyed by whatever current system we're trying to "reform". It has never happened in our history.

Richard Nixon was infinitely more progressive than the modern Democratic Party. Seriously!

Man is that not the god's honest truth. We work our asses off to give the Democrats control of both houses of Congress AND The White House, and what do we get? A Democratic Party that is to the right of Richard Milhouse Nixon. Have you ever?! Money, by god, still rules in the good old USSA!

I stopped reading the comments after yours. No reason to continue. You have it exactly correct. Nothing else could be added as you have so throughly and succinctly illuminated the Southern mindset. I am a southerner, brought up in the South. I left the South for 20 years at age 29, and now I live in the South again. You have it exactly right.