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When you advocate free health care, you're

advocating something with Socialist roots (although also advocated by that strange hybrid, the Liberals). I know you don't like the categories, David, but when the post concerns Socialism, the categories within the discussion are inevitable.

 As for Welfare, it's an important point. Although I KNOW you're not "on the right' (although I've seen the term bandied about about you) there's a fundamental thing here which people don't understand.

The true Left believes that everyone should work, and equitably compensated for WORK. The true Left believes in centralized mechanisms for supervising Labor and this included Welfare. The true Left envisions a Welfare system which would determine who is capable of working and deny them benefits and find them work and send them to work' determine who is incapable of work and give them benefits so they could live COMFORTABLY (which in the US is not the case, they live at poverty level, and those who can, cheat, and those who can't, like the handicapped, struggle); and determine who needs training in order to be able to work at their potential in jobs which are available, and train them.

So the true Left envisions a fair and functional Welfare system which works closely with a fair and functional social work system and with employment agencies, employers, etc. The true Left looks very carefully at budgets. The true Left is rational.

And IMHO the true Left nowadays who does not understand that their function is to provide a BALANCE with the Capitalists in order to ensure successful MIXED ECONOMIES is delusional. This means that a lot of the "Old Left" is obsolete until/unless they revise the goal to go with the reality. Every single purely Socialist state thusfar has been a fiasco.

LIBERALS are the ones who advocate wasteful, idiotic welfare systems and that is why they are called "bleeding hearts" both those to the Left and those to the Right. Because their agendas are unrealistic and ultimately patronizing to the poor. And that's the reason why I so often in my life find myself able to dialog productively with Conservatives (I mean TRUE conservatives, not the Neocons OR the Religiious Right, which are relatively new phenomena). Because we're not patronizing. And even if they are often dimetically opposed, we have some kind of economic basis in our ideology.

 I believe this is the reason why Kaveh and Ayhab were able to have a discussion on economics on one thread for days and days which no one else participated n except Anonfish trying to follow it and ask questions.

Unfortunately, n NYC, when "Workfare" was implemented under Giuliani Welfare applicants WERE given brooms and brushes and DID have to clean the streets for the enormous numbers of tourists in the heydey before 9/11, and the dotcom and finanical millionaires of the bubble. And they were paid peanuts, I mean a couple of dollars per hour, and yet their job duties prevented them from enrolling in good training programs. And that is one of the many reasons why so many people in New York loathed and despised Giuliani.

As regards governtment intervention in financial affairs I totally disagree. There has to be a balance in the regulation, like in all things, but non-regulation is far worse IMHO than excessive regulaton. But that's a conversation for a rainy day, and if you want today to be the rainy day, that's fine, and if you don't, that's fine too.  Really, it is.  :o)

I do not condone socilaism

  I believe in smallest of governments but I do believe in certain rights when we are born such as free health care, human rights including labor righst etc...

I am against government intervention in financial affairs but I am for regulation of greed. 

I do not support welfare as we have it either. All those standing in the dirty streets getting those checks should do something for it, starting with cleaning their neighborhoods, give them brooms and paint brushes and put them to work, in simplest of words. There is so much that can eb done. unless one is mentally disabled. 

ah so it's the youth..

that accounts for it. it'll be the same in iran, mixed economies, the only reasonable solution.

and i'm sure all the kids will be very appreciative of this left of mine in expat land who sat there screaming all these years against King Capital and its wife Neo-Colonialsm while they let them all hang from cranes and didn't give a good goddam if only three people were left standing in iran as long as they could be "autonomous."

how dare you post this, you rightwinger you? what a hypocrite you are.

oh sorry, hell oh out there in tv land.

i know i know a war would've killed far more, tv land, but you see the problem is you don't feel that way when your sister's hanging from a crane because she schtupped someone and it's not so much your intention it's the silence of the mummy's tomb all these years...

well like i said in the blog on the labor purges striking iran that none of you marxists bothered to piss on, i'm with jesus on this one, the truth shall set you free. now go form your center "left" coaltion because daddy obama who rose from the west said the three wise men will lead you, the thirteenth iman, whose face you'll see on the moon..

as per your new blog, david..you know i'd been writing a blog that included that idea today..how dare you think like me you goddam rightwing scum working with a beauty queen to save kids from cranes..