[lit-ideas] Re: From today's paper

  • From: Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2008 00:06:25 -0500

>>The authoritarian aspects are the ones being used to *remove* anything good for the people ...


Not exclusively. There are many other authoritarian aspects of our society that derive from manipulation of social programs designed to bring good results. High school kids forced to perform community service (what could be wrong with that?) are funneled into crony rackets as slave labor. Programs designed to bring more doctors to medically underserved areas are used to funnel medical slave labor for investors who buy and sell medical practices like Monopoly properties, thus ensuring the areas stay underserved.

For every well-intentioned social plan, there are a pack of clever sleazoids waiting to turn it into a profit center. Often these sleazoids are in cahoots with legislators who draft enabling laws.

Credit card companies (yay, Joe Biden of Delaware!) recently started lowering credit limits by careful screening of people's purchases and by investigating people's bank balances. For example, if you bought food with a credit card, that was considered suspicious. Authoritarian control and intrusion of privacy.

More and more, our society is concerned with control. The control of people's lives. Drug-testing, credit reports, medical records, and a thousand other seemingly-useful systems that agglomerate into increasing authoritarian control.

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