Bob Herbert, in a column in the New York Times, provides a laundry list of stuff about which Mitt Romney must be complaining when he bemoans the (current) liberal Washington:
*Civil Rights
*Women’s Rights
*Social Security
*Unemployment Insurance
*Medicare
*Medicaid
*Clean Air & Water
*Workplace Safety
*Head Start
*Food Safety
For those of you who have read Upton Sinclair’s, The Jungle, think about the way food was manufactured. Think about the working conditions and the general conditions of life for working men and women back at the turn of the 20th century. Life has become substantially less nasty, brutish, and short than it was then. Was it liberals or conservatives who were responsible for the substantial improvement between then and now?
Liberals and their policies are certainly not perfect; but I think it’s beyond question that Mitt Romney is full of shit: a) because Washington hasn’t been controlled by liberals for a long time now; and b) because liberalism is responsible for some substantially positive developments in this country.
So, the assumption here is that the only thing that got business to improve standards is government intervention? At no point was business’ concern that it provide better, safer products as a selling point any part of it? Really? Truly?
Absolutely the muckrakers put pressure on where it needed to be applied, but at the same time it wasn’t perfect either. The Shame of the Cities, another muckraker favorite of that era, was large in decrying the urban condition of overcrowding, urging the sort of living that is now referred to by social critics of the same stripe as ‘suburban sprawl’.
For those who decry the pollution of the automoibile, perhaps the most important lesson is that people rode horses in densely packed urban centers, with the attendant health issues one might expect to be caused by mounds of horse crap in the road.
Damn Liberals and Medicare. Must be talking about George W Bush and his Medicare prescription drug package. Must be talking about the Republican Congress of the last few years, that cut none of those things, but instead increased their budgets.
A great disservice is done in painting the faulty picture that conservatives really liked unhealthy food, or perhaps were fond of dangerous working conditions, and generally long for the bad old days- not to mention ladling a big steaming pile. No one side has cornered the market on improving daily life, health, and safety, but wow have the partisans gone into full gear, selecting history a la carte to suit their ballot box desires.
It’s a matter of which side has done more to help. Liberals shouldn’t be ashamed to proudly describe the things they’ve done to improve conditions in the U.S.
The conservatism I’ve seen in practice has generally been content to allow business to externalize the costs of their activities. This creates market conditions where prices don’t reflect the true cost of activity — it’s sort of the private sector analog to public sector subsidies.
A lot of what liberals have done is to pass laws that curb the effects of those externalizations.
It’s cheaper to pollute because you can impose the costs of the pollution on those who breathe the air and water into which you dump your pollutants instead of paying to make sure your activity doesn’t produce pollutants that have to be endured by others. The clean water and air acts try to curb that.
And, if you’re making a lot of money from externalizing the costs of your enterprise, you can afford to buy a place far away where the air and water are clean.