The Good Old Days

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Ah, yes, those good old days. Why can't we just have them once again?

Why can't we go back to the time when we let banks fail and people lost their money without FDIC insurance? What about those happy days when we could employ 10- and 11-year-olds (or even 6 & 7 year-olds) in our sweat shops, before those pesky child labor laws? Or when we could stop or bust labor unions using as much violence and force as necessary, without those irritating labor laws? How about the time when employers could take advantage of employees before the minimum wage laws spoiled it?

Remember those good old days when old people (you know, like your grandparents) couldn't buy food or pay their rent without Social Security and could not get health care without Medicare? Or when poor people starved without welfare and died without Medicaid? Remember when lazy, unemployed people had to shift for themselves and just get a job, before unemployment benefits came along.

And what about the greatest generation of G.I.'s coming home from WWII, who couldn't get a college education or buy a home, and now that damn government comes along with the G.I. Bill. And, now, the G.I. Bill is even better for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Horrors, the government involvement with our lives!

Remember when we could keep "those people" out of our neighborhoods, clubs, restaurants, and jobs and discriminate freely against women before those damn civil rights laws were enacted. Recall when anyone could get lung cancer from cigarettes, take defective drugs and eat poisoned food before that meddling FDA began telling us what was safe. And without government involvement, we wouldn't have had that inefficient postal service which has been delivering our mail for more than two hundred years. Any fool could have seen that e-mail was coming.

"Ah, yes, those were the days, my friend."

And now they want everyone to have health care. Well, say the Republican shills, "I want MY America back!" Pay attention! America no longer resembles the one you grew up in.

And that only further proves the point -- you got it backwards. It's America that did the growing up, and you're the ones we no longer recognize.

Excuse me if I don't want to hear people explain the "reasons" behind the actions of the profoundly unreasonable.

Medicare for All

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