Opposition to government funded sexual and reproductive healthcare for low-income women might indicate a lack of perspective. Consider the billions of dollars unaccounted for in a Pentagon budget where defense contractors reap huge profits, amid allegations of war profiteering.
Bear with with me. There’s a connection here. This involve some US companies working in Iraq being accused of maximizing their profits by way of unnecessarily risking or causing death and injury to US soldiers and foreign civilians. Perhaps the government money being spent on low income women is a drop in the bucket by comparison and a wiser investment?
I suggest it’s a wiser investment in terms of healthier women raising healthier children who do better in school and do less crime and become tax paying workers instead of prisoners, thereby improving US domestic stability and economic competitiveness. By contrast, I humbly suggest war profiteering is making some people rich at the expense of US national interests.
Similarly, it’s odd how some or many common folk are mad about government money for sexual and reproductive care, yet know and care little about government subsidies to huge corporations in sectors of the economy beyond the war profiteering in Iraq.
If one is concerned about wasteful government spending, how about focusing on corporate tax evasion? But, sadly, should the focus on low income women surprise us ? It wouldn’t have surprised robber baron Jay Guild who said during the Gilded Age, a similar time of gross inequality: “I can hire half of the working class to kill the other half.”
It’s an old trick. Throughout history, ruling elites have looted treasuries of their countries while allowing or promoting conflicts that divide the common people, deflecting popular revolt against them as the masses take their frustrations out on each other, or perversely find unity by persecuting scapegoats. I suggest low-income women, as well as undocumented immigrants, are currently part of this process of scapegoating.
This calls to mind Ronald Reagan’s talk about welfare queens driving Cadillacs. He was wrong about that. But was he wrong when he said “government is not the solution to the problem; government is the problem” ?
Not sure what my anarchist friends would say about this question, but here it is. Maybe the problem is not government per se, but instead the problem exists when government neglects the common people while taking away their civil liberties and imposing phony austerity so as to further enrich corporations and individuals who fund their political campaigns and buy legislation thru lobbying ?
Whether you think of yourself as an anarchist or liberal or progressive or conservative, I suggest at least part of what motivates the conservative opposition to government is the goal of distracting and disempowering ordinary folk. Public apathy about politics creates a vacuum those abusing power will very likely fill. An equally undesirable possibility is a populist movement based on xenophobia and other forms of intolerance.
One might ask of a conservative complaining about the evils of government, “Who funds all those power hungry people in government you’re warning us about?”
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