A modest proposal..
Ending the abortion debate – and problem – in one easy move: If we took all the money that we’re spending on pro-abortion punditry and put it into a trust fund to pay for people’s abortions instead – basically, stop funding NARAL and the other political organizations agitating for abortion, and instead just have those of us who are pro-choice contribute directly to a trust fund to make sure people who can’t otherwise afford abortions have access to them, would this not end the problem and let the rest of the health care and reproductive health people get their money?
Actually, we could take this all sorts of fun places. We could have only those who wanted war contribute money to the army, too. 😉 Right now, it seems like a great racket to be in is to be a political action organization who sends out emotionally inflamed emails every few weeks saying how if you just send $35 now we can beat those no-good-nicks on the other side (who are doing exactly the same thing). In other words, we’re spending a lot of money getting nothing done while we carefully balance two opposing forces. Sending the money to support abortions directly seems like a better solution.
I pretty much try to stay out of politics – I don’t watch the news, I try not to read any news – because among other things it seems totally pointless and like the entire system exists to benefit the politicians. But it does seem to me like we could end the debate and just have pro-choice people directly provide funding for abortions – and end up spending less than we’re spending now for organizations to shove ads at each other.
May 7th, 2011 at 8:15 am
This argument reminds me of the argument made (at least by college students) in the late 1960s re: Vietnam. If we divided the money being spent on the war and instead divided it among the Vietnamese with small farms, etc., we would win allies and not need the war. It sounded like a good idea.
May 7th, 2011 at 2:11 pm
Sorry… all of the above is pure idealism with no foothold in practicality whatsoever. It’s akin to saying “Maybe if we printed enough money, nobody in the world would be poor”.
May 7th, 2011 at 3:05 pm
And you know this based on extensive testing based on your network of subjugated worlds, Clint? Which method of testing did you use to arrive at that conclusion?
Because what we’re doing now is so well rooted in practicality, and working so well.
May 8th, 2011 at 12:45 pm
I don’t need to subjugate worlds, there’s plenty of evidence of how things work here in the real world.
You can’t just “stop funding” for NARAL. They are free people free to collect money from other free people. People don’t just magically do your bidding – or indeed you’d be able to subjugate this world.
Furthermore, if you limit the funding of some activity only for those who believe in it, then activity is not determined by what is right, but by who is rich. If only 1% of people support something, and they are poor, it doesn’t get funded. What you are basically asking for as a tyranny of the majority run by aristocracy. There’s not simply a magical amoutn of money available for what a group of people want or need.
Hell, if you only had people who believed in vaccinations pay for them (instead of funding research through compulsory taxes) — between the antivax crowd, and religious people who don’t want to fund science, our vax tech would probably be 100 years behind, and you’d probably already be dead from measles.
Except you’d probably have never been born because we’d be speaking Germany or Japanese, because if things were your way, only people who believed in war would fund the army, and we would end up defenseless and unable to magically conjure up an army by the snap of our fingers after Pearl Harbor.
Then again, we might not have even colonized America, because columbus was funded by the king – and if the king only got money from people who believed there should be a king….
This can be reduced to an absurd level.
Then there’s the whole national health care vs american health care. We’re the only industrialized nation where you basically only pay into health care if you believe in paying for it.. (Of course, lots can’t afford it, which speaks to my aristocracy points above.)
You’re such an impressively logical person on the computer. I have a hard time comprehending why your excellent mental abilities only seem to work inside the computer case, but not outside. It’s damn confusing to me. At least it’s interesting. 🙂
BTW – politics is truth, and affect everything. Every breath you take, the quality of air, every bite of food that goes into your body, the flame retardant chemicals in all of our bodies, every time you poop, your sewage, your computer usage – it’s all governed by politics. Politics is simply the administration of reality. To ignore it is to basically ignore a large portion of how the real world works. It’s good for stress, but poor for fostering a proper understanding of the real world systems that actually govern us.
Of course, if only people who believed in funding computer research paid for it – we probably wouldn’t be talking online right now. Compulsory military taxes made the research and implementation of the internet possible.
Just call me secretary of keepin’ it real.