Wolves and Sheep
April 8, 2011 - by
We’re about to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the April morning in 1861 when a hot-head (some would say fool) in Charleston pulled the lanyard on a cannon and started what old southern maiden aunts used to delicately call ‘The Late Unpleasantness.’
A lot’s been said and written about why we ended up fighting the Civil War and, of course, today the most popular explanation is the noble Yankee’s fought ‘to abolish slavery’ and no doubt more than a few did but there were also plenty of other reasons people on both sides picked up guns and marched off to war, including Shelby Foote’s apocryphal story of the captured Confederate private who when asked, Why are you fighting? looked back at his Union captor and snapped, Because you’re down here.
These days tariff is a pretty sullied word but back in 1861 95% of the federal government’s money came from tariffs and most of those tariffs were paid by Southerners while most of the money was being spent by the Northern and Western Congressmen on ‘public improvements’ – like canals – in their districts. It was the biggest ‘wealth transfer’ in American history up to that time and after thirty years of paying tariffs a fair amount of Southerners were mad enough to fight.
Now a lot of intellectuals and academics will say – with a hint of scorn – that anyone who suggests the war was fought over anything except slavery is just plain silly but look at Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address: He told the Southerners, If you’ll stay in the Union I’ll agree you can keep your slaves, I’ll guarantee it, I’ll pass a Constitutional Amendment to set it in stone, and I’m only gonna ask you to do one thing in return: Just keep paying those tariffs.
Wealth transfers are still pretty popular these days: Most federal spending in one way or another is about money leaving one fellow’s hands and ending up in another fellow’s hands – corporations get subsidies paid for with other people’s money, banks get bailouts and oil companies get tax loopholes. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, in a way, are another, even more popular, kind of wealth transfer. After all, most folks get back a lot more money from Social Security than they pay into it.
Right now in North Carolina, I’m sad to say, our Republican leaders in the General Assembly are involved in a whopper of a wealth transfer of their own.
During the last two elections the political arms of corporations and insurance companies and groups like the Medical Society and Big Pharma have spent or contributed over $5 million to elect Republican legislators and now the Republican powers-that-be in the legislature are giving drug companies legal immunity when they sell drugs like Vioxx and doctors legal immunity when they commit malpractice in the ER.
Our Republican legislators may mean well but giving a pharmaceutical company legal immunity when it sells bad drugs is setting the wolves loose among the sheep.
Wolves and Sheep
April 8, 2011/
We’re about to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the April morning in 1861 when a hot-head (some would say fool) in Charleston pulled the lanyard on a cannon and started what old southern maiden aunts used to delicately call ‘The Late Unpleasantness.’
A lot’s been said and written about why we ended up fighting the Civil War and, of course, today the most popular explanation is the noble Yankee’s fought ‘to abolish slavery’ and no doubt more than a few did but there were also plenty of other reasons people on both sides picked up guns and marched off to war, including Shelby Foote’s apocryphal story of the captured Confederate private who when asked, Why are you fighting? looked back at his Union captor and snapped, Because you’re down here.
These days tariff is a pretty sullied word but back in 1861 95% of the federal government’s money came from tariffs and most of those tariffs were paid by Southerners while most of the money was being spent by the Northern and Western Congressmen on ‘public improvements’ – like canals – in their districts. It was the biggest ‘wealth transfer’ in American history up to that time and after thirty years of paying tariffs a fair amount of Southerners were mad enough to fight.
Now a lot of intellectuals and academics will say – with a hint of scorn – that anyone who suggests the war was fought over anything except slavery is just plain silly but look at Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address: He told the Southerners, If you’ll stay in the Union I’ll agree you can keep your slaves, I’ll guarantee it, I’ll pass a Constitutional Amendment to set it in stone, and I’m only gonna ask you to do one thing in return: Just keep paying those tariffs.
Wealth transfers are still pretty popular these days: Most federal spending in one way or another is about money leaving one fellow’s hands and ending up in another fellow’s hands – corporations get subsidies paid for with other people’s money, banks get bailouts and oil companies get tax loopholes. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, in a way, are another, even more popular, kind of wealth transfer. After all, most folks get back a lot more money from Social Security than they pay into it.
Right now in North Carolina, I’m sad to say, our Republican leaders in the General Assembly are involved in a whopper of a wealth transfer of their own.
During the last two elections the political arms of corporations and insurance companies and groups like the Medical Society and Big Pharma have spent or contributed over $5 million to elect Republican legislators and now the Republican powers-that-be in the legislature are giving drug companies legal immunity when they sell drugs like Vioxx and doctors legal immunity when they commit malpractice in the ER.
Our Republican legislators may mean well but giving a pharmaceutical company legal immunity when it sells bad drugs is setting the wolves loose among the sheep.