I made a comment on this article earlier, but as the day progressed, I thought about it more and I think this is a topic worth elaborating on, and it should be something that we as a country need to discuss.
Is our government established to serve the people? or is our government established to serve the interests of business?
And I realize that is a question that is so fundamental that anyone on this site will respond with a loud "duh", but, unfortunately a sizeable percentage of the population of this country believes the opposite, whether they realize it or not.
And this difference in philosophy is fundamental to the way we view the government. This is why social programs such as social security, and unemployment benefits, and essentially any program that provides a service to the people is considered a massive overreach by the government and unconstitutional. This is why any form of regulation whatsoever is considered evil. This is why unions are from the devil. The government does not exist to serve the people. The government exists to serve the interests of business.
This is why "socialism" is such a dirty word. In the history of our country, only one idea has been considered so terrifying that people felt compelled to start a witch hunt to rip it out of people's minds before it could spread.
Now this is not to say that business and free enterprise is bad. Our Founding Fathers were in agreement that free enterprise was necessary for a democracy to flourish. However, the main difference is that while the left believes that a good economy is a good thing because it is good for the people, the right believes that a good economy is good for the corporation, and this prosperity would trickle down to rest of the population. And this is an important distinction.
And this is a debate that needs to be made in our world today. When our Founding Fathers established that business was good for the country, business at the time was primarily agrarian and what we think of today as small business. They never ever dreamt that any single business could become as big as they are now. Back then, what was good for business was almost always good for the people, so the two ideologies could coexist. But those days are long gone. Populist interests are often different from Corporate interests.
We now live in a world where the banks are already too big to fail. Multi-national corporations are now bigger than small countries, and at the pace we are going, corporations are going to become larger than our own government. When Samsung becomes larger than the US Government, this is a problem. And yet, I've talked to people who see absolutely nothing wrong with this prospect.
This is something to keep in mind whenever Mitt Romney accuses Obama of attacking free enterprise. This is why they believe a powerful military needs to exist, rather than funnel that public money towards social programs.
And this is a war we are fighting whether we realize it or not, because the question of whether the people or corporations are supreme will be answered soon, and the outcome of this fight will determine the future our children will inherit.