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People should be free to choose what is best for themselves as long as they do not infringe on the rights of others to do the same. I created this blog to discuss issues I have with big government, liberal media,and to talk about my support for capitalism and the Iraq War.
7 comments:
It looks like bulshit numbers to me.
It also makes me wonder how many people would die to tougher regulations on industry. Sense such regulations would neccesarily make commodities more expensive it stands to reason that a group of, probably poor, people will have less access to resources that would allow them to live longer. Hardly anyone died of pollution in the 12th century.
Theoretically we could take the moeny the government would save on health care and give it to poor people to buy whatever got expensive. But actually that's not my solution.
My solution is to switch to fucking nuclear power already, which is safe, clean, and cheap, and would cut back hugely on the pollution problem in America. The only reason we're not doing it now is idiot environmental gorups, which is a. Why I favor campaign finance reform and b. Don't believe for a second that private charities with the most successful marketing campaigns will actual have the best plans to help people and make the world better.
I am pro nuclear myself
Could you be a little more elaborate on explaning how nuclear powers reveals private charites to be ineffective.
Nuclear power generates toxic matter that last for ALL OF ETERNITY. That makes me gun shy towards nuclear power. Absolutes are almost always not fun.
There are waste issues such as storing it - but in the end it is the best- if we can just get past all the "fears" people have about it. You hear nuclear and automatically think trouble- but really it is probably the safest we have.
Actually, the majority of the radioactive waste coming form a nuclear power plant- the liquid you'd probably be thinking of as 'radioactive waste'- has a half-life of 8 days. The stuff that lasts longer is very small (spent fuel rods and such) and much of it is recycled into fuel; what little of this longer-lasting waste needs to be sequestered is transported and stored in accident-proof containers (by which I mean, you can literally crash a train into them without creating a leak) and stored in caves 500meters undergroudn in the desert, away form civilization and farming/etc. This waste will reach 1/1000 of it's orriginal radioactivity in about 500 years.
Interestingly, many more humans are dmaged by radioactive fallout every year from coal-burning power plants than are by nuclear power plants, because the coal that is burned contains radioactive isotopes (which are found in trace quantities in pretty much any rock you'd pick up) which do not burn at the same temperature as the coal, and end up vaporized and pumped out the coal stack with the rest of the smog, and can end up being directly inhaled into people's lungs.
The fact that your intuitions (llike almost everyone's in america) about nuclear power is that it is far more dangerous and damgaing than it actual is makes my point about the dangers of private charities and social action groups. This idea, and the fact that the US uses so little nuclear power, is almost entirely the result of vigorous marketing and advertising campaigns by Greenpeace, the most successful and influential environmentalist group on the planet.
Greenpeace has been incredibly successful in gettin donations and making people agree with them, and thereby influencing both public policy and social ideas/norms. But the things they actually stand for are extremely ignorant, and wrong-headed, and the results of their actions are in many cases simply evil. In the case of nuclear power, they have forced the US for decades to rely on heavily polluting, greenhouse-gas emitting coal power, instead of switching to much cleaner nuclear energy. In the case of DDT and genetically modified crops, Greenpeace and other major environmental groups such as the World Wildlife Fund have prevented third world countries across the globe from using both of these products, either through misinformation campaigns in the countries themselves or by convincing the US and other countries to impose trade restrictions on crops grown using DDT and genetically modified crops.
The result of this has been literally millions of preventable deaths every year in places like Africa, both from milaria and other bug-bourn diseases which DDT would drasticaly decrease, and from wimple famine due to failed crops.
The people working at Greenpeace are not evil. They believe they are doing good. But there is very little correlation between being passionate about a cause and being able to argue your point of view convincingly, and actually knowing what the hell you're talking about. I'm sure that you must be able to agree with that statement.
And that's why I don't trust a system of private charities- the simple fact that I can look at some of the most successful charities current thriving under that system, and see them doing so much evil in the world
So I take it by the lack of responses that you all now agree with me that private charities trend towards marketting rather than helping and government social welfare programs provide better accountability?
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