Pharmaceuticals only account for about 8% of US health scare spending, and the government already funds a substantial amount of drug development. In fact, the government and nonprofit foundations already fund a huge amount of medical research.

We don't have a sustainable private system right now either. Insurance companies are doing everything they can to reduce coverage while increasing premiums. How is this better than a public option? One thing Medicare does quite effectively is drive down the costs of care. Ask any doctor. We need a public plan to control costs.

Frankly, in this country, those are inconsequential choice.

The day they start to screen for intelligence, or even athletic ability, it becomes a threat to the ideals that (I believe) this country was founded on. The world has enough inequality without the creation of a master race.

Luckily, I think intelligence is a little trickier to identify than the traits they've cited.

My point was that the United States was obviously not a free society prior to the civil war, at least by most reasonable definitions of the term. Similarly, claiming the US has become simply "less free" in the past 60 years is laughable. Women and minorities have seen huge strides in the path toward establishing their personal freedoms. To just pick one arbitrary example, it wasn't until 1966 that beating became grounds for divorce in New York - and women still had to prove that a "sufficient" number of beatings had taken place.

I strongly believe in a free society, but let's not pretend that the United States used to be some kind of paradise and only the federal government is to blame for our problems - that's pure ideology.

Since we abolished slavery? Wha-huh?

I agree with your sentiment, but I have to say that your "facts" about FDR are a little off. First, most people say that FDR took the US off the gold standard.

Second, the claim that he "extended the Depression" is based, from what I can tell, entirely on work by Cole and Ohanian that is not exactly universally accepted by economists. It assumes that neoclassical growth theory is correct and then tries to explain why it fails to account for the slow recovery from the Great Depression.

They only 'prove' that FDR's policies were at fault if you assume that their theory correctly accounts for the growth that didn't actually occur. Yes, sounds pretty convoluted - that's the great part about the social sciences. You can make claims about causes based on data that doesn't exist.