1984?

[professorpinasheep]

Well first off I never said the government had any right to direct people 100%. My point is that regulations have to be there because people don't know how to lead themselves, and the ones that acutally know where they want to go or what they want to do have the chance to because they still have the freedoms that we are granted in this country.
I had no intentions of talking about welfare, in fact it was not even on my mind when writing that, if you were lead to this by what i stated then you really misunderstood what i was talking about.

I brought up welfare because I think reforming welfare would be a better (and more constitutionally correct, for that matter) way to counteract the laziness you were speaking of, rather than attempting to legislate people's behavior. I was offering a better solution. Also, if you say "people don't know how to lead themselves", I'd have to ask how any business venture is successful or how our country has experienced such economic booms in the last few hundred years. The problem is that people don't know how to elect the right leaders.. They only pay attention to soundbites and news snippets, as opposed to actually doing some simple research.

Now yes freedom of choice is something that should not be taken away. Thing is these companies need some kind of restrictions, letting them just make the rules is too reckless and that has been proven by the whole housing bubble pop. If there were regulations in place to stop the wild lending practices this whole problem could have been avoided. They made plenty of risky moves, they allowed a lot of people to lend with values they should have never had. This threw so much out of whack it screwed up industry not directly connected to them. The point I was making is that for the most part these companies are the people who won't stop smoking cigarettes. Thing is they have become the cancer and if we don't pay to fix it the cancer will wreak havoc on the body (the body being the world economy).

either way the taxpayers are screwed, this whole matter is just the safest way.

The safest way is to let an increasingly intruding government decide what's best for me? If you're willing to let them do that, how are you any different than "the 38 year old living in his mom's basement" (I think that's how it went) that you talked about that was too lazy to do anything or make his own decisions? I want to think how I choose to think, not how I'm told to think. If I disagree with something, it shouldn't be a crime. If I choose to speak out against it, it shouldn't be a crime so long as I do it peacefully. If I want to drink a soda or a beer, why should I have to pay an extra tax because there are other people out there who do it to excess and end up draining social medical programs like Medicaid? The rights of individuals are on their way to being trampled on in the name of collectivism.