Tiwaz wrote:market forces (essentially corporations)
You're giving the people to whom you refer too much credit. They are by and large not smart enough to recognize the connection you make in those four words. They think of market forces as the benign "invisible hand" described by Adam Smith and do not at all equate it to the wisdom and integrity of corporate boards or executives. And it's all very academic to them, an article of nearly religious faith.
Just because they have a bigger distrust of government than of human nature or corporate boards does not mean that they trust corporate boards. They don't recognize that their position implies such trust. Here's another inconsistency you will find in the people you're describing: Although they will say what you paraphrased about health insurance, talking in hyperbole like government "death panels" to decide who gets health care (actually, that's what we have now with corporate insurance bureaucrats -- some of them actually DO decide who will live and who will die), when you ask them about the financial meltdown, almost all of them will be among the first to say that instead of bailing out the banks and financial firms, we should have let them all fail (market justice)
and thrown the officers into jail for fraud. Logical consistency is not a strong suit with them. It isn't that they're entirely inconsistent, but it's easy to make fun of them by stringing a few of their sentences from different contexts together so that they contradict themselves from each one to the next. A large majority of Americans believe there ought to have been a lot more jail sentences for illegal (and immoral) behavior in the executive suite and the corporate boardroom. It's just that few really believe such a thing can or will ever happen on a significant scale.
Not everyone who explains the rationalization behind how things happen in the US actually believes the rationalization. Some of them just want you to know how things got the way they are.
Scientific polling tells us that at present, 3/4 of Americans believe that health insurance reform should include a government-run program much like what KELA administers, the type of program under which we already pay for health care of people over about 64 years of age. Yet it's not at all clear we'll be able to get 50% + 1 of our legislators to vote for such a program. That's because citizens vote one day every two years and REALLY more like one day every four years. Corporations vote with dollars every day. Talk about THAT, apart from each person's little pet orthodoxy, and you'll get overwhelming agreement from Americans that corporations run American politics for their own good, not for the common good and not by any rules of moral conduct. Even Dick Cheney agrees with that -- he simply sees nothing wrong with it.
Give them a chance to condemn corporate venality without thereby admitting that "liberals" might be right about something; then you'll see them turn the same jaundiced eye on corporate behavior that you usually see them casting on their political opponents.
The people you're talking about, like the radio audience of blowhard Rush Limbaugh, are a minority of some millions. They are a very loud minority, but not at all representative of the man on the street. And remember as well, most of them have jobs where they can listen to right-wing radio all day because they don't have a whole hell of a lot else to do -- long-haul truck drivers, delivery guys, sandwich makers, etc. They're not the people who decide how much of anything happens in America.
