Does what I do affect you? Do the decisions that I make for myself have any affect on your life? I am talking about personal decisions. Decisions like whether or not I get married or have children. Or whether I have a car or take the local bus. Or whether I want a salad or a vegetable side dish.
Do these kinds of decisions, most of them of not any real import generally, which we all make every day, have any affect on other people in any way?
Do you make your own little decisions like this a thousand times a day without anyone supervising you and/or approving or opposing your doing so? How do you feel about making your own little decisions for yourself throughout the day without anyone’s assistance or supervision or approval or opposition? Isn’t that just the normal way we function on a daily basis?
But what about the bigger decisions we all make that do affect other people and how we as individuals behave in culture and society? Big questions that when answered determine what we value both individually and collectively? We are all individuals. But we also are a part of a larger group, whether or not we participate with that larger group.
Some of the bigger decisions we make as individuals that I have specifically in mind are:
Do I support my country making war on another country?
Do I support the use of force against non violent protest?
Do I support laws being made that restrict human rights?
Another big issue in a democracy is, do I have any right to have a say in how the taxes I pay are spent? Do I have any right in the decision making process that determines how the money that I pay in taxes that are automatically deducted or that I pay voluntarily at tax time are spent? Our government, Congress specifically, decides how this money is spent. But does Congress ever base its spending priorities on what the majority of Americans want? Does Congress ever bother to ask the American people how the majority of people think tax money should be spent?
Americans pay taxes. If you look at rates and levels of taxes Americans pay compared to other countries I believe the amount of money Americans pay in taxes is somewhere in the mid range. And, there are very large differences in the amounts of taxes that are paid by different economic groups of people in the United States. It’s a grossly unbalanced tax code.
Why is there such a lopsided tax code in the United States with the very rich and large corporations, the groups with the most money, paying the least taxes while the middle class and poor pay disproportionately more? Interest groups are represented in Washington DC by 10s of thousands of paid lobbyists who daily seek to have their agendas advanced by the members of Congress. Daily lobbying and fund raising is the order of business in Washington DC. Members of Congress meet regularly with lobbyists and “donors”, that is, wealthy people who “contribute” to political campaigns of “our” elected representatives. Much of the legislation that comes out of Washington DC is bought and paid for by these special interest groups and wealthy donors while simultaneously what regular people may want and/or need is not solicited and is sometimes suppressed and overridden by line items of the special interest groups and big donors. So, a very small minority of the population has a much more immense political sway in Washington DC while the majority of Americans are not given an audience and their needs are often not addressed or met by Congress.
Some people say things like, “Oh, well, that’s the way it is in Washington. You can’t change that. That’s just the way our political system works.”
But is that really true? One of the large questions that I could have included in the list above is: Do I support the way things are now, the current political status quo as it now exists in Washington DC? Or, are there any improvements that could be made in the way our American democracy works so that the majority of Americans can have their needs be determined and decisions about spending tax dollars can be based on majority needs and wishes?
I don’t think this is pie-in-the-sky thinking if we truly have a fully functional democracy in these United States.
Liberty, to me, is having a right to have a say in how government works and what it does.
What do you think?
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