It’s impressive that you are getting thoughts from
this post as well as from our dialogue made here.
He’s missing 50+% of the US expenses- WAR.
Without that open wound of currency- ???
“Democracy, The God That Failed” is actually the title of a book written by Hans Herman-Hoppe”. I haven’t read it, but it gets good reviews by most who have read it.
I read an historians view that bureaucracy was one of the signs of an advanced civilization. Apparently he hasn’t had to deal with it much. And I think that is what is wrong with the VA and any number of hospitals I know. Probably a lot of other institutions too, you know the kind to big to fail.
When communism failed, it didn’t result in democracy triumphing. Instead, crony capitalism took off in a rocket of elitist triumphalism, with the greed of oligarchs unrestrained in their globalist new world order. Government, bought but never paid for, has become their handmaiden. Pragmatically, there is no compassion for the dregs left over from yesteryear’s cannon fodder, no more than for the demobilised armies of permanently unemployed. Democracy hasn’t failed America – the elites who have accomplished their own coup in America, subverting democratic accountability, have completely failed the American people.
Paternalism breeds an attitude of entitlement on one side – pot & pan banging entitlement – and contempt on the other. Indicates a sour denouement.
It is often said that the first step to self-improvement is to recognize that you have a problem.
I’m a veteran and have had problems with the VA health care system. My observation has been that when confronted with the possibility that they may have made a mistake or that there is a problem, at the VA there is an almost instinctive reaction to go right into a defensive posture where everybody just starts trying to cover themselves and deny everything.
Further, at least in my case, the VA is actually allowed to self-evaluate it’s own performance and decide if it made mistakes. The medical providers and administrative personal responsible for your care gather privately in a room together. Nether the veteran nor any representative of the veteran are allowed to attend. Then they sit together and determine that they did everything perfectly and convince themselves that the complaint is invalid.
As an example, in my case a contractor that the VA hired made mistakes and injured myself and other veterans. However when asked to investigate the VA denied that the contractor made any errors and even said they did an excellent job. But conveniently omitted from the written report was the fact that the VA terminated it’s contract with the contractor during this period and that the contractor subsequently fired the doctor that was treating us, reportedly for “ethical reasons”.
How can the VA continuously improve itself if it won’t even admit it has problems? Answer: it can’t. And that explains a lot.
[…] The US Congress is constantly holding hearings on all kinds of problems. Virtually every government function I’ve ever seen is run by people who have completely forgotten how their agency got started. It seems not a single agency puts much emphasis on the ostensible mission that justifies its existence, and spends far more energy and resources on simply cooking up new justifications. In other words, you cannot make a bureaucracy work at anything but bureaucracy itself. […]
These people volunteered to go fight for a police state in military actions against the entire world of Islam, a campaign set in motion intentionally. In Israel they have been talking about this move for the last forty years, religious Jews have been fearing what the arrogant secular gang who run the US media and Wall Street would do as their power crests, and it would appear that they chose to “just pull it.” These uneducated herd gentiles that volunteered to go fight in these ludicrous wars, we are supposed to feel sorry for them when they get exposed to the horrors they were there to inflict? We should feel sorry for them while we are still doing the same thing to innocent, conservative, religious people who were, before we came, exporting food with a zero carbon footprint?
Welcome to the professional army, who are just another form of commoditized, dehumanized, alienated labor, and treated by their paymasters as just that.
The statistics about mortality rates of veterans from the Gulf War under the elder Bush are chilling–pretty clearly someone made a conscious and deliberate decision that it was cheaper to let them die than to face the ailments that the war caused them and their families in many cases, including the effects of firing depleted uranium munitions.
All the jingo aside–what do you expect? This is just another aspect of Capitalism in its most brutal, virulent form.