Dr. Forbush Thinks

Conservatives like to make the claim that Liberals will always propose that “…we should throw money at a problem.” Of course this argument could be made about the conservatives as well, because any project will take “seed money” to get it started, no matter what the project is. There is publicity, marketing, staff to get anything off the ground. So, making the claim that throwing money at a problem is only a liberal tendency misses the point of the issue itself.

The point is that there are always issues that need to be solved. Only those that believe in anarchy believe that government has no purpose at all. The anarchists are excused from this argument. But, for the rest of us the argument comes down to how much money the government will spend and what projects will that money be spent on. Paying for the government’s spending is a totally different issue, because taxation is the source of all money whether the money is borrowed now and paid back later, or if people need to be accountable now. I shouldn’t need to say anything about the evil of debt, but the Republicans tend to prefer that evil because it allows them to shirk their responsibility to some later generation.

So, let’s look at what the Republicans have decided to spend your hard earned money on. They have decided that sending troops halfway around the world to try to keep the peace in a civil war is a wise use of your tax dollars. But, to be fair the civil war didn’t happen until we spent the money to invade the country on poor intelligence in the first place. Unfortunately we didn’t spend the money to get good intelligence, because the Republicans that took over the government in 2001 thought that terrorism wasn’t such a big deal. In fact, these Republicans thought that spending the money on “Star Wars” missile protection was a better use of the money. In fact, shifting the spending of money around was an obsession with the early Bush administration.

I think that the summary of this action could easily be stated as shifting money from a “prevention strategy” to an “aggression strategy.” Diplomacy was less important than weapons systems. Cutting money for programs like FEMA, Head Start, and health care in favor of programs like new weapons, star wars and military aid to our allies.

The point is that retort of throwing money at the problem isn’t valid in most cases, because the act of throwing force at a problem generally costs money. And, as we know with the pointless war in Iraq we have thrown $300 billion dollars at the problem and the latest NIE shows that the war is actually fueled by this conflict.

If we were to think about this $300 billion dollars for a moment and the terrorism problem we might be surprised to realize that Bill Clinton’s suggestion of helping Middle Eastern countries to create public education in the Middle East might have addressed this problem in a much more effective way.

Bill Clinton pointed out that the terrorists are largely created in the madrassas, cheap religious schools infiltrated with terrorists. Parents choose to send their children to these schools, because they realize the value of an education in a modern world. Since public education does not exist in these countries, parents are left to choose between the various private education options. And, the parents decide that the cheapest education is the religious education offered by these madrassas. The question could become, how many madrassas could be shut down by helping Middle East countries create public education systems? How much would we be willing to spend to actually reduce number of terrorists recruited through this system? What would the side effects of doing this be? Overall positive or negative effects? How would that compare to our aggressive efforts? How many lives could have been saved by using this approach?

Obviously this is one solution to one problem and I am sure that many bright people out there have many other solutions. We should listen to them and consider them. But we should be careful not to resort to aggression as the solution to every problem. It would be like the old saying, “When all you have is a hammer everything begins to look like a nail.”







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Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."


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