Is the US headed towards a socialist government?

[kandrathe]

No, free in terms of being able to do what you want when and how you want to, so long as it doesn't infringe on others' rights.

I'm not sure how things are where you live, but I'm really not free to do whatever I want with my property even when it does not infringe on other people. And, most importantly, I would like to keep more of my income without the government siphoning off half of it to pay for things that do not benefit me or my community.

Want to do drugs? Better off in the Netherlands than the US. Want to have an abortion? Almost certainly better off in Canada. Don't want to have other peoples' religious values forced on you, or your children? I'd take Sweden over the US any day. These are not issues of people "redefining" their liberty in terms of obedience to state power. They're classic liberal issues of freedom, and they're doing as well, if not better, in many of the socialist countries of the world as they are in the US.

200 years ago in the US people had more liberty than they have now, however, abortion was not discussed and laws did not appear until the 1820's. The liberties I'm speaking against are the governments imposition of positive rights, such as the right to affordable housing, the right to a living wage, the right to have free public education, the right to social security, the right to a minimum standard of living, etc. In order to secure these types of socialist "rights", actual liberty is sacrificed "for the common good". Now, anytime someone argues against these socialist rights, the automatic knee-jerk reaction is to assume the opposition is against the notions of affordable housing, a living wage, free public education, social security or a minimum standard of living. This is not true. These societal boons can be arrived upon without putting every citizen at the end of the bayonet of governmental force.

The "mental cage" stuff is an argument that can't be refuted. "Kandrathe is trapped by the invisible bars of a mental cage! He believes what he does, not because he is a freethinking individual, but because he's an elephant trained to his tether!" If you can honestly show that people are being indoctrinated, fine, but it sounds like you're just assuming, Ayn Rand style, that anyone who disagrees with you must be crazy, blind, or stupid.

Of course people are being indoctrinated! Some of us who persevere (like you and I, and others here) have learned to question everything and require real proof, and even then sometimes doubt they have the whole truth. I would still say that the vast majority of people in the world subscribe to a world view they've been indoctrinated into, rather than one they arrived upon through any objective critical thinking.

I tend to be a person who questions everything, and so I get branded as some crazy radical. :) For example, I ask frequently, "Why does everyone need to get to work at 8am?" It seems to me that if we really wanted to optimize our infrastructure for a minimal cost we would order our society so that expectations of when a work day began would range from 6am to 10am, thereby alleviating rush hours and road congestion. And, also, why the industrial focus on 40 hours of time spent on the job, when what we really pay people for in the information age are the results of their labor whether that result took 10 hours or 60 hours to complete. If two people do the same amount of work in different amounts of time, then I reward the faster worker by giving them a bit more free time, not by giving them vastly more work or requiring them to slow down. Does a necktie really make you look more professional, or does it constrict the flow of blood to the brain? Why do we still run our lives as if we all still either live on a farm, or work in a factory?

I really think the downfall of mankind is their propensity to be habituated, and their inability to think outside their box (or cubical). Our constant social struggle is the perpetual belief of people that they can control things (and each other). Order is glorified, and chaos (as well as change usually) is abhorred.