You don't compromise with a crazy, damaging idea, or embrace it as a reasonable position, in order to get along.
We did it with welfare, when the rightwingers made up welfare queens driving Cadillacs, and it hurt people and cost us all.
We did with pensions, which undercut the entire purpose of retirement savings and replaced it with a profit center for investment firms that pulls the rug out from under retirees during every bust / bubble cycle.
We're doing it with education, pretending that unions and bad teaching, and not poor economic conditions and inept parenting, are the root of our problems.
Now we're doing it with SS, perhaps the most successful government endeavor in our history, pretending it is a government handout that's costing taxpayers money and must inevitably be eviscerated to make way for real giveaways to defense contractors and oil companies.
We've heard that privatization will fix prisons and the military, but what it really does is get GIs electrocuted in the shower and send children to literal work camps.
Every one of these carefully crafted, completely untrue rationales have one goal: Shifting costs to the public and benefits to private interests. None of it works the way it was represented to, because it was never supposed to. These are lies invented to rationalize greed, and every time a Democrat or progressive agrees to consider them, we lend weight and legitimacy to our own demise.
That's why it's a problem when we put these things "on the table." Yes, we know -- Republicans and their campaign-financing masters really, really, really want to take taxpayer money for themselves to solidify their own power, and to hurt working people and unions and the elderly. Please please please?
Our answer can't be that we'll consider it. Or go partway. Or try it out. Or trade it for a possible future breadcrumb of sanity.
We cannot afford to legitimize big lies like these by even pretending they are in good faith, or have any possible benefit. Every time we do, we're putting a noose around our collective necks and offering to kick the chair away.
For what, exactly? To seem reasonable? To make nice? What do we get out of being reasonable or making nice with people who would see us all dead for another nickel in their pockets?
NOT ACCEPTABLE is right.
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