I don't pretend to know a lot about politics or the news. In fact, usually I am very uninformed. I only occasionally read up on what's going on if people keep talking, like they did with all that happened in Libya and Egypt, and then now with Joe Paterno. But today has been a day for thinking about politics in Econ and Spanish. In Economics, someone wrote one of our blog comments on a proposed tax on the producers of Christmas trees in order to pay for the advertising they were requesting from the Department of Agriculture to help raise sales. The debate was whether or not there should be this tax and also, if it was even the Department of Agriculture's place to help raise Christmas tree sales. Apparently, the dairy industry did it before, which is how the "Got milk?" campaign began. I think it makes more sense for the government to promote the sale of milk because it is promoting nutrition in a way since milk is important for strong bones, etc. But one girl commented that she didn't think it was the government's place to tell her to live a healthy life and that if she wanted to die from obesity at 50 by all means she would. And that comment just got me thinking about what is the actual role of the government. Does it merely facilitate and make sure no one kills anyone and let the market and everything else run freely? Or are there some kinds of standards that the government needs to promote? Obviously, we need some kind of structure to our lives because human nature is not perfect, but how much structure? And about what things?
On a different note in Spanish class, we were talking about the Spanish Constitution, and one of the articles says that "Everyone has the right to life" but the way it is worded in Spanish, it does not read "Todos los españoles" but rather just the word "todos" which encompasses every living thing...? It's very vague. There is no death penalty in Spain, and I am pretty sure that abortion is legal. My professor was very vague in his answer to my question about what was the view of abortion. I don't get how you can say that you value life and that is why capital punishment is immoral, yet say that a woman still has the right to choose to abort her child or not. And I don't understand how conservatives can be so adamantly "pro-life" when they are in favor of the death penalty. I am not really sure how I feel about the death penalty anymore, but it seems that both sides have their views about what is wrongly taking life mixed up.
Right now, I don't really know what I think about all of this, and I don't really know where to go to be informed because everywhere is biased.
I hear you on the death penalty thing. The little jury inside my head is still out on that issue, and probably will remain that way for a long time... :) I do understand how conservatives justify capital punishment (and remain "pro-life"); they basically only believe in killing murderers because murderers "deserve to die." (As opposed to unborn babies.) It makes you wonder, though... I mean, murderers obviously deserve to be punished, but LIPWPP does that fine. Why kill them? It's always struck me as too much of an eye-for-an-eye mentality. Should we rape rapists? Probably not. Then why is murdering murderers justified? I don't know.
ReplyDeleteAnd that^ (I don't know.) pretty much sums up this entire comment. :P So yeah...
Oh yeah, and this is Will King. :)