The System Isn’t Broken

I often hear people, out of pure frustration, lament about how “the system is broken”.

“The system” is a term that can be applied to a number of different things, but most often when people use this term, they are referring to “the government”.

The United States government is hardly a monolithic entity that operates with the nefarious efficiency of a hive-mind (or inefficiency of a hive-mind, take your pick), but I’ll save that explanation for a future post. However, “the system” is not broken; it performs exactly as it was designed to perform.

That the United States is the world leader in the number of its citizens it incarcerates is hardly indicative of something being broken with the system. The so-called “war on drugs” feeds the prison-industrial complex with unswerving efficiency.

That the United States is the wealthiest nation on earth, but has too many pockets of extreme poverty in its cities to bother counting is hardly an accident or a coincidence, since it provides the political elites living, breathing examples they can point to in order to maintain the perpetual debate about income inequality and wealth redistribution while tacitly maintaining the system that they say needs fixing.

That the United States maintains a “healthcare system” that effectively operates as a “sick care system” with hospitals that resemble luxury hotels rather than places where the sick and injured receive “care” is not indicative of a broken system. It is indicative of a system that makes billions of dollars with its collective noses in both public and private troughs funded by We the People in the most inefficient way possible.

Sticking with healthcare, if you are over age 65, active duty or retired military, poor, a member of Congress, or the President, you have the best single payer healthcare on the planet. However, if you don’t fit any of the above categories, you (or you and your employer) must pay exorbitant premiums to a privately owned insurance company.

Coincidence? Broken system? I don’t think so.

The healthcare debate has been raging since well before I was born and I’m a few months away from being 50 years old. Is this a symptom of a broken system or does it serve an unspoken, but very obvious agenda?

Just a few thoughts to consider the next time you are lulled into thinking “the system is broken”.

-The Rational Ram