PA Bill Number: HB2311
Title: Establishing the School Mental Health Screening Grant and Development Program.
Description: Establishing the School Mental Health Screening Grant and Development Program. ...
Last Action: Laid on the table
Last Action Date: Sep 23, 2024
Things to Consider by Bill Lafferty: What is being informed? :: 12/26/2016
In the previous blog we talked about the importance of participating in a democracy. Since the citizens of a democracy ultimately make the decisions, even in a republic, they will need to be informed
If the electorate is not informed, they cannot make good decisions. They may make decisions based on what they think will benefit them without regard for anyone else. But if everyone in a democracy did that, the whole enterprise would fail, for a democracy is designed to benefit the entire group of citizens, not any single citizen. Imagine 330 million people acting only for themselves.
One is tempted to say that a lot of people in the United States vote only for their own interests, and even more people have no idea what the issues are or their ramifications. Take for example, the Iran deal in which Iran gets nuclear weapons in a few years. The ramifications of that is nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and nuclear war. And yet many people support the deal and the president who authored it.
One cannot escape the reality that when a majority of voters concern themselves only with their personal interests and have little idea of the ramifications of voting one way or the other, democracy cannot survive.
Right now, the country stands on the edge of that. Clinton voters actually outnumber Trump voters. The country was saved this time by the electoral college, which functioned just as it was designed to do: defeat the “tyranny of the majority.”
But at some point the unions, blacks, feminists, gay sensationalists, illegal immigrants, those who favor big government, 2.79 million federal government workers, government contractors, welfare scammers, environmentalists, opponents of charter schools, and gun haters will collectively overwhelm the rest of us, and the nation will begin a downward spiral culminating in national bankruptcy and global economic breakdown.
Even those who make some effort at being informed sometimes get it wrong. Take, for example, the millennials who supported Bernie Sanders and socialism. Sanders made the argument that modern Scandinavian countries exemplify socialism, and we could have that here. But the reality is that these countries have more in common with capitalism than socialism. Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea are the exemplars of modern socialism.
Modern history is replete with the failures of socialism and communism, and yet hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of young people during the recent election wanted to make the United States a socialist state. That is the kind of damage that can be done when the electorate are not well informed.
In the past, errors in judgment of the electorate have been relatively painless and it hasn't mattered much who was elected.
Now, with a former president who has armed our enemies with nuclear weapons and young voters who think that Stalin never killed anyone, the consequences are different.
