The End Of The Commonwealth

Amid the many controversies attending the election of Donald Trump is one easy to overlook: the mounting assault on “pubic goods”—public education, public lands, public information, and public health, among them.  The worldview of Trump and those he’s bringing into government is one in which seeking private interest is paramount, not only as a business aspiration but as a governing ideology. Of all the attitudes of the new administration, this may be the most threatening to democratic practice. There has long been an ideological divide in U.S. politics in which liberals see the production and protection of public goods as a rightful—though not exclusive—function of government, while conservatives deplore interference in the free, private market. This tension, not necessarily a bad one for policy making, existed in some equilibrium from the Second World War to the 1980s.   The scales have been tipping toward private interest rather than public good since the Reagan years, however, and the coming of Trump promises an even stronger swing to private over public. Consider the funding of public education through the college years by individual states. These funds were declining steadily before the 2007 recession hit, and then dropped even more sharply.  By the end of the recession, support for public education had fallen more than 40 percent since Reagan was elected in 1980. It’s a destructive trend (not least because good pu...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news