Anger is the spirit of the riot, of tearing things down, we have had plenty of anger, we need to build again.
One of the issues we have is a two party system in permanent election mode. No idea put forward by the other party is allowed to go forward without being harried no matter what it's merits. Put a conservative and a liberal in a locked room together without press, and they will usually come up with a better decision that either would come up with alone: if they can be freed of the partisan counting of coup.
The free market is worshiped and socialism is a dirty word, at least in theory. yet stripped of labels Americans might prefer a different path.
For decades, polls have shown that a plurality of Americans -- around 40 percent -- consider themselves conservative, while only around 20 percent self-identify as liberals. But a study from two noted economists casts doubt on what values lie beneath those political labels.
According to research carried out by Michael I. Norton of Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke University, 92 percent of Americans would choose to live in a society with far less income disparity than the US, choosing Sweden's model over that of the US.
What's more, the study's authors say that this applies to people of all income levels and all political leanings: The poor and the rich, Democrats and Republicans are all equally likely to choose the Swedish model.
But the study also found that respondents preferred Sweden's model over a model of perfect income equality for everyone, "suggesting that Americans prefer some inequality to perfect equality, but not to the degree currently present in the United States," the authors state.
But as long as we push our side of a two party system, and attack other Americans we see as enemies, we drift away from what we really seem to want. |
