David McElroy

It’s been official U.S. government policy for decades to promote democracy around the world. The assumption seems to be that majorities everywhere really want western-style freedoms if they just get a chance to vote for them. Well, guess what? They don’t.

In many places, all the majority really want is to control people who don’t agree with them. I’ve talked before about how freedom and democracy aren’t the same things, but the people of Egypt — newly “freed” from a longtime dictator — seem to be trying to create a textbook case of a democratic tyranny.

In recent voting, Islamists have taken close to two thirds of the seats in the country’s first post-revolution parliament. Roughly 37 percent of the parliament will be held by the Muslim Brotherhood alone. We might be having a look at the future for Egypt right now, though, because a wealthy businessman made the mistake of tweeting the cartoon above — as a joke about how Mickey and Minnie Mouse would be required to look if the religious parties win.

The businessman — who’s a Coptic Christian — faces trial for “insulting Islam.”

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Life is full of tradeoffs. If we choose one thing that we want, we tend to be forced to give up a degree of something else we also value. Being happy isn’t a matter of getting everything we want. It’s a matter of finding the right tradeoffs — deciding what matters most.

It seems as though most modern people have chosen — perhaps unconsciously — the path of accumulating material things over emotional connections with other people. So millions of them sit in their suburban “boxes” and wonder why they’re miserable, even though they’ve achieved what they thought they wanted.

I’m thinking about this because of an old song that someone introduced me to over the weekend. (Listen to the song at the end of the article.) Malvina Reynolds was a singer/songwriter and political activist in the ’60s. I doubt I would have agreed with many of her political positions, but I found myself strongly identifying with her song, “Little Boxes,” which satirizes the antiseptic and meaningless lives that she saw people living in suburban tract homes.

I’m of two minds about people who protest against this “little plastic life.” There’s a part of me that appreciates the standard of living we’ve come to have because of the standardization and mass production of our lives. A world in which everything was custom-built individually is a world where not nearly as many people can afford nice houses and other material things.

On the other hand, there’s a huge part of me that’s repulsed by the world those things have created.

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In the eyes of most people, the intent of legislation matters more than the outcome. That’s the only way we can possibly explain why most people continue to support federal efforts to make health care more affordable and more available.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that the federal government got seriously involved with interfering with the medical industry. You can argue that it started before then, because it was certainly a gradual thing. But it was in the Great Society programs of the ’60s that the government started pumping massive amounts of money into health care. The purpose was to make quality health care available to everyone.

That’s not what happened, of course. In 1940, you could spend a day in the hospital in Greenville, Ohio, for $4. Adjusted for inflation, that would be about $31 today. Do you know any hospital where you can get a day in a room for $31 now? I don’t. Why is medical care so much more expensive today? And why do people trust the people who made it more expensive to fix the problem?

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