Saturday, January 30, 2010

Why do People Vote Against their Own Interests?

From the BBC comes this interesting article. In a country that has given its people universal healthcare, the debate in the United States is puzzling, to say the least.
“One of the fallacies that politicians often have on the Left is that things are obvious, when they are not obvious. Obama's administration made a tremendous mistake by not immediately branding the economic collapse that we had just had as the Republicans' Depression, caused by the Bush administration's ideology of unregulated greed. The result is that now people blame him.”
Psychologist Drew Westen, author of The Political Brain

“You vote to strike a blow against elitism and you receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our life times, workers have been stripped of power, and CEOs are rewarded in a manner that is beyond imagining. It's like a French Revolution in reverse in which the workers come pouring down the street screaming more power to the aristocracy.”
Thomas Frank, author of What’s The Matter with Kansas

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