What Government Can Be
Neoliberalism (free-market capitalism) took over in the U.S. in 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected, and has reached the point that many people hate government.
Now, when people say they “hate government,” what they’re really saying is that they hate the bloat, corruption and incompetence of the U.S. federal government. I wish there were a way I could get these people to watch this video, in which Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand, lays out what she and her team have accomplished in the past two years.
From 
Until the coronavirus, few Americans thought too much about pandemic management. In the last few months, however, we’ve come to understand at least a few basic concepts, perhaps the most central of which is this: You will never know if you’ve overkilled the virus, but you will be acutely aware that you’ve “underkilled” it, and wish in vain that you had done more. 
We often hear otherwise intelligent people say, “Trump is the only thing standing between us and socialism.” What a strange remark that is.
Today’s Americans find themselves in a strange moral position.
I found this just now, and I thought I’d publish it in an effort to describe how ridiculous the U.S. appears on the world stage.
We’ve often discussed Americans’ peculiar rejection of science, whether it takes the form of climate change denial, fear of vaccinations and GMOs, dismissal of the COVID-19 response, or the welcoming of environmental deregulation. In many cases, this is the result of corporate disinformation campaigns, launched to confuse the citizenry, calling into question what they’re being told by the scientific community.
What Pope Francis points out here is almost definitely true; he’s spot-on as usual. Like so many other challenges our civilization faces, overcoming the pandemic will not be possible if we continue to ignore the needs of the least fortunate members of our population. 
Ruling against environmentalists, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday decided that the federal government has the authority to allow a proposed $7.5 billion natural gas pipeline to cross under the popular Appalachian Trail in rural Virginia.
