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Prior to 1913, Americans paid no annual income taxes. (Although Lincoln had levied a temporary tax on income to pay for the Civil War.) Our military was small because we had only just begun our descent into imperialism and empire building. Land grant public colleges were an eastern and Midwestern state development, a product of the Progressive movement, in what Wisconsin Senator Robert LaFollette called "the laboratories of democracy." Until the 1950s, most of the country had dirt roads, a fact that so disturbed Eisenhower that he instituted the Federal Highway system as part of a program of military preparedness. The backbone of American plutocratic prosperity for most of its history has been cheap labor, such as provided by slavery, child labor, and for most workers, 70 hour workweeks under brutalizing and dangerous conditions. In comparison to other industrialized countries, the U.S. has a particularly violent labor history, with government troops often acting as strikebreakers, and the court system imprisoning union organizers for long jail sentences. Many of the great factories violated patents on British intellectual property, such as Carnegie's theft of the Bessemer process for manufacturing steel. Once again, let me state that the expression "free market" is a term of art used to disguise the fact that markets are inherently monopolistic, where the few big fish gobble up the little ones. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 was ostensibly designed to prevent monopolies from developing, but was quickly perverted by plutocrats and their corporatist courts into an instrument to attack labor unions. Corporate hiring practices among immigrants was designed to set workers against one another through cultural, linguistic, and historical differences. Is this the history we should re-learn and emulate? Take a look at a list of the most profitable companies in the world, and you will be hard pressed to find more than a handful that are not beneficiaries of enormous corporate welfare, outright socialism for the rich.

and another vote bought with money we don't have.
doc...you have many valid points but..c'mon.. we all know it's much more than that. remember..there was time when we paid NO income tax. we had a military..roads..subways...collages...all the basic things we needed to make our live work. the difference is that back then we had a true free market. what we have now is just extortion. if someone wants to play santa claus there betterr be a healthy army of elves to produce the goodies. like it or not..that comes from the free market. even bill clinton understood that. i totaly agree this country does many stupid things which we share common ground. there was a time this country did not. perhaps we should look at our history again and relearn what made this country what it once was

You're goddamn right, Bluto. We do pay for it. Its called TAXES, and most people in the developed world understand that its the price we have to pay for living in a semi-civilized society. But what does the average American get for his tax dollars, besides the world's most murderously invasive military, "gangsters for capitalism" in the words of Marine General Smedley Butler, creating a continual supply of "enemies" and untold numbers of "collateral damage" corpses, in the endless pursuit of profits for the top 1%? Over the last 40 years, through the concerted efforts of corporate propaganda, a popular attitude has taken hold that governmental spending of OUR tax revenues, to improve the quality of life for the average citizen, is somehow an illegitimate use of political power, damaging to both the economy and the character of our people. Meanwhile, the halls and offices of Federal, State, and local governments are besieged by armies of corporate lobbyists, corrupting our political process with outright bribery, all so that the plutocratic interests which control the country can suck ever more deeply on the taxpayer's tits. Take a good look around you at the kind of society these parasites have created. Tax breaks, tax abatements, deindustrialization, Wall Street bailouts, corporate welfare writ large, combined with a military system that spends almost 54 cents of every tax dollar on wars the Pentagon can never seem to win, have defunded and in some cases bankrupted the public sphere. Investments in infrastructure, education, public housing, public transportation, health care, child care, medical research, the environment, and renewable energy, expenditures vital to the long-term functioning of any nation, have all been sacrificed at the altar of the quarterly profit statement. Increasingly, our country is taking on the characteristics of the kind of third world hell-hole these globalists deem "business friendly," pitting desperate workers around the world in a brutal race to the bottom. And for what? A report out this week tells us that the planet's richest 52 billionaires have more wealth than half the people on earth, some 3.65 billion human beings. Some of us know that this situation is unsustainable, both financially and morally. That's why we support the presidential candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders. In 1953, when U.S. military spending was at 14.2% of GDP, President Eisenhower said "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities...It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals...We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people...This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron...Is there no other way the world may live?"