Joan Rivers, played for a charity called God's Love We Deliver on The Apprentice. She won a lot of money for the charity and that is great. The charity does the following work:
God's Love We Deliver provides essential food and nutrition services to men, women and children living with HIV/AIDS, cancer, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease and other serious illnesses. Our clients live throughout the five boroughs of New York City, Hudson County and Newark, New Jersey. All of our services to clients are provided free of charge.
This charity should not exist. That a charity like this must exist to provide such basic existential needs for seriously ill people, often terminally ill, should disgust the American populace. Before we are happy that she was able to raise so much money for a charity that started out so small and will now get much much bigger as a result, we need to ask ourselves why it exists. Charities like these exist because of serious gaps that exist in the government's philosophy for how the public good should be supported. In the simplest terms, the existence of this charity tells us that our political philosophy does not serve the function of ensuring basic health needs of the population even though these needs are a fundamental right of all American citizens to be happy. Government cannot ensure happiness if its people are dying or suffering when they do not have to.
In fact, US spending on health care is greater than post-industrial peers and with less favorable results to at least two critical indices of public health including infant mortality and life expectancy. If we can agree that the physical and mental health of a person and of a society is about as basic an existential need in order to establish "happiness" and the freedom to pursue it, then a government that does not meet that basic social need is failing in a critical purpose for its existence.
The protective role of government in the way that we read the founding documents in our current context cannot exist only secure borders to protect the republic's sovereignty. It must also protect its citizens from the very elements that have brought powerful civilizations down in the past. Among these is the central role of public health. Without substantial enough public health that would essentially make charities like God's Love We Deliver irrelevant, the government fails its citizens and reveals that it does not truly care about meeting their basic existential needs.
Yet very little about US health care is public. It is a gamble that non-governmental corporations will meet the demand with sufficient enough supply and maintain enough business savvy to make a profit to grow as profit bearing companies will protect the public good. In so doing, the government has passed off one of its central functions to corporations both privately owned and publicly traded. This is a moral failure much bigger than even if we went straight passed gay marriage to polygamy (as many neo-cons assert will happen) for while marriage is not a central function of government, public health most certainly is.
I'd like to see a good "conservative" argument that does not agree that health is an essential function of government while clearly defining what the essential functions of government actually are. Moreover, on what basis does the fundamental right of "the pursuit of happiness" exist among those such as AIDS patients who cannot feed themselves. The logical answer is that from that side of the fence, the government exists to protect profits before people. The priority is wrong. The function of government is to make money rather than to see that its citizens flourish. For this I agree with Jeremiah Wright: God should damn America. Even as we read in the Bible, God damns those nations that lose their essential moral functions of protecting and supporting the common good of its citizens. The more we idolize profit at the expense of the public good, the less we should expect God's favor for much of anything; for it is not favor but a swift kick in the ass that we all deserve and ought to expect until the moral compass of government is re-calibrated towards the good.
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We all know HIV/AIDS are serious treat in our world. If i were you wear a wristband in your charity for the good reason and helping many people.