Students for Idiotic Policy Positions

met like a whole effing slew of them this weekend.

the actual group they belonged to was something like, students for social security reform. basically a libertarian/conservative student group pushing for the privitization/dismantling of social welfare programs, social security in particular.

came across them at a bbq for a friend of C's who had just graduated from catholic law. i won't recount all the details of our little encounter, but i will say that the highlight of the conversation was when one of the morons called me ignorant because i referred to our health care system as based upon free-market principles (which is, of course, true -- the only subsidies that our government gives us go to the insurance industry), and then proceeded to tell me that people living in rural mississippi had better quality of life indicators than people living in sweden SOLELY BECAUSE, PER CAPITA, THE STATE OF MISSISSIPPI HAS A HIGHER GDP. this is lunacy, idiocy, and downright shamanism all rolled into a nice little turd biscuit that this kid ate right up. a person mired in poverty in mississippi has a horrible quality of life; a person living in sweden, where he or she will receive very generous unemployment and health and social security benefits, has a compartively wonderful quality of life based on every single indicator that really matters: access to health care, affordable food, clothes, and shelter, and the like. it's not even close.

there was also a self-described libertarian there whose whole argument for why social security should be privatized is that, "money is not a bad thing."

i swear to god, i'm not making this up.

man they were idiots.

but the burgers were tasty.