Over time, I am like written Hebrew...

...best understood as moving from right to left.

It's the damndest thing, really. I spent 23 years working on a political world view, weaving in and out of conservative and libertarian arguments. The theory was simple: government power is a necessary evil, tolerated in small, unimportant doses and feared in larger roles. The more power government has, the less freedom we all have, so for almost any political question, the correct answer is "whatever reduces or limits government power".

And then there was Fred. Fred is Erinn's dad. He's a lawyer, which means he's spent the last few decades getting paid to argue. This is good, because when my anxiety doesn't overtake me, I enjoy a little back-and-forth with someone intelligent.

Fred has been a liberal since, well, since "liberal" meant something noble, you know?

So, anyway, we were spending the night at Casa de Foley and the Bill Maher program on HBO turned into a conversation on health care. I was trying to argue what is basically the republican and "moderate" democrat plan -- private insurance as opposed to a government run plan. It goes back to the original point behind my politics: government power is too rich a power to be allowed to control something as precious as our very health, life and death.

And then Fred made this point (and i'm paraphrasing because I didn't think to write it down). Basically, he said that libertarians (the closest thing to my thoughts) mistrusted government consolidation of power but that we had nothing to say about PRIVATE consolidation of power. His thought was that, not only was private power an evil to be reckoned with; it was probably also an evil worse than government power.

I had never thought of it that way. I mean, corporations are generally soulless bastards leeching all that is good from the earth, buying up shares of our democracy while enriching their friends via a pipeline of public money and government-sponsored monopolization...but it never occured to me that they were WORSE than government.

So if you're wondering how the hell I went from Bush apologist to Health Care crusader, now you know why...because of Fred. It's all Fred's damn fault. Haha.