Perspective

AKA: Remember Perl Harbor !

This is part of a reader email that FOX News' Bret Baier read on his show; it's what passes for "perfectly and profoundly astounding" over in wingnut land:

Putting things in perspective: March 21st 2010 to October 1 2013 is 3 years, 6 months, 10 days. December 7, 1941 to May 8, 1945 is 3 years, 5 months, 1 day. What this means is that in the time we were attacked at Pearl Harbor to the day Germany surrendered is not enough time for this progressive federal government to build a working webpage.

Yes, let's put some things in perspective.

Firstly, Germany's surrender wasn't the end of the war, Japan's was.

The US alone spent close to five TRILLION dollars ($288B in 1940 dollars is $4.8T in 2013 dollars) in those three and a half years. That's 7500 times more than the highest Obamacare cost estimate (which is bullshit anyway).

The US alone lost more than 400,000 lives during WWII. I don't think anyone has died as a consequence of working on the Obamacare website.

During WWII, the US government involved itself in every level of the economy. Gas, sugar, bread and meat were rationed. The government limited the commercial use of steel, aluminum, nylon, rubber and copper. Pennies were made of steel because copper was too vital. Nickles were made of silver because nickle was too important. Cigarettes and chocolate were rationed. Whiskey was hard to find because many distilleries had switched to making industrial-grade alcohol for the war. Automobile production was stopped. An all-out propaganda campaign was launched to get people to buy war bonds (ie. to let the government borrow people's money). It's the closest thing to a centrally-planned command economy that this country has ever seen. All our allies (and enemies) did similar things.

It required the entire US military, nearly all of them compelled into service by government draft, along with no small amount of sacrifice from allies who had been fighting the war for many years before we got in. Russia lost 20,000,000 people and spent more than two trillion dollars. France spent almost two trillion. The UK spent almost a trillion dollars.

And, we didn't have the GOP fighting the President's handing of the war every step of the way.

If the US put five TRILLION dollars towards a website, diverted the production of all relevant industries to the effort, forced 10,000,000 Americans to work on it, and enlisted the help of all its allies, it could probably have built the world's best health insurance website.

But, obviously that's a crazy scenario and a ridiculous comparison. Nevertheless, the letter that spawned this comparison is what the wingnuts are calling the "Most important juxtaposing of issue imaginable. Gov't mgmt vs Free Markets."

That's because they are blithering idiots.