You claim to be conservative but yet you support government backed healthcare, mandated vacation days, mandated work hours? I am not supporting US policy, we are on the completely wrong track. My argument is for the America that we used to be not what we are today.
Do you honestly think that the government has to provide healthcare for people to stay alive? If so then you are insane. How did people stay alive before 1965... I wonder.
This mentality that government is ALWAYS there to save you enrages me. We are all doomed if we don't change our paths.
The problem with these "conservative Americans" driven by individualistic "puritan/calvinistic" values is that if a person is not successful for whatever reason, it's because he/she is not "working hard enough" or worse, "not chosen by God".
Despite being a conservative person myself, I STRONGLY oppose the opinion that a State should simply do nothing when it comes to basic tasks such as public health and security or publicly-strategic goods including infrastructure - I defend a Minimalistic State, not an Absent State. Governments are there for a reason, and one of the most important reasons is to ensure that the fabric of society is not destroyed by such rabid individualism in the first place.
Ironically, the mentality you cry about is the same mentality that saved the US after the Great Depression, with your great "socialist" president Roosevelt and his public works initiative. Once more, that is not to say the State should intervene in every possible aspect of our routine lives: but to ensure that the taxes you pay revert back in the form of good roads, military protection and, YES, BASIC health care.
To support anything against this is to be an ANARCHIST, or someone who opposes any form of established governance framework. So if you are ever faced with unemployment (a pretty easy example nowadays in the US), you CANNOT presume that you deserve such a fate and that the State is not supposed to at least ensure you have access to a doctor when push comes to shove.
I may also note that not even Ron Paul supports what you say, since his opposition to mandated health care is grounded on constitutional factors, not ideological ones (i.e., that no one deserves a public health service).
As for mandated vacation days or hours, this comes from a basic legal tenet called "hypossuficiency", which in its turn resulted from the horrendous abuses perpetrated in the UK during the Industrial Revolution (where workers were treated as animals, similarly to what YOU criticize about China today)...
In other words, just a basic framework to guarantee basic human rights to people...or would you say that the right to a minimum period of rest is also abusive? Is it good to be a slave in America?
