I'm perfectly willing to pay higher taxes, as I did in the UK, if it means that all people will have access to decent health and education. Not only do I believe that these are basic human rights, it is also difficult to challenge the fact that the whole of society benefits when there is no impoverished underclass, and how better to achieve this than by providing free health and education? Having said that, I have to agree with those who point out that the DR does not have the conditions in place for this to happen. The reality here demonstrates that there have to be major changes in the workings of the system and its officials before people would entrust larger chunks of their income to the state for it to administer effectively.
One point I disagree with is that state-employed professionals are by definition inferior. My father is a retired doctor (an excellent one, it goes without saying) who always resisted the pressure to work in the private sector, believing medicine to be a vocation in itself and not something that should be motivated by profit. I know of many others like him both in the teaching and medical professions. There are incompetent doctors and teachers across both the private and public sectors.
Again, having said that, I have some sympathy with the argument that those who choose to 'go private' can do so if they wish.
To the question of distributing left wing leaflets? I think the poster, in asking that question, showed that he had not done much thinking or research. Who just lands in a country to distribute leaflets without sounding out local like-minded organisations first? Had he done so, he would have got all the information he wanted from the many left-wing organisations that exist here, and checked whether there was any relevance or need for his message, as well as the legality of it.
BTW Isn't it funny that all these right-wingers are cheering on a candidate whose roots in left-wing philosophy are no secret? That they abhor the President, whose political origins are from the conservative side of the spectrum? I know that right and left mean little these days in party politics, particularly Dominican party politics, but the irony remains.
How many posters here blast Dominicans for their passivity in the face of government abuses? Wouldn't it be a good thing if there was a little more resistance?
Chiri
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