Delusion in American Politics

Freud distinguished between delusion, which is belief in something which can be proved to be false, and illusion, which is belief in something which cannot be proven to be true. In his book, The Future of an Illusion, he said that belief in delusion leads to psychosis and belief in illusion leads to neurosis. The following is a list of common delusions current in contemporary US politics. This is a work in progress, and I may add more delusions later.

Delusion no. 1. Global climate isn't changing. Corollary delusion: Human activity is not causing global climate change.

This belief is clearly delusional. More than 99% of the world's climate scientists and a tremendous weight of evidence agree that planet earth is growing warmer and that human activity is the primary cause. This is the 2013 report. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/

Delusion no. 2. The US government is hobbled by tremendous crippling debt and so we must massively decrease government spending.

In fact, most professional economists assert that US national debt is not overly large in relation to the size of our economy. Debt is mostly investment in our future. Most of our debt is owed to American citizens. Further, we could eliminate debt by making large corporations and financial institutions and the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes, as they used to 50 years ago. Here's a summary of the debt from the Congressional Budget Office. http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/04/news/economy/budget-outlook-deficits-cbo/ Here's an article by Richard D. Wolf on debt. http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/wolff180811.html We actually need more spending on education and other social services, infrastructure, green technology, and lots of other things that help people and society.

Delusion no. 3.  Private business is more efficient than government. We should shrink government and outsource as much as we can.

In fact, government is much more efficient than private business at doing many things. The US Postal Service is more cost-effective than any of its competitors even though they skim off the profitable delivery business and leave it to deliver everything else. Congress has made the postal service look unprofitable by forcing it to fund 75 years of employee pensions in advance, a requirement imposed on no other government agency or private company. Health care is much more efficiently delivered in other countries by government than by US insurance companies. It is both cheaper and everyone is covered. Government is better at providing electricity at lower prices as well as internet and telephone service and water. When we had an effective system of education in the United States, it was run by the government. Now that that public system has been starved of cash and has severe problems, there is a delusion that privately run schools will do better. They don't.

Delusion no. 4 The US government promotes democracy.

I recommend Stephen Kinzer's book, Overthrow, to debunk this delusion. Kinzer presents a long series of historical events in which the US government overthrew foreign governments, most of them democratic, and mostly replaced them with tyrants. Indeed, since the late 18th century, the US government has been the principal enemy  of democracy in the world. Of course, in the United States itself, the Supreme Court and many state governments are engaged in a full-scale assault on democracy by flooding elections with huge amounts of money and making it much more difficult for eligible voters to vote. George W. Bush lost two elections which were awarded to him by vote theft, endorsed by the Supreme Court the first time.