quote:Originally posted by The Pixiest: Strider: That's the same reason I'll never vote for democrats. One must have economic freedom before the other freedoms even matter. To control our wallet is to control our life.
There are plenty of ways to control our lives sans wallet. But more fundamentally, I'd ask exactly what you mean by economic freedom and how it is attained.
Wallet is nothing compared to "health". Controlling (providing) healthcare is the ultimate form of control. When what you eat and how you behave impacts all of society = when your hot dog eating habit and sedentary lifestyle negatively impacts the collective government expense, you are no longer free. Nationalized healthcare might be second only to cap and trade legislation when it comes to a loss of individual freedom. Communist progressives are using healthcare and global warming to make their socialist agenda palatable to the American people.
Healthcare for all, means centralized control (taxation) of behavior that impacts your health. You like to eat fried chicken or smoke cigarettes,....you'll pay a premium. Cap and trade legislation,....everything uses energy.
Foot in the door, frog in a pan...we know where this road ends. IE NY soda tax. What made soda relavent for targeted taxation? Individual freedom vs government freebies. Nothing is free. Nothing is universal.
posted
Why don't you go ask the folks in countries with nationalized health care just how much they hate not being able to eat at Mcdonalds?
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:Originally posted by BlackBlade: Why don't you go ask the folks in countries with nationalized health care just how much they hate not being able to eat at Mcdonalds?
Like Greece or the other immature nations of the EU that are going broke, cutting their budgets and raising the socialist retirement ages?
Legally, Americans don't have to sign up for social security. If you refuse you can't get a job or go to a public school though. Nations with national healthcare do have McDonalds...pay twice as much for a burger though. You're "free" to imbibe...if you're willing to pay the tax.
Taxation isn't about money, it's about life. Every man has a limited number of hours to live. Many of those hours are spent working to make an income. Taxing a burger, tabacco, light bulb or SUV is taking away the profits of a man's life. How many hours per day should a person work for the government? What is fair? What about people that don't work at all? Money represents the hours and effort people have invested in their lives. Some people study and work, others live on the guarantees of society. We have a limited number of hours in our lives. Some of those hours, we work to make money. Many people sacrificed years of many sleepless days for a high income later on.
"The rich" is an easy target but no one talks about the effort. It takes a dedicated student, junior high through grad school, and thousands of hours of effort to get to that point. My 11 year old daughter understands this concept and is top of her class. Twenty years from now, she'll be one of the demonized "privileged".
The hours of your day is your life. What does one who works owe to one who doesn't. Why study hard and put in the time when what you earn is a universal promise? There is a tipping point. Your tax rate is your slave rate. How many working hours do you owe to the government? I can take care of my family.
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quote:Originally posted by malanthrop: [QB]Nations with national healthcare do have McDonalds...pay twice as much for a burger though. You're "free" to imbibe...if you're willing to pay the tax.
quote:Originally posted by malanthrop: [QB]Nations with national healthcare do have McDonalds...pay twice as much for a burger though. You're "free" to imbibe...if you're willing to pay the tax.
US 3.22 UK 3.90 *SOCIALIZED HEALTHCARE* Euro region: 3.82 *SOCIALIZED HEALTHCARE* AUS 2.67 *SOCIALIZED HEALTHCARE* CZ 2.41 *SOCIALIZED HEALTHCARE* NZ 3.16 *SOCIALIZED HEALTHCARE* SK 3.08 *SOCIALIZED HEALTHCARE*
etc etc etc etc
I don't actually have any opinion on mal's assertion here; I have no difficulty believing you are correct. However, looking at that table I do notice that the USA big mac price is based on an average of New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Atalanta. I wonder why they chose that... just logistics? I imagine it would be pretty difficult to get an accurate average of every big mac in the country.
But that means the price might be slightly inflated. In my experience, big macs do tend to be a little more expensive in the city than in rural area. But... not nearly enough to be double anything. So... yeah, he's still wrong.
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quote:Foot in the door, frog in a pan...we know where this road ends. IE NY soda tax.
A side note: if this road ends at soda taxes, it seems to me that this is in fact a relatively small price to pay. I'm not a huge fan of punitive taxation, myself, but it would never occur to me that the worst-case scenario for rampant authoritarian government would be a tax on soda. It seems to me that, for example, our society's tolerance of the ordered assassination of American citizens is a far worse symptom of a similar trend.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote:When what you eat and how you behave impacts all of society = when your hot dog eating habit and sedentary lifestyle negatively impacts the collective government expense, you are no longer free.
I'm not sure I get the logic behind this complaint. Under the private sector health care situation, people who take poor care of themselves cost the system just as much. However, because of how it is structured, this cost is shared across the people in the same pool as them. You're saying that in a system where people have to take financial responsibility for their choices that lead to them needing more health care is less free than one where they have no more liability for this than people who make better choices.
From the perspective of the fatty junk food eater, I can get that they'd want other people to pay for their mistakes, but I don't think that this is more free. Actually, I find it the opposite. Obviously, in any pooled system, I'm going to be picking up some of the tab for the people who make bad choices, but it seems to me that one where they bear more and I bear less is both the more free and the more fair one.
Likewise with a theoretical cap and trade system. Fossil fuel energy generation has an impact that goes beyond its direct costs. Cleaning up or dealing with the pollution that this creates has indirect costs that someone has to bear. Right now, this is either taken care of by the government or it exists as a sort of hidden cost through the effect of pollution on the people hit by it. As far as I can see, cap and trade is supposed to be moving these costs more onto the people whose energy generation and consumption causes them.
From what I can tell, you seem to be arguing for systems where the costs and responsibility for people's choices are subsidized by the whole of society instead of falling more fully on those people and yet somehow this is more free and less socialist.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
It struck me last week that Evil Obamacare is the 2010 WMD.
In 2002 we all knew that Hussein had WMD in Iraq. He had tons and tons of the stuff, and our mission was to stop him from using it on others--either other Iraq innocents, his neighbors, Israel, or even the US.
Anyone who said differently was just wrong. No one bothered to check the facts because it was just given--Hussein had WMD.
Today we look back on that scare and laugh. It was so obvious he didn't have them (not counting some 20 year old forgotten stockpiles of weak mustard gas).
So too--in 10 years we are going to look back at the Health Care Law of 2010 and wonder what all the fuss and fear was about. It is not a take over of health care. It is not a governmental regimentation of doctors and medical practices. It is an attempt to get people covered under private insurance. That is all.
The most vocal critics of it find danger 4-10 steps removed. If it works, and If a public option is enacted and If the public option out performs private options and If then a single-payer nation wide insurance program is all that is left then those running the program may make bad decisions. There are a lot of ifs in there. As it stands now, people die because they can't afford to go to a doctor so they wait out their sickness until its too late. No ifs. Just facts.
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How on earth Norway manages to have socialized health care, and top the prosperity index is beyond me. They must be fudging their numbers.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote: How on earth Norway manages to have socialized health care, and top the prosperity index is beyond me. They must be fudging their numbers.
Is it really fair to compare a small group, about half of New York City's population for comparison, of overwhelming white people to a massively larger and much more diverse group?
Posts: 1918 | Registered: Mar 2005
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quote:Originally posted by kmbboots: Why do you think the diversity of the group matters?
Because people are just plain more willing to share with others like themselves. It's a sad fact, but there you go. Thus, socialised systems work better in ethnically homogenous areas, because people are less willing to cheat the system when the beneficiaries are visibly like themselves. Such opposition to our welfare system as does exist in Norway is, I'm sad to report, very strongly correlated with opposition to immigration.
The other point is that there are strong path-dependency issues. Norwegians have a thousand-year tradition of working together, sharing with the local community, and generally just being more socialist than capitalist, because for those thousand years there was no dang capital. People who tried to go it alone in that climate just plain failed; piss off your neighbours so much that they wouldn't help when disaster struck, and you were a goner. This leads to a completely different cultural tradition than the frontier-pioneer-individualist ideal of American settlement. (I remind you that the southern part of Norway is at the latitude of Newfoundland. Try settling Newfoundland as a single pioneer in a Conestoga and see how far you get.) You just cannot map the laws and structures that work on this sort of tradition onto the atomised American culture and expect good results; indeed it's breaking down just because we're becoming wealthy, urban, and isolated.
Culture matters. So does scale. Norway's total population is about half that of New York City. You would not try to govern the continental US the way New York City is governed, or the state of Ohio; nor would you assume that Texans want the same government structure that New Englanders do. So why assume you can lift things wholesale from Norway?
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I'm not assuming that. But I think that there are things we can learn from cultures that are getting things right that we can't seem to manage.
Posts: 11187 | Registered: Sep 2005
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I wouldn't worry all that much about it, I'm not really convinced that cultural effects are all that strong anyways. I'm sure there are some, but they might just get swamped by other factors. In Canada, there are only fairly small differences in healthcare support between provinces that are fairly homgenous and those that have very diverse cities like Toronto and Vancouver.
In fact, you'll find much more support for universal healthcare in those cities than say, the more conservative and homogeneous Calgary, so meh.
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quote: How on earth Norway manages to have socialized health care, and top the prosperity index is beyond me. They must be fudging their numbers.
Is it really fair to compare a small group, about half of New York City's population for comparison, of overwhelming white people to a massively larger and much more diverse group?
No not wholesale it isn't. But when you live in a place like I do where American exceptionalism is taken for granted, you start to wonder what list does America have to start to bottom out on before people realize that other countries have some pretty good ideas too.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote: How on earth Norway manages to have socialized health care, and top the prosperity index is beyond me. They must be fudging their numbers.
Is it really fair to compare a small group, about half of New York City's population for comparison, of overwhelming white people to a massively larger and much more diverse group?
We've been over this before. The entire eurozone is more diverse, spends on average about half as much per person on healthcare, and they receive better care and live longer.
Our system sucks, socialized healthcare is superior by all reasonable metrics, and America's freemarketeers should, at long last, get over that.
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posted
Those of us who support a free market (yet universal) healthcare system see nothing contradictory about state-run systems outperforming our current system (which is aggressively not free market).
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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quote:Originally posted by kmbboots: Why do you think the diversity of the group matters?
Because people are just plain more willing to share with others like themselves. It's a sad fact, but there you go. Thus, socialised systems work better in ethnically homogenous areas, because people are less willing to cheat the system when the beneficiaries are visibly like themselves. Such opposition to our welfare system as does exist in Norway is, I'm sad to report, very strongly correlated with opposition to immigration.
The other point is that there are strong path-dependency issues. Norwegians have a thousand-year tradition of working together, sharing with the local community, and generally just being more socialist than capitalist, because for those thousand years there was no dang capital. People who tried to go it alone in that climate just plain failed; piss off your neighbours so much that they wouldn't help when disaster struck, and you were a goner. This leads to a completely different cultural tradition than the frontier-pioneer-individualist ideal of American settlement. (I remind you that the southern part of Norway is at the latitude of Newfoundland. Try settling Newfoundland as a single pioneer in a Conestoga and see how far you get.) You just cannot map the laws and structures that work on this sort of tradition onto the atomised American culture and expect good results; indeed it's breaking down just because we're becoming wealthy, urban, and isolated.
Culture matters. So does scale. Norway's total population is about half that of New York City. You would not try to govern the continental US the way New York City is governed, or the state of Ohio; nor would you assume that Texans want the same government structure that New Englanders do. So why assume you can lift things wholesale from Norway?
Socialism only works in homogeneous societies. Socialism is a great idea that requires sameness of the society.....hence, the genocides of the 20th century with the aim of a socialist utopia. The Amish in the US are a great socialist success... they build each others homes and barns. Successful socialism (sameness) requires everyone contribute the same, have the same culture and values. Class warfare cannot lead to successful socialism. Class warfare leads to things like the "killing fields" of Cambodia, where people threw away their glasses because only the evil educated had glasses. Demonizing the rich....who wants to be rich? Maybe the poor will start offering jobs.
Socialism is a great idea that cannot succeed in a melting pot. It could work in a purging pot, where no one has a job because bosses are evil. It could work in nation that outlaws minarets, the Bible or Jews.
quote:Socialism only works in homogeneous societies. Socialism is a great idea that requires sameness of the society.....hence, the genocides of the 20th century with the aim of a socialist utopia. The Amish in the US are a great socialist success... they build each others homes and barns. Successful socialism (sameness) requires everyone contribute the same, have the same culture and values. Class warfare cannot lead to successful socialism. Class warfare leads to things like the "killing fields" of Cambodia, where people threw away their glasses because only the evil educated had glasses. Demonizing the rich....who wants to be rich? Maybe the poor will start offering jobs.
So malanthrop, how was the movie Witness? Enjoyable?
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posted
I like this new "No no, socialism only works in homogenous societies" thing. It's the spirit child of yesteryear's failed "No no, socialism works in the small countries, but wouldn't work in our LARGE country."
The whole idea that it only works in places like Norway because they're liberal KKK utopias is about as well-informed and impressive as 'herp derp socialized healthcare results in 2x mcdonalds costs olololol'
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:What does a "free market yet universal" system mean?
Remove healthcare from employers entirely. Create Very Large Groups (millions of groups, at minimum) that are easy to discover based on demographic information and overlap heavily. Have insurance companies bid on offering standardized insurance to those groups, and then be able to offer whatever additional options they want. Any health care company insuring more than some small number (a few thousands) of a group be required to offer their plans at similar rates to everyone in the group. Have insurance be required, with an accompanying progressive tax (ideally folded into the general tax program, but whatever) that is used to subsidize those with difficulty affording insurance (possibly they would also be members of a special group with a sort of "automatic insurance" they don't have to explicitly purchase, to simplify things).
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
Nearly all of the people I know who say they favor the free market would never, ever, ever describe that as a free market solution to healthcare. They would say it's not free market at all, especially what with the blatant governmental meddling and regulation.
It probably needs a different descriptive term.
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posted
If those who favor a free market support the current system, then they aren't remotely aware of what a free market is.
A free market only exists in the context of rules and norms that guide and constrain the mutually consenting actions of individuals. While what I propose is more constraint than normal, those who are familiar with the details of contract, trade, and labor laws will be aware that the free markets we have in those are not some void absent structure, either.
I call the setup free market (admittedly with certain non-free market components, in order to deal with the unique problems of health care -- that's the "yet universal" part) because it preserves most of the properties that are considered desirable in a free market: many sellers and many buyers, price competition, product differentiation, price signals, et cetera.
It is also significantly more free market than the other serious propositions.
Health care being tied to employers is going to become a serious problem in the US, with the option to not provide health insurance going away. That significantly increases the cost of a low-wage employee. If that cost were supported by society at large, employers would be able to employ substantially more low-wage employees.
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quote:Originally posted by fugu13: If those who favor a free market support the current system, then they aren't remotely aware of what a free market is.
They don't think that the current system is free market either. It's not. Nor, I think, would they be willing to say that this is. It's just a different flavor of statist meddling. They would probably break into hives at the audacious idea that a plan where the government requires coverage of all people is in any sense 'free market.' It's coerced by the government if you don't have the option to not be covered; it's not universal if you do.
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posted
Requiring coverage is the least part of what one might argue prevents there from being a free market in that arrangement. Our car insurance markets, for instance, are quite free and function extremely well, despite it being a requirement for driving a car around. The increase in "freedom" of the market without the universality requirement would be miniscule.
They might feel it isn't particularly free in other senses, but a universality requirement is at best a minimal deviation from a free market, especially when it is addressing a market failure (markets with market failures are also not free markets).
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posted
As a point of interest, the original version of the Norwegian constitution did in fact outlaw Jews; also Jesuits. ("Jesuitter og Munkeordener maae ikke taales. Jøder ere fremdeles udelukkede fra Adgang til Riget." Or in English, "Jesuits and cloistered orders shall not be tolerated. Jews remain forbidden to enter the kingdom.") The clause was repealed in 1851. The laws at the time were anything but socialist, though. Workhouses for the poor, canings for thieves, no unions. Malanthrop should approve.
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: It's coerced by the government if you don't have the option to not be covered; it's not universal if you do.
I'm not sure I agree that it's coercion to make people pay for services they receive. If you go to hospital, the ER has to save your life. Then they bill you (in the most convoluted and dishonest way possible, but leave that aside for now). Then people who don't have a few thousand in the bank default on their debt.
If our options are to make you pay upfront or let you die or make you pay upfront with gradual taxes over the years, I vote for the second option as more humane.
Posts: 2283 | Registered: Dec 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Dan_Frank: But that means the price might be slightly inflated. In my experience, big macs do tend to be a little more expensive in the city than in rural area. But... not nearly enough to be double anything. So... yeah, he's still wrong.
Also typically in Europe there are fewer "rural" McDonalds' than in the US. Most especially this is true in central Europe- CZR has McDonalds' only in the most highly developed urban areas, and a few of the key busiest traffic corridors.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: I like this new "No no, socialism only works in homogenous societies" thing. It's the spirit child of yesteryear's failed "No no, socialism works in the small countries, but wouldn't work in our LARGE country."
Well, the idea that European countries are more homogeneous than the US is a tad ridiculous. It could only be true if you were very selective about what aspects of different societies you were willing to compare. Are there more white people in Europe? Yes. Does that obtain in the same way as in the United States? No...
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posted
I'm a Delawarean and I'm just jumping in to say I met Christine O'Donnell yesterday at my highschool football game (she was campaigning for votes) and she seemed really nice and charming as a candidate.
But when I looked into her eyes it felt like she was trying to steal my soul!
She may very well be a witch Posts: 856 | Registered: Jun 2007
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quote:Originally posted by Samprimary: It's coerced by the government if you don't have the option to not be covered; it's not universal if you do.
I'm not sure I agree that it's coercion to make people pay for services they receive. If you go to hospital, the ER has to save your life. Then they bill you (in the most convoluted and dishonest way possible, but leave that aside for now). Then people who don't have a few thousand in the bank default on their debt.
If our options are to make you pay upfront or let you die or make you pay upfront with gradual taxes over the years, I vote for the second option as more humane.
When you are paying through taxes, you are not "paying upfront" for yourself, you are paying for everyone, and you have no choice in the matter. This is government coercion. Sure, it is morally and tactically superior to the "free market" solution (which is no obligation to either pay for or provide medical coverage or care), but its obviously coercion.
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