The people and corporations who individually make more than the entire lower class combined, by screwing over and stepping on said lower class. "Where the money comes from" is the easiest possible thing to solve in a modern socialist economy, because technology allows us to individually produce more than we consume.
Have you done the necessary calculations to prove this?
The people and corporations who individually make more than the entire lower class combined, by screwing over and stepping on said lower class.
Which would accomplish, what, exactly?
Tax every person for 100% of the income of everyone who makes over a million and you would have, what, 2/3 of a trillion dollars?
Obamacare's annual cost is about 2 trillion. That's just Obamacare. Sanders wants the government to take on the health care costs of everyone, and that's just Sanders' health care plan. Not including the other stuff he wants socialized.
So congratulations, you've accomplished funding 1/3 of the yearly cost of a program that is far less than the cost of Bernie Sanders' program. And I'm sure the economy's not going to take a hit at all from all the peoples' incomes you wiped out. Great work.
So, where's the rest of the money going to come from?
First of all, your numbers are atrociously wrong. The entire US budget is about 3.5 trillion per year and only 830 billion of that goes to healthcare, of which the ACA is only a part. That cost is approximately $2500 per person per year. Your 2 trillion figure is the approximate prediction for a decade, not a year.
Consider also that the US spends more per person on heathcare than any other country in the world by a huge margin, and yet has far worse overall health. The reason for this is that most of that healthcare spending doesn't actually go toward providing healthcare but instead to insurance companies. If you cut them out completely by nationalizing insurance you cut the costs significantly for much higher gains in public health. This also, in the long run, lowers the expenses of hospitals and individual doctors, because of the insurance problem being alleviated.
Essentially the reason that healthcare is so expensive is because insurance is a massive parasite that takes most of the money in the health system and funnels it into their own pockets.
I feel the question is that we are a large country of vast designs, and that thus far the Reaganite vision for the nation has not done much service in sustaining us into the 21st century. We have had Republicans in control for a majority of the time over the last 30 years and largely influencing policy. One of the largest ideological tenets of the last several decades is what is called neo-liberalism, which is basically a neo-conservative political leaning. So we have the libertarian segment who sees that the government is too large and it needs to be taken down, so that the free market can more charge. The left wants bigger government or creating new systems in place.
The Libertarian movement has become more successful in blaming government for the economy and has found many sympathetic ears and grown in the last few years, and now we're seeing a counter formulation in the form of Bernie Sanders. What Ron Paul, and now Rand Paul, with the Mises Institute and other libertarian organizations have been moving towards with the Tea Party is to create a new form of conservative coalition. What Obama created was a coalition that was center-left, and this is seeing the real leftism that was the New Left of the 1960's. In some ways by evicting socially liberal candidates from the GOP and hunting down moderates and labeling them as a RINO via the Tea Party's guiding popular headlines offers little recourse.
The modern GoP does not encompass enough ideas that are tenable to sustain a moderate wing as a big tent party, and we're in a political shift right now because the party has not had a chance to sell the libertarian debate yet. In part this means that people from the Old New Left are coming out and challenging what is called the Third Way politics of the 1990's that Bill CLinton and Tony Blair practiced. The Third Way, which took aspects of neo-conservatism and placed into it some more leftward ideals, created the guiding policies of the 1990's. During the 2000's, we saw a combination of an attempted repeat of Reagan era policies without necessarily the rebound nor the understanding of the current economic foundation problems.
The issue is not that libertarianism or social democratic philosophies are wrong, it's just that they are have a time stamp for their ideas when they can be implemented and what quality of life a person wants and who thrives in those civilizations. Libertarianism is more rough and tumble, and if you read the Mises Institution there's a lot of cherry picking over data sets and trying to spin certain areas in history that were violent as "not being so violent." The role of the Mises Institute is when it comes to a comprehension of public safety, disregard it. There are some good refutations and some interesting policy debates, but overall the intellectual moorings with people like Rothbard are wanton.
Socialism in the classical sense is also left intellectually wanton in a similar vein as libertarianism is today. There are huge negatives associated with socialism and we have a natural disposition to hate on socialism because we as a nation fought socialism for so long and have a Jeffersonian tradition to hate on taxes. We are a money loving culture, so we see the government as a burden and naturally think someone is going to steal from us and screw us over by "taking our money." That's it, that's the entire point and fear that comes with socialism. It's looking at communism and people fearing that someone in government is going to screw up and blow everything to hell or outright conquer the US and lead to tyranny.
So what neo-conservativism tries to do is moderate the tone, but has failed as an ideology because it's moorings took into consideration specific assumptions about people that are not necessarily true. The presumption with Hayek is that people whenever given the freedom will often choose to create something to help others, but we also must contend in the reality that there is no free lunch and scalability is a universal problem. What makes libertarians upset is the concept of a public good, because they have a natural predisposition ideologically to only see mistrust and value the individual. And the thing with a libertarian is that they are willing to take a lower standard of living as a sacrifice, however the people that I have encountered as libertarians tend to be white and come from fairly good backgrounds and have good jobs. So I have never really encountered a libertarian thinker that has really been hit hard, rather that libertarians who have been hit hard like Rand or Rothbard is that they escaped a place that tried to actively kill them. One of their fundamental, big, big big huge life experiences was to escape communism. Mises himself was German. Libertarianism is in large part a reaction to fascism and communism, rather than what we would call socialism today or in its modern strain social democracy.
The large thinkers often cited like Mises or Rothbard or Rand have some really bad intellectual moorings and really bad habits, including Hayek. The first problem with Mises is that he discounts the role of Madisonian factions in a multi-level system as he's never really experienced it in his life, to my knowledge. Hayek was enthralled to the concept of individualism and feared the rise of government in the Road to Surfdom, however he also placed too much weight on the ease of individualism to create something as well as leadership. Most people don't lead, they follow and copy other people's behaviors. Which then brings up Rothbard, which is probably one of the most paranoid and delusional intellectuals that I have crossed during that time period. For starters, some of his ideas are just out in left such as selling babies to families instead of having a formalized adoption system. He's an economist, not a political scientist or a social worker. His intellectual moorings come out of a fear of government, and it shows hardcore. Rand, the issue with her, is basically she took her fear that turned into hatred while having a romantic idea about personhood that she turned into a political ideology that lasts to today. There's some good tenets, but there is also a lack of understanding altruism and strategy in creating a civil society. She had romantic inclinations and was a romantic in her faith of people, but she lacked a stoic sensibility of scale within the realm of the individual and the capacity for harm.
The biggest issue with libertarianism is the non aggression principal, in which it typically is a worthless point because it basically codifies the social golden rule of "treat others as you wish to be treated" with the added caveat of "and I'll treat you the way you treat me if you hurt me." Which is a fine concept, until we get to the second area and then begin to look at the degeneration into a lack of justice without final and binding arbitration through a constant system of attacks and reprisals. Basically, there is no end to tit-for-tat until a large event happens that triggers an awakening moment. A civil society bypasses that event through rule of law, and thus far libertarianism has not created a soluble and stable system that scales well and as of yet nothing competes with Common Law that has been refined by many countries over centuries.
Now Hayek had some good ideas and a bit more moderate than most, which is why a lot of conservatives like him. Milton Friedman had some good policy ideas, because he himself understood certain dynamics. I severely question his son's politics, and overall I don't care for the younger Friedman generally because he is an anarchist for reasons cited above with a failure to understand Common Law's legacy versus a recycled version of the golden rule. What we need to do is to take within the context of the situation and the time period we live in and come to terms that we are not doing things right, and that the need for different ideas is coming back into vogue with Jacksonian politics, Tea Party, the rise of libertarianism, see Ron Paul and friends, and then came the left with failed starts and struts through the Occupy Movement. What we may see now is the rise of socialism over the next few decades and this is something that I have anticipated for multiple years as a yin-wang to libertarianism with market fundamentalism.
The key sequencing difference between a socialist, a communist, and a social democrat is that the social democrat has been tried out in multiple countries including Canada and to some respects, arguably Israel. Which is why I find it deliciously funny after calling Obama a socialist for decades, we in the conservative movement are going to get a real bona fide socialist in a refined tradition and saying "Hey, why can't we be like these success stories?" It is going to place better ideological competition and hopefully finally, finally force libertarianism to deal with its fundamental flaws such as an over focus on freedom without understanding that people want a sustained level of quality of life; the Hobbes trade off argument for security that the NAP is not qualified to contend with especially with the Common Law tradition for conflict resolution.
What socialism had to contend with was capitalism's success in the market economy, today a modern socialist in the form of social democrat would argue that capitalism is a wonderful thing and that free markets are great. This is no different than authoritarian capitalism, it embraces capitalism as one of the governing laws of a society. This is the greatest innovation that socialism and what remains of communism have had, is the adoption of the free market system. Now a libertarian would argue that a mixed economy isn't free, but for the most part Non-Austrian School academics and adherents will argue that a mixed economy is a free market economy. Mises and Rothbard disagree over this very tenet about a mixed economy, but like I said, most people don't know who these guys are and call the US a free market economy (which is a mixed economy and is free). That raises another problem with libertarianism, using words and definitions that are not within context of other more mainstream contexts and trying to be counterfactual within their own tradition creating an ivory tower problem.
With that said, social democratism does indeed have a problem with overregulation as seen with things such as metered internet use in Canada (think your water bill or phone versus your home internet access as Canada vs. US system). So there are also issues with freedom of speech, such as cases where you can write something about someone's dead Grandfather and get sued inside of a British Court. Granted Britain follows more of what is called Fabianism, but I digress. The point being is that you get less freedom of speech, higher taxes, more regulatory controls, but typically access to more public goods and more income stability.
I think what libertarians have to offer is that if you can win big, you can win big but you can also lose big. Hence SurgingChaos' point about being Izzet. Within the Izzet guild things blow up, and if you have a Selesnya political ideology that is horrible and scares the hell out of you. Probably because an Izzet society historically does destroy the commons and over time shifts to become Temur or some other tri-color combination over time like Jeskai during a low corruption phase or a Grixis one during a high corruption phase. A Selesnya society arguable, and I understand the oversimplicity here in color combinations, will during specific time periods become Abzan as they become more aggressive militarily to compete with other aggressive powers like what Canada did during World War II. Now with that said, these metaphors are simple for the sake of illustrating the point to people here that "ideas change relative to the time periods they're in." So a good idea from the 1800's US for policy may not be good today. So in essence that if you're playing and winning with Abzan, you should continue playing Abzan until you start seeing less wins. And we are at time period in US history where we are trying to take in new ideas for the 21st century.
And I've yet to touch on Jacksonianism, what the problem with what the Tea Party is trying to sell is basically that we don't need big banks and the government to intervene. Yet, as we see that is was incompetent regulators, a tradition that started under Reagan, and overly predatory companies that saw profit as the only sole good adventure. What Sanders rails against is the 1980's Gordon Gecko that "greed is good." Look, politically I am a conservative. But, but I have to read his Filibuster from 2010 and I have to say I agree with some of it:
I invite you to read it in full to really understand his perspective on things, and he does not sound as "crazy socialist" as people want to make him out to be. Sure, of course socialism as an ideology has problems, but unlike libertarianism it has evolved and has been practically used in smaller countries and can and is trying to be established in larger countries through the social democratic model. I do not think he will win, he is instead a sort of Walter Mondale that will speak to specific issues and make a sharp contrast with libertarianism. If he can really challenge Rand Paul, I feel it will make the conservative libertarian politics better and sharper for 2024. I just don't see Hilary not being elected only once if she is elected a first time.
Libertarianism is in its teenager phase, where now it has attention and is being tested some what in politics today. However, it lacks the more ancient moorings of older versions of conservativism and arguably I don't really consider libertarianism a form of conservative political philosophy if the person uses anarchistic tenets like NAP.
To place into context what I'm looking for:
1. An appropriate level of government for the time
2. A stable level of taxation
3. Stable level of economic growth that is willing to sacrifice speed for efficiency and stability
4. Tiers in society that people move up and down, but can still "make a living"
5. Freedom from government and freedom of speech within reason
6. The ability to provide a future for the next successor generation, not just creating a generation and leaving them on their own and destroying the moorings that bind societies together.
In the last few generations we have been irresponsible in believing that one thing is the solution, whenever the point is that every tool is a tool for our use. Collectivism is nothing more than a tool, individualism is nothing more than a tool. The main locus is to create a moral, just, safe, and successful place to live for as many beings as possible. Whenever we back away from that goal, we lose ourselves in the process. I'm one of the faceless, no one will remember in a few generations let alone know what I am or what I look like. I simply do not matter, what matters are the people I influence now who will act as the face in a chain of events that cascades forward into whatever will become of what we call human in the future. That is the meaning of individualism as a witness, but our responsibility to those that come from us and forward from us. We have a responsibility to them not to obliterate what has worked for previous generations by throwing our inheritance for law, wealth in all its forms, our culture, and so much more.
That is what the difference between Izzet and Temur is, that Temur thinks of what is and what will come and what has faded away while also building that better tomorrow. Temur takes pride where it came from, understands the savagery of growth, the need for individualism but also the need for community. Within that realm there is a need for tradition but also innovation. It is within that dialectical balance one can posit to see that whether you see extinct dinosaurs walking around or continue to see elephants roam the Earth a hundred years from now. Past and future. Collective and individual. Hate. Love. Creation. Destruction. Sacred. Desecration. Survival. That is what is meant to be human.
Private Mod Note
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Life is a beautiful engineer, yet a brutal scientist.
I don't really see the effects of the system collapsing everywhere around me, as one would expect considering I live in a socialist country.
How well is Europe doing right now?
For the most part, rather decent. Majority of countries have declining amounts of debt. Finland isn't doing great, mostly because our export trade to Russia is cut off, but it's not too bad either. We've had to move some schools three blocks apart together in larger buildings to save on costs.
A shrinking economy benefits people? A bankrupt country benefits people? This is news to me. We should go ask the people of Greece how well their being is right now.
No, but there are decisions that will shrink the economy but bring greater benefits elsewhere. And the plan isn't exactly to go bankrupt.
I didn't say economy wasn't important. I said that it was not an end-all-be-all statistic,
Again, in a debate about the economic soundness of a police, you're trying to downplay the significance of looking at the economies of countries?
In my opinion, the goal of any economic policy should be to create well-being. Growth and jobs create well-being, but they are not the only things that do. Some byproducts of economic growth, such as pollution and inequality, also destroy well-being. Each economic system is a compromise. Some deliver higher growth, and with it higher possibility of making a fortune for yourself. Others deliver higher standards of living and lower inequality.
If the economy is the only thing that matters, laissez-faire complete freeform capitalistic anarchy that can form excessive monopolies and cartels is going to win out. I would not want to live in such a country, however.
and that having a great economy that only creates well-being for 0.5% of the people would not be a very worthwhile thing to aim at.
Right, because only 0.5% of our country's people are better off than Columbia. Sure, that's exactly how things work.
I am not sure whether or not to take this strawman, print it on fine paper and glue it to every centimeter of my wall or to incinerate my computer for having had to display it. Furthermore it is a strawman regarding an imaginary situation. (See: Would not be.) The goal of that sentence was obviously to demonstrate the point that economic growth does not necessarily improve the living conditions for most people.
It does not seem to be productive to push for GDP growth without raising taxes or systems that would allow the government to get out of debt. There really is no reason to not have centralized healthcare,
What do you think centralized healthcare would accumulate if not debt?
Increasing taxes to fund the centralized healthcare would cost US, as a whole, less money. Currently, you spend more than double the amount Finland does on healthcare, per capita. In fact, there are only two countries with higher health expenditure per capita than the US: Norway and Switzerland, both countries where everything is bloody expensive. Both still have better life expectancy to show for their spending, and actually spend a significantly lower percentage of their GDP. Centralized healthcare allows (as I have explained earlier in this thread) for higher leverages when negotiating prices and thus actually fosters competition. Right now Americans are forced to negotiate in smaller groups or alone, which ends up with them forced to either take really bad deals or risk their health.
The only people that benefit from the lack of centralized healthcare are the companies providing healthcare and the insurances.
A: Desirable, but unachievable. B: Desirable and achievable. C: Undesirable and unachievable. D: Undesirable, but achievable.
Ok, (A) does not exist. There is no such thing as a plan that is desirable but unachievable. If a plan is not is not feasible, it is a bad plan.[/quote]
We did not talk about a plan. We talked about ideas. Bernie Sanders certainly does not have a plan.
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I'm about to read whatever it is Frostdragon4 posted again before replying to it. A few times, and probably Googling some of the terms. Not disregarding it, but a post that well thought-out requires a well thought-out response.
The Sage is occupied with the unspoken
and acts without effort.
Teaching without verbosity,
producing without possessing,
creating without regard to result,
claiming nothing,
the Sage has nothing to lose.
Bernie Sanders, like most people on the left, is obsessed with the Nordic countries. Which really irks me, because every time someone brings up the "why can't we just be like Sweden" argument they completely ignore the size of those countries (not to mention the fact that Sweden actually created most of its wealth in a very libertarian environment before the huge welfare state was created). There is no way the Nordic model could ever work in a country with over 300 million people.
I wanted to talk about this thing, and the modern conservative-libertarian argument against this as well, is that the reason socialism is bad because it hurts the Protestant Work Ethic. This means that during a time period, people used delayed gratification to earn money and build businesses and invent things and so on to build up a better quality of life. Sweden didn't exactly have a very libertarian environment, as there was a codification of the rule of law that was formed by traditions rather readily that the Swedish then used as a basis for their markets. It gave a merchant plug and play access to markets while they also delayed their own gratification by working and building up their business until they got the "epic win."
Dependency theory is the supposition that basically means by using welfare state, we created and degenerate people into a place that looks like learned helplessness where people do not advance themselves. We need to balance that against the institutions for plug and play, and that the exclusivity of the current market situation within the economy with concepts such as "overqualified worker" is something that makes people very angry. When people get very angry they tend to act, in this society through the Common Law tradition conflict resolution happens through the governing body of the legislature rather than through force of arms in a purely voluntary situation.
I feel that you're correct with the socialist model as seen in Canada and Nordic countries and a few other European countries and arguably Israel, as it currently doesn't work. It hasn't been invented yet at all, just scaled up models of Anglo-Franco-Germanic Capitalism and Singaporean Capitalism are probably the two largest strains we see today in competition. Basically, it's America vs. China as England vs. Singapore in terms of scale and originality.
But, we need to take a step back, rather than looking at freedom. Forget freedom exists in a context, but what makes me "decide to start a business" and what makes me "decide" to "do something." Well, a part of it is peer pressure from my parents to make something of myself. If my parents are capitalists, odds are I'm a capitalist too. If they succeeded at it, it means I'll probably do it myself. This is why early on the theory of the Protestant Work Ethic, but I think Weber is wrong about the work ethic. It was several factors, for starter during the Middle Ages if I started a business and was a seafaring merchant I could screw people over and take property and not give the other guy his money. Who would be on the hook for me screwing the town over? Why the town of course! There are towns that were invaded or attacked for money because merchants screwed people over, and they made everyone liable for the merchant's theft. There are letters of college students asking not to have to pay, because they cannot afford to off the merchant's theft costs and they felt it was unfair for them to pay for a stranger's costs. It was weird justice like that we have the insurance industry, 14000 modern banking rules, and massive upgrades to maritime and commerce law during the Commerce Revolution. Basically the emergence of modern trade and institutions, really.
Then we have the technological revolutions like double end book keeping and modern accounting among other technological upgrades.
But the difference between a Protestant and a Catholic was mainly cultural, in what is called Sola Scriptura. Sola Scriptura means scripture only, and the biggest biggest biggest deal to a Reformation Protestant was that they wanted everyone to read the Bible. If you can read the Bible, you can get information, if you can get information you can apply information better and interact with the economy writ large and the local government as to protect yourself against shady merchants. This has been one reason why Israel is called start up nation, take one factor about any given Jew like a Protestant; they like reading their scripture. And if people like to read, they read other things and they also have a high tradition of education too which has allowed Israel to maintain high standards and people entering science and so forth. Because they push people, the same with the Confucian tradition and the same with the Erasmian tradition to which Mises and others were educated out of.
Basically, it doesn't matter how good your work ethic is if you keep losing. You need people to keep off your lawn and make sure other people can't screw you in a business transaction. And what lacks right now is that America doesn't support good working habits, modern American companions do not train youngsters, and basically make a mockery of the system. Back in the 1990's it was easy to train people, but today we want off the shelf ready people. But that's a problem related to business also cutting people right off the cuff.
Equally, we need to look at how people get money to start a business, the real hint here is home equity loans. When the home equity line of credit dries up, so does a person's capacity to get money to build a new business as the modern example. The other debt free model, is to build up through having a side business eventually over take the old income. This is made more difficult by people not being able to find a job to pay for start up costs, and getting angel investors and other sorts of things are made difficult without even getting into the Kickstarter models and frustrations that do occur with that.
Capitalism isn't about freedom as a generic construct, capitalism requires a culture. Socialism doesn't trample on it, as Israel, Sweden, Canada, and other successfully entrepreneurial countries and even Communist China has entrepreneurs. This is just something we in the conservative and libertarian side of the equation need to get used to. There are other forms of capitalism than classical liberalism. And we must contend that Sola Scriptura, unlike Confusion tradition, is similar to Orthodox Judaism that it encourages a sort of rigidity in thinking by following only scripture and following a dogmatic fundamentalist tradition that limits learning and exercise. Evangelicals in the US right now are rather dead set against a liberal education, rather than redefining what a liberal education is. What a liberal education offers is the capacity to develop new brands and concepts. You can't make a Cthlulhu game without reading Lovecraft, but Lovecraft couldn't create Cthlulhu without Greek mythology as an early part of his own self education.
And what Sanders talks about in his 2010 Filibuster is about the New Deal, perhaps it is not Mises or Rothbardianism but rather our own experiment with the New Deal itself. Our tradition, unlike what Sanders wants to use isn't found in social democracy, but rather a form of New Deal conservatism that takes upon our long established Whig traditions over our Jacksonian attempts. From Polk through Lincoln there was a great experiment in trying to fuse Hamiltonianism and Jeffersonianism, Hamilton for many parts won the course. Why did Hamilton win? Because he looked at what other people did, and adjusted for success without necessarily discounting human stupidity and foibles. Madison took it a step farther with his statements about factions, and Jay with his opinions over the court. However, it arguably wasn't until a crisis that we are forced to reinvent ourselves. The last major revolution in the US that rebuild this country head to toe was the New Deal the second that succeeded in redefining policy would be Reagan Era in the last hundred years.
The issue with anarchism is that it's trying to undermine a system that has been in place for centuries, and arguably a tradition and existent that is trying to deny a thousand years of Common Law. Common Law like any other law is edited, which is why Shariah Law isn't very popular right now because it hasn't been massively redacted and edited. Our British Common Law tradition comes out of Roman Common Law. We have no true "tradition" of libertarianism, rather what is "libertarian" is a phase within a string of events that creates a stable civil society where a mixed economy exists. This experiment has been ran globally for thousands of years. The pockets that exist without it, are sparse and mostly have massive, massive issues with security. Whether that is Colonial Pennsylvania or something else that lived in fear of Indian attacks.
Social democracy is probably best called "social democracy market economy." That is a place with a welfare state, high levels of taxation, and a highly interactive market economy surrounded by institutions. And Sweden did inherit aspects of trade with other countries for their rules of engagement and was influenced by Common Law and other traditions as they transitioned away from feudalism to building the modern Sweden. The Swedish also had a strong literary tradition along with their capitalism. Perhaps the issue is not so much the issue from, but rather "to" that becomes the problem with hastle.
A socialist wants safety and freedom, while a libertarianism wants unbridled freedom in its raw form. A moderate wants to have aspects of both. A place proper to have unbridled freedom, while also having the safety to practice that freedom. And therein is the paradox, you cannot have one without the other. It is love and marriage. Safety and freedom.
Socialism is also looking at the tribal model, where there was a lot more give and take in the system rather than take by the few. Meaning that children were a village's concerns to raise and there was a system in place to make people into adults. There was a role for you, if you were blind you became a priest. If you were a limp, you learned how to make tools. You get the idea, but those services were done for free to an extent in some early communities or relatively easy to get established.
The issue is more of the capacity for businesses to be more selective in the way they interact with people in cryptic ways through their hiring processes rather than anything that has to do with capitalism itself. What may make cost in the benefit-analysis sense does not always find itself into reality, as right now the system is built towards exploitation in a poaching game for experienced workers as one such example. What the Germanic system tries to do is work counter cyclically by making sure that people are educated and retrained for jobs that work within the market. I've talked with people who do work in social services, the issue isn't money it's coordination.
Sadly, I see the need to reform the welfare system and I see mainly that it is the argument for dependency theory. We already see through some experiments with welfare like the Harlem Children's Zone we see a better and more efficient form of Comenius' dream. And frankly, the creator of the Harlem Children's Zone has went about to state that "we know how to do it, we just need to scale it up." Federalism is the fastest way to scale something up, not local communities that are post industrial without an identity other than a post office zip code and a dairy cow. To use Mises' artifice with the term socialism, in that everything that government does is socialistic we must therefore portend that socialism is indeed a part of the answer just as capitalism is.
What Sanders is saying, you take the money out of the hands of private capital and you put it into the public trust and then redistribute some of the profits back into the community to build roads, bridges, educate people, take care of the sick and elderly, and do basic research. Even Thatcher agreed with all that, even Reagan did. But Rothard didn't, and that's what makes Rothbard so different and a footnote in intellectual history versus that of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek who conservatives lament over. But Friedman and Hayek had some very, very wrong things with their ideology with laissez faire. That laissez faire isn't fair, and that moralism enters into the equation with humans and within that distribution leads to insurgent groups like the Golden Dawn and Molly Maguires who are discontent groups who gain power through terrorism and power grab. Which coincides more with Madison's views about humanity about faction, rather than the profit seeking advent of Rothbard's view of human nature.
What libertarianism is built on a reaction to fascism and communism. If we consider that Alisa Rosenbaum when she had lung cancer was on government social security, we would think that fine until we consider that she is Ayn Rand. Ron Paul receives social security payments.
The issue is this, that a pension system has been done since the Roman Empire with a census and accounting system. We've done it for hundreds of years, and sometimes it fails and most of the time it works for a very long time before needing to be rebooted.
Thus far, we may portend that the New Deal in its long standing capacity to mutate from older traditions is more ideal than the musings of an intellectual is by far better for America than Jacksonianism or anarchocapitalism. Coming out as a geological-cultural determinist over that of an economic determinism is an interesting aside. What comes first, the geographical adaptation or the economy or the culture? Rather than screwing with Robinson Crusoe, like so many economists like to start with, or something more esoteric and alien from most people like Colonial Pennsylvania after the time that the Penns left the colony or somethings like Spanish Civil War Spain, it might be better to start with the Pilgrims to argue out how a society needs to adapt and build itself up. Which is interesting, because I can actually tie in Progressivism and the Nazism going that route.
I didn't say economy wasn't important. I said that it was not an end-all-be-all statistic,
Again, in a debate about the economic soundness of a police, you're trying to downplay the significance of looking at the economies of countries?
In my opinion, the goal of any economic policy should be to create well-being. Growth and jobs create well-being, but they are not the only things that do. Some byproducts of economic growth, such as pollution and inequality, also destroy well-being. Each economic system is a compromise. Some deliver higher growth, and with it higher possibility of making a fortune for yourself. Others deliver higher standards of living and lower inequality.
If the economy is the only thing that matters, laissez-faire complete freeform capitalistic anarchy that can form excessive monopolies and cartels is going to win out. I would not want to live in such a country, however.
It's econ 101 that monopolies and cartels are economically inefficient and create huge dead weight losses. So your argument that a focus on maximizing economic growth necessarily promotes monopolies is dubious. A freshman economics student knows that monopolies harm economic growth.
One thing that creates monopolies is crony capitalism, i.e. the ability of monied interests to influence government policies in their favor. The ability of the big guys to squeeze out the little guys through superior influence. It's not clear to me that socialist policies would do anything to eliminate or reduce this effect. On the contrary, because the government is larger and more powerful under socialism, the ability to lobby the government would likely become a more important and effective tool.
As I understand Scandinavian socialism, most of the money is collected at the national level but spent and distributed at the local level. This, among other factors, makes is difficult for lobbyists to influence government policy. But that is not how things are in the US. If we take the US system of top-down spending and overlay socialism on top of it, we would get more monopolies, not fewer.
Bernie Sanders, like most people on the left, is obsessed with the Nordic countries. Which really irks me, because every time someone brings up the "why can't we just be like Sweden" argument they completely ignore the size of those countries (not to mention the fact that Sweden actually created most of its wealth in a very libertarian environment before the huge welfare state was created). There is no way the Nordic model could ever work in a country with over 300 million people.
I think as much as such ideals would be appealing to some in practice it will simply just never work. The money for socialism has to come from somewhere and seeing as company tax and income tax of the lower and middle classes is where most of all government money comes from this is the place where governments will have to go if they want to increase there tax income in any meaningful way.
The thing is though seeing as we live in a truly international corporate stage governments simply cannot just increase the tax burden of there nations companies. Companies are increasingly having to fight for corporate survival on an international stage and to cut revenue of companies such a hefty margin will have far reaching consequences.
People are under the impression that if you tax the higher income bracket just more then things would simply be better. This is pure socialist tripe. If the US truly wants to introduce socialism they will have to increase the tax of the majority of Americans not just the top 2 percent. That would mean a tax increase for those who are the majority of earners in the US ie 30 - 100 K a year.
The fundamental issue with Bernie Sanders' policies is the same as the fundamental issue with every socialist government: where's the money going to come from to fund this?
The fact of the matter is that the government budget is currently complete insanity as it stands. Now Mr. Sanders wants to tack on the price of health care for everybody AND footing the bill for college education on top of that.
So where's the money going to come from?
Is it that hard to imagine that we could start closing corporate tax loopholes? Or that we could start taxing the outrageous corporate profits being made during this 'great recession'? College education seems like a much more reasonable thing to subsidize than private military contractors and oil production, no? Exxon's CEO makes six figures a day while people go hungry. That would be a good place to start. We could begin putting a low tax rate on financial transaction like stocks, derivatives, and other financial transactions that would also work towards reducing volatility in the markets due to financial speculation. Targeting off-shore/overseas tax havens. Cutting military spending would free up a lot of money, and I'm not saying cut soldiers' pensions or anything like that, but just reduce the amount of money that is funneled directly into private companies through the military and surveillance industries. When Sanders talks about energy issues, it would be completely feasible to divert subsidies that fossil fuel companies receive into new green sources of energy like wind turbines and solar panels. When oil companies receive billions of dollars from public funds, then of course, wind and solar aren't going to seem as efficient, but we have oil conglomerates making vast amounts of profits while being propped up by tax dollars.
Is that a start?
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One of these day I have to get myself organizized.
I don't know. I don't see any actual numbers. Almost all of what you said are the standard vague condemnations and complaints that have become clichés over the past decade or two. The one thing that resembles a concrete policy proposal is your tax on financial transactions - and even that is stretched for details, but let's just say I'm very skeptical that that will have the consequences you claim it will.
I don't know. I don't see any actual numbers. Almost all of what you said are the standard vague condemnations and complaints that have become clichés over the past decade or two. The one thing that resembles a concrete policy proposal is your tax on financial transactions - and even that is stretched for details, but let's just say I'm very skeptical that that will have the consequences you claim it will.
I know more about it from an ecological standpoint and hence have global figures, because climate change is a global issue.
I think it isn't radical to say that America spends too much on the military and most of that money is funneled into private firms like Blackwater, Northrop Grumann, KBR, Titan, etc. We don't need newer versions of drones. I question how many of these contracts would be necessary if the American military hadn't bit off more than it could chew: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/09/private-military-contractors/303424/
I think you can find money for the costs of healthcare, education, and green energy somewhere in there. And that's just me googling things in between my school work. Mind you, could he do these things through Congress? Probably not, but the conversation is worth the effort.
I think it isn't radical to say that America spends too much on the military and most of that money is funneled into private firms like Blackwater, Northrop Grumann, KBR, Titan, etc. We don't need newer versions of drones. I question how many of these contracts would be necessary if the American military hadn't bit off more than it could chew: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/09/private-military-contractors/303424/
The question is not that they're doing it; the question is how much money it would save for them not to be doing it.
The official CBO number is $3.2 billion. Now, that's just for the energy tax; maybe you can get it up to $21.6 billion when you factor in other tax credits. But I'm not going to do your homework for you; if all you do is google for a bit, that's all I'm going to do too. Anyway, the interesting number here is that renewables received $7.3 billion from the same tax credit, more than twice as much. And if you read more of the article, it throws out various estimates for federal spending over various periods on fossil fuels vs. renewables (vs. nuclear), which I won't repeat in detail but certainly put the lie to your implication that renewables aren't competitive because Uncle Sam is unfairly favoring big oil. They're getting a lot of federal money. So maybe we should cut those subsidies too, if we really want to save?
EDIT: Okay, I see, the $21.6 billion number is factoring in the state governments' subsidies as well. Which are pretty well outside the constitutional authority of a hypothetical Sanders Administration.
I think you can find money for the costs of healthcare, education, and green energy somewhere in there.
I think you seriously underestimate those costs. Even AzureShadow in his defense of socialized medicine above quotes the healthcare cost figure at "only" $830 billion per year. (And he may be wrong; he didn't cite his source.) This is why the numbers are so important. It's easy to say "stop oil subsidies and we'll have more money!", and yes, if we stop oil subsidies we will have more money, and maybe there are other good reasons for doing it too. But basic math says that $3.2 billion or $21.6 billion or even $50 billion is way, way less than $830 billion. So if you're trying to pay for healthcare, cutting oil subsidies will not be nearly enough. The government would have more money if they opened a lemonade stand in front of the capitol, too, but that doesn't make "open a lemonade stand" a credible policy proposal for paying for socialized programs.
Just so I'm not a complete Negative Nancy, I will say that I think the real path to paying for healthcare is in finding effective ways to control healthcare costs, rather than trying to find a gazillion dollars in the federal couch cushions. But getting into the details of healthcare policy really belongs in another thread. What I'm trying to say here is that Bernie Sanders' rhetoric, like yours, relies on a non-quantitative, math-free understanding of the federal budget: oil subsidies cost "money", and socialized medicine costs "money", so if we take the "money" from one budget item and give it to the other budget item, we should be fine, right?
First of all, your numbers are atrociously wrong. The entire US budget is about 3.5 trillion per year and only 830 billion of that goes to healthcare, of which the ACA is only a part. That cost is approximately $2500 per person per year. Your 2 trillion figure is the approximate prediction for a decade, not a year.
You are correct, I misread and that is the approximate cost for a decade, not a year. That was a blunder.
However, you still have a problem with numbers: you say "only" 830 billion is being spent on the current healthcare plan. Taxing everyone who makes over a million dollars at 100% of their income will leave you wanting by, what, 163-ish billion dollars? And again, that's the spending with Obamacare in effect, not a health care plan for everyone that Sanders is talking about.
I'm not getting figures for how many people are currently enrolled in the Obamacare plan, apparently in January it was 9.5 million people, but let's bring it as high as 12 million people. The US has 318.9 million people. You're talking about the government providing for the health care of all of them.
So I ask again, where's the rest of the money coming from?
No, but there are decisions that will shrink the economy but bring greater benefits elsewhere. And the plan isn't exactly to go bankrupt.
You plan on increasing government spending when we are very much in debt and spending more than we have. Where else does this plan lead but bankruptcy?
In my opinion, the goal of any economic policy should be to create well-being. Growth and jobs create well-being, but they are not the only things that do.
More hot air. In a debate about the soundness of economic policy, we focus on economic policy. Saying, "Yeah, well, what really matters is that people are happy right? Right?" doesn't help your case.
We did not talk about a plan. We talked about ideas. Bernie Sanders certainly does not have a plan.
Oh well that changes everything. [/sarcasm]
An idea that is not feasible is a bad idea when it comes to governance. If an idea fails to work, then you don't want it.
830 billion is being spent on healthcare, yes, but almost all of that goes directly to insurance companies. If you cut out the middleman and have the government provide healthcare funding directly like so many European countries do, the cost would plummet. Insurance is a cancer on the entire industry, from the pharm tech companies to the doctors to the hospitals to the consumers.
If you cut out the middleman and have the government provide healthcare funding directly like so many European countries do, the cost would plummet.
Replacing insurance with the governement is not "cut[ting] out the middleman," it's replacing one middleman (insurance) with a different middleman (government). In order for this to result in a better state of afairs, the government needs to allocate healthcare more efficiently than the insurance companies do.
It's certainly possible for the government to be more efficient than the insurance companies at administering healthcare. But it's also possible for the government to be far less efficient and/or corrupt. That's why Bernie's specific plan for implementing universal healthcare is so critically important and why people are skeptical of vague platitudes.
Also note that making the "cost plummet" is not the end goal here. The easiest and fastest way to make healthcare costs plummet is to bulldoze every hospital and doctors office in the US. Healthcare spending would plummet overnight because there would be little to no healthcare available to buy. Instead, the goal is to reduce costs while keeping quality and availability the same (or better). This is not an easy task and, to repeat myself, whether this is achievable relies heavily on the specifics of the plan.
It's econ 101 that monopolies and cartels are economically inefficient and create huge dead weight losses. So your argument that a focus on maximizing economic growth necessarily promotes monopolies is dubious. A freshman economics student knows that monopolies harm economic growth.
And in the second year the no-longer-freshman student will learn why things he learned in his first year are not always correct. The deadweight welfare loss does not apply in situations where the monopolist is better capable of exploiting economics of scale, in which case the profit maximizing equilibrium can very well reach a lower price point and higher output than under perfect competition. The MC under a monopoly can very well increase in different rate to the unit production than under competition leading to different MR=MC. There is also the special case of natural monopolies where competitors cannot reach MES and as such, encouraging competition and forcing the competitors to invest the required sunk costs actually creates inefficiency. Indeed, one of the main reasons why monopolies tend to be inefficient is because they don't understand economy and act rationally, or are able to lobby for subsidies where such would not be needed*. Because they can afford to be stupid, don't care, or whatever.
Monopolies form under free competition as well, when one company is capable of competing others out of the market, suggesting that they are able to perform very efficiently in order to secure their position - this is something that the hypothetical freshman student would be incapable of explaining. The common 'explanation' that monopolies are capable of destroying competition through predatory pricing has been shown to be faulty. Thus fundamentally inefficient monopolies would rarely remain monopolies for long.
As an aside it should be noted that vertical price restraints and vertical price fixing are not per se illegal in the United States, and instead fall under rule of reason as of 2007 (See Leegin vs PSKS). Thus it could be assumed that allocative efficiency really is not a concern. (Also see United States vs Apple Inc, though - there seems to be some confusion.) Furthermore, MAP is a legal practice, and essentially a form of vertical price fixing.
One thing that creates monopolies is crony capitalism, i.e. the ability of monied interests to influence government policies in their favor. The ability of the big guys to squeeze out the little guys through superior influence.
Sure, and this works the other way. The costs of lobbying in order to maintain their monopoly position also increases the inefficiency of the monopoly, as that money could have been spent on more efficient production or research.
*: There are also some cases where the monopolies are right. Sometimes it is better to subsidize them and force them to operate at margins where they would otherwise generate a loss (Without the subsidy), especially in the case where other industries rely on said monopoly and allocative efficiency is paramount. I.E: There are even situations where subsidized monopolies promote economic growth.
It's not clear to me that socialist policies would do anything to eliminate or reduce this effect. On the contrary, because the government is larger and more powerful under socialism, the ability to lobby the government would likely become a more important and effective tool. As I understand Scandinavian socialism, most of the money is collected at the national level but spent and distributed at the local level. This, among other factors, makes is difficult for lobbyists to influence government policy. But that is not how things are in the US. If we take the US system of top-down spending and overlay socialism on top of it, we would get more monopolies, not fewer.
Scandinavian countries also have laws forcing transparency. The fact that someone had donated a certain party something around 600€ as Bitcoins and it was impossible to track who they were due to the anonymous nature of the currency broke the news barrier in Finland.
No, but there are decisions that will shrink the economy but bring greater benefits elsewhere. And the plan isn't exactly to go bankrupt.
You plan on increasing government spending when we are very much in debt and spending more than we have. Where else does this plan lead but bankruptcy?
US currently spends $9146/capita on healthcare. Finland spends $4449. Assuming that the US should be able to reach similar efficiency as Finland (When realistically due to higher self-sufficiency and larger scale economy the efficiency should be higher.) this spending could be reduced to roughly the same amount. Thus, the US could increase taxes so that the increase is anywhere between $4449 and $9146 per capita and use that to fund centralized healthcare. Numbers higher than $4449 leave the government with more money than they would spend to fund the healthcare system, while still maintaining same quality assuming similar efficiency. The extra money could be used to, for example, pay off debts.
Now, this is not exactly how it works out, but hopefully you can understand the basic idea.
In my opinion, the goal of any economic policy should be to create well-being. Growth and jobs create well-being, but they are not the only things that do.
More hot air. In a debate about the soundness of economic policy, we focus on economic policy. Saying, "Yeah, well, what really matters is that people are happy right? Right?" doesn't help your case.
Your argument is like saying that when justifying where to build a new charcoal plant, we should decide to erect it right in the middle of the largest city because the decision is one of finances, and proximity to consumption reduces the costs of energy transfer. That consideration completely disregards pollution, risks, and well-being of people near the plant. In other words, you are trying to simplify and streamline the situation where doing so leads to omission of important data. You cannot ignore a number of consequences of any certain policy or action and tunnelvision on others. You need to think of everything.
We did not talk about a plan. We talked about ideas. Bernie Sanders certainly does not have a plan.
Oh well that changes everything. [/sarcasm]
An idea that is not feasible is a bad idea when it comes to governance. If an idea fails to work, then you don't want it.
*sigh*
You are missing the point. If someone would find it desirable but believes it is unachievable, it is possible to change their mind about that. If someone believes it is undesirable, that is a different thing to change one's mind about. Hell, I find the idea that everyone would be happy forever and stop being rude nice, or that everyone would learn to stand in lines efficiently to maximize throughput, rather beautiful and desirable. I also do not see a good way to make that an actual thing. That does not mean I should never discuss the topic because it is very much likely that I am wrong about the fact that this idea cannot be realized. Likewise, someone can see the move towards more socialism as desirable but unrealizable, and it thus might be worthwhile discussing why they think so and whether or not they are right in their beliefs.
I get the impression that you are simply trying to kill or divert the discussion here.
It's certainly possible for the government to be more efficient than the insurance companies at administering healthcare. But it's also possible for the government to be far less efficient and/or corrupt. That's why Bernie's specific plan for implementing universal healthcare is so critically important and why people are skeptical of vague platitudes.
Also note that making the "cost plummet" is not the end goal here. The easiest and fastest way to make healthcare costs plummet is to bulldoze every hospital and doctors office in the US. Healthcare spending would plummet overnight because there would be little to no healthcare available to buy. Instead, the goal is to reduce costs while keeping quality and availability the same (or better). This is not an easy task and, to repeat myself, whether this is achievable relies heavily on the specifics of the plan.
This is very much true. And while the insurance companies are evidently doing a really bad job at efficiency, I would not leave Bernie Sanders in charge of it either.
The Sage is occupied with the unspoken
and acts without effort.
Teaching without verbosity,
producing without possessing,
creating without regard to result,
claiming nothing,
the Sage has nothing to lose.
I totally agree with you. Not just is it the replacement of one middleman with another it is also the removal of the profit motive. A thing which when removes takes with it all incentive for an entity to do things efficiently.
An idea that is not feasible is a bad idea when it comes to governance. If an idea fails to work, then you don't want it.
Ezra Kline did an article a few years ago on Clinton Era Welfare Reform that had a few good ideas in it. So in order to fix Medicare, there were grants given out for companies to try different things out to help people.
The basic gist is with direct assistance targeting the people who cost the most money to treat and prevent those problems we save a lot of money. There are similar programs in other cities right now that look at hospital data, target specifically the highest cost people for insurance or hospitals, and then keep those people from getting back into the hospital by putting in a long term treatment plan with proper support. And to be honest, I don't see charity being a huge thing here.
We're seeing fire stations not being able to buy equipment or train people based off the old bingo and lunches gambit or donations, and local communities are moving to all employed or a mixed company department and imposing a fire tax. Charity is inconsistent, this is why we simply do not see private roads everywhere because the failures to support a commons. You have one person who stops paying into the system, then others retroactively stop paying into the public pool until the system fails.
A hybrid system, where you use either a profit or tax based system combined with charity seems to work best. This reflects Ostrom's research on common pool resource problems, where you have an admixture of public, private, and NGO activity in the sector or what is Madisonian factions. Each of a series of different factions wants something, and they have to negotiate within the sphere to find an equilibrium. That equilibrium is constantly shifting, but the question comes down to really "how much innovation do we really need?"
For the most part, many of the major revolutions for trauma care come out of war. And given the US fights a war every decade, that's a given. The second biggest contributor is exploration in the old school sense, which we have not been doing to the degree that we used to as a species. We must also contend that the "sexy effect" for specifics like breast cancer are large or some kid that has a messed up pallet. You see people there, but not a mentally ill guy on the street with a beard and a jacket. This is specifically why some libertarians want a kind of government system to take care of the people that the charities won't take of care, like the crazy that has an unknown mental illness that is telling you the end is nigh.
Yes, what works for breast cancer does not work for all diseases. There are some diseases that with a little bit of research dollars could have large rewards, because frankly we're ignorant and haven't explored those areas. They're not sexy, either because few people are afflicted with them. We're talking perhaps a few hundred thousand.
I'm not a huge fan of taxes, I'm not a huge fan of Obamacare, but let us face it that it at least attempts to scale something that conservatives, especially whenever they win, fail to scale. Our medical system is not the envy of the world, it's our medical technology and even then the far more socialist Japanese do quite well because of their own innovative culture. So instead of looking at socialism as the great evil, we need to distinguish between what is efficient in what other countries do well and look at what would work well within our own system and then scale over time.
We've tried smaller government, and after the 1990's we got more expensive health care. That's a fact. So now we're trying government, my preference is to try to distinguish between free market enterprise and a public good. Health by its nature involves others and families, abuse and other things arranging from issues like alcoholism last for generations. It might not be government's job to be everyone's big brother, the issue is we're looking too much at 1984 and not enough at Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. That is a country that ignore's people, and looks towards people like Kim Kardashian for entertainment rather than looking out for their next door neighbor. That's not government's fault, that's just our individualistic culture outsourcing those duties to government and private enterprise because we're too lazy.
American people don't want bothered with a problem or anything, especially if it costs them money. Yet, a person will donate to the Good Samaritan a few dollars during Christmas, because its going to a good cause. The point is we need to start connecting our taxes to good causes and good ends that people actually believe in, rather than always looking to individuals who have basically not given us any answers at all to the problems facing the American healthcare nightmare.
I'm a conservative that supporst the tenets of the New Deal, so rather than wasting time trying to scrap the whole system. We need to look at reconfiguring the system itself to be better maintained. If social security is good enough for Ayn Rand, then it's good enough for Ron Paul, it's good enough four hundred years from now.
And frankly, after five years of "repeal and replace" why is there no conservative healthcare bill to add new systems in place to bring down the costs? It's a useless debate, because there are no alterations such as a healthcare savings account available to all Americans. Teaching people to save for a rainy day is a good thing, but do we conservatives do that? No, we're too busy talking about "government bad" "market smash!"
Obamacare has:
1. Allowed for people to job hop from job to job looking for better work without being tethered to one job
2. Allows entrepreneurs the capability to maintain health coverage for their family as a start up
3. No lifetime caps
It's time we stopped just thinking of individual autonomous units that can "magically" make it in the world, and just say some people get screwed and if you work harder than the guy to the left and the right of you you can still make it.
Everytime I see one of those young men going around killing people with some mental illness, I feel that we're failing them somehow. They must've been having problems as a kid, and had they got the help they needed they would have grown up better. Might not be captain stability, but at least they wouldn't be dead or in jail. Or looking into that face of that homeless person and thinking, "Why the hell are you there?" Asking those people that question is hard, because it takes so much to help those people and some people in those circumstances are just beyond one person's help.
Our lives are disorderly, we dislike being inconvenienced. Yet, we overpay for health insurance and teach the world what not to do with healthcare. We're not making people more independent, we're showing that socialism is the answer rather than when necessary it is a part to an answer for a very complex problem and set of issues.
I totally agree with you. Not just is it the replacement of one middleman with another it is also the removal of the profit motive. A thing which when removes takes with it all incentive for an entity to do things efficiently.
US follows a service provided model, so for instance you get a fracture treated. They'll charge you like $100 just for gauze since they don't charge labor fees among other hidden charges. It's cleaning up the billing system that insurance companies are too lazy to do so. They're more interested in other ways that have been hazardous and stupid. Such as denying one kind of medication and having a person go on a "cheaper" treatment plan that is more intensive and makes the patient take more pills than necessary whenever another more expensive pill would do.
Insurance companies are incentivized to collect money, not treat patients. That is the problem before we entertain about people without health insurance and improper long term care.
Instead, the goal is to reduce costs while keeping quality and availability the same (or better).
Yeah, cost containment, access, and quality are the three themes when talking about a health care system. The issue is how to do any sort of cost containment without negatively affecting the other two. The one benefit have a universal payer would be over the current mixed system we have is that costs would be a lot more transparent. This is too much to go into without dusting off my old healthcare econ books, but suffice it to say that what people think constitutes quality and access doesn't always reflect the reality of clinical care.
I don't really see the effects of the system collapsing everywhere around me, as one would expect considering I live in a socialist country.
How well is Europe doing right now?
For the most part, rather decent.
So one country's about to default, and four others had to be bailed out, one of them (Portugal) apparently teetering towards defaulting. That's over a fourth of the European Union. This does not sound decent to me.
In my opinion, the goal of any economic policy should be to create well-being.
And without a viable economy, where is the well-being?
Considering that the US is not in the top 10 for World Happiness Report while 8 European countries are, not in the top 10 of Where-to-be-born_Index while 5 European countries are, and that US has lower life expectancy than Colombia, I will just assume this is either unsubstantiated bait or an opinion formed with concern only about economic growth and/or purchasing power.
The correlation is obviously not 1-for-1 (it NEVER is!) but the it's definitely positive and should get even more positive the moment you start to controlling for variables (like oiling exports which adds a lot GDP for a few countries but little economic activity for their populace) and do some real statistics rather then this crude meaningless thing we are doing right now.
So one country's about to default, and four others had to be bailed out, one of them (Portugal) apparently teetering towards defaulting. That's over a fourth of the European Union. This does not sound decent to me.
Total population of Spain, Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and Cyprus is ~76 million. This is less than one sixth, or roughly 15% of the EU population. Government Gross Debt as a percent of GDP is also significantly lower overall in the EU (89% to 107%) than the United States. When we look at countries with higher debt/GDP ratios than the US, the total population of Ireland, Greece, Italy and Portugal is ~88 million. This is still less than one fifth - roughly 17% of the EU population. Considerably less of the Europe as a whole.
It is also notable that Greece does not need to default. In 2014 the amount of money Greece had to spend to pay interests as percent of GDP had fallen significantly from 2011 (7% to 4.3%), largely due to the subsidized loans with low interest rates. In other words, they are in much less trouble than they used to be. Greek defaulting will be a policy decision if it happens, rather than a necessity. They could easily balance their budget, they simply choose not to. I am not sure what will happen if/when they default, but the shock to the European stock market has been significantly lower than the decline in the Asian stock market, so apparently the business world isn't too concerned. (Or perhaps the potential crash of Greek economy is detrimental to some export market in Asia - I am not actually sure about that.) So in a way the bailing out Greece has worked, so if they default they default despite that - not because of it.
In my opinion, the goal of any economic policy should be to create well-being.
And without a viable economy, where is the well-being?
I do not disagree with the fact that a crashing economy destroys well-being. The point I am trying to make is that strong economy does not necessarily lead to well-being. US already has a stronger economy than a lot of other countries, but lower well-being than those countries (At least according to statistics I could find). Single-minded focus on more economic growth with no other policy changes is unlikely to lead to high increases in well-being, and good results could be achieved with policies that would not necessarily contribute much to the growth. Furthermore, as I understand there is rather good projected growth on the economy of the States, which would suggest that now might be a good time to divert some of that cash flow towards reducing poverty and improving healthcare.
I am not saying US should go all socialist, but moving towards it should help. Laws enforcing transparency of funding of political parties and transparency of lobbying would be on thing that would likely slightly stifle growth as large companies would be less able to pass laws that benefit them at the cost of general populace. Government-funded healthcare, as I already stated I believe, would be something that would be beneficial to the US as a whole and could be funded through increased tax and organized at a better efficiency than the insurance companies are currently able due to economies of scale and improved leverage. I also believe that something could and should be done about the prison system - even if it means having to fund rehabilitation programs more. I do not believe these would bankrupt US, though they would likely reduce the rate of growth in the following years - which I would consider an acceptable tradeoff. And I believe something like this is what Bernie also believes, though the specifics might differ.
The correlation is obviously not 1-for-1 (it NEVER is!) but the it's definitely positive and should get even more positive the moment you start to controlling for variables (like oiling exports which adds a lot GDP for a few countries but little economic activity for their populace) and do some real statistics rather then this crude meaningless thing we are doing right now.
I am not exactly sure what point you are trying to make. Care to elaborate?
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The Sage is occupied with the unspoken
and acts without effort.
Teaching without verbosity,
producing without possessing,
creating without regard to result,
claiming nothing,
the Sage has nothing to lose.
I don't like the title of the article, but after reading it there's an understanding about his past. He's a single father of one, and lived off of welfare for a number of years living as a social activist trying to run for office and a career politician. It makes sense with his idealism and focus on morality, and it fits his own narrative. It is a good read on the "man behind the man," however I feel it does underscore an import point with socialism. Whenever we consider socialists they tend to be activists or thinkers.
The interesting part to me is that whenever you consider moderates such as Clinton and Obama and Team Bush, you end up with people who have professional backgrounds and success. Then we entertain people like Sanders, Ayn Rand, Mises, Rand Paul, and so forth those people tend towards an extreme in their personal biography. Even Jack London for his literary success had issues early on his life, and he was an ardent socialist.
I think this is why personal biography telling about people, that those who come from stranger backgrounds tend to have a harder push towards one extreme or another. I really tend to dislike certain aspects of the "gotcha, look at what they said" politics. I prefer understanding their long trajectory and growth as a person, such as Donald Trump's necessity in his brand to say he's worth more than he actually is. That his wealth is a significant part of his brand and who he is as a person. I really don't look at what people say, I look at both what they say and how they lived. It is no different than an alcoholic saying "don't drink and drive" or a person of means saying that "wealth doesn't mean anything" at the top.
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Life is a beautiful engineer, yet a brutal scientist.
The interesting part to me is that whenever you consider moderates such as Clinton and Obama and Team Bush, you end up with people who have professional backgrounds and success. Then we entertain people like Sanders, Ayn Rand, Mises, Rand Paul, and so forth those people tend towards an extreme in their personal biography. Even Jack London for his literary success had issues early on his life, and he was an ardent socialist.
I think you have the arrow of causation flipped. It's not that having a conventional background makes you a moderate while having an "extreme personal biography" makes you more of a political extremist. I think it's the case that the political moderates (i.e. those most likely to win presidential elections) have been carefully pre-selected by their respective parties and political backers, ensuring that they don't have controversial personal histories. Candidates with extreme political positions (i.e. candidates who are less likely to win) have not been selected and vetted, so they tend to have a wide variety of backgrounds, including more "extreme" ones.
The interesting part to me is that whenever you consider moderates such as Clinton and Obama and Team Bush, you end up with people who have professional backgrounds and success. Then we entertain people like Sanders, Ayn Rand, Mises, Rand Paul, and so forth those people tend towards an extreme in their personal biography. Even Jack London for his literary success had issues early on his life, and he was an ardent socialist.
I think you have the arrow of causation flipped. It's not that having a conventional background makes you a moderate while having an "extreme personal biography" makes you more of a political extremist. I think it's the case that the political moderates (i.e. those most likely to win presidential elections) have been carefully pre-selected by their respective parties and political backers, ensuring that they don't have controversial personal histories. Candidates with extreme political positions (i.e. candidates who are less likely to win) have not been selected and vetted, so they tend to have a wide variety of backgrounds, including more "extreme" ones.
Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard were both Jewish immigrants from Soviet Russia, and created market based philosophies to counteract Marxism. Ludwig von Mises and Wilhelm Roepke were both affected by fascism and communism, and built within the same intellectual framework as Rothbard. Rothbard and Roepke were students of Mises inside of the libertarian tent. Much of libertarianism can be traced to taking classical liberalism ideas and applying that to WWII as a reaction against fascism and communism.
We can then see why someone like Ted Cruz's father, a Cuban refugee, and Ted Cruz himself would both be a part of reactionary.
Jack London, author of White Fang and Cry of the Wild and other books, was born poor and while many attempts to finish his education was never really able to do as much as he liked until he was older. While socialism was in vogue intellectually, and he was commercially success, we can see as a part of his own personal growth why he was a supporter of socialism. Then whenever we consider Bernie Sander's own personal biography, linked in a former post, we can consider his lifestyle choices and continued support of those ideals.
In part, the ideals that reflected one's own successes and fears in life can be seen in one's own political ideology. Even Hilary Clinton was a conservative in her young life, but still maintains similar to her husband a support of neo-liberal policies like free trade.
The vetting process sure has a lot to do with tone and moderation and talking points, much like Reagan or Clinton or Team Bush. However, we must conclude the basic tenets of their cherished philosophies have a bearing on their upbringing and locality and what determined success. For Bernie Sanders it was government, for Clinton it was both the private sector and government, while for others it was the private sector.
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Life is a beautiful engineer, yet a brutal scientist.
Have you done the necessary calculations to prove this?
First of all, your numbers are atrociously wrong. The entire US budget is about 3.5 trillion per year and only 830 billion of that goes to healthcare, of which the ACA is only a part. That cost is approximately $2500 per person per year. Your 2 trillion figure is the approximate prediction for a decade, not a year.
Consider also that the US spends more per person on heathcare than any other country in the world by a huge margin, and yet has far worse overall health. The reason for this is that most of that healthcare spending doesn't actually go toward providing healthcare but instead to insurance companies. If you cut them out completely by nationalizing insurance you cut the costs significantly for much higher gains in public health. This also, in the long run, lowers the expenses of hospitals and individual doctors, because of the insurance problem being alleviated.
Essentially the reason that healthcare is so expensive is because insurance is a massive parasite that takes most of the money in the health system and funnels it into their own pockets.
The Libertarian movement has become more successful in blaming government for the economy and has found many sympathetic ears and grown in the last few years, and now we're seeing a counter formulation in the form of Bernie Sanders. What Ron Paul, and now Rand Paul, with the Mises Institute and other libertarian organizations have been moving towards with the Tea Party is to create a new form of conservative coalition. What Obama created was a coalition that was center-left, and this is seeing the real leftism that was the New Left of the 1960's. In some ways by evicting socially liberal candidates from the GOP and hunting down moderates and labeling them as a RINO via the Tea Party's guiding popular headlines offers little recourse.
The modern GoP does not encompass enough ideas that are tenable to sustain a moderate wing as a big tent party, and we're in a political shift right now because the party has not had a chance to sell the libertarian debate yet. In part this means that people from the Old New Left are coming out and challenging what is called the Third Way politics of the 1990's that Bill CLinton and Tony Blair practiced. The Third Way, which took aspects of neo-conservatism and placed into it some more leftward ideals, created the guiding policies of the 1990's. During the 2000's, we saw a combination of an attempted repeat of Reagan era policies without necessarily the rebound nor the understanding of the current economic foundation problems.
The issue is not that libertarianism or social democratic philosophies are wrong, it's just that they are have a time stamp for their ideas when they can be implemented and what quality of life a person wants and who thrives in those civilizations. Libertarianism is more rough and tumble, and if you read the Mises Institution there's a lot of cherry picking over data sets and trying to spin certain areas in history that were violent as "not being so violent." The role of the Mises Institute is when it comes to a comprehension of public safety, disregard it. There are some good refutations and some interesting policy debates, but overall the intellectual moorings with people like Rothbard are wanton.
Socialism in the classical sense is also left intellectually wanton in a similar vein as libertarianism is today. There are huge negatives associated with socialism and we have a natural disposition to hate on socialism because we as a nation fought socialism for so long and have a Jeffersonian tradition to hate on taxes. We are a money loving culture, so we see the government as a burden and naturally think someone is going to steal from us and screw us over by "taking our money." That's it, that's the entire point and fear that comes with socialism. It's looking at communism and people fearing that someone in government is going to screw up and blow everything to hell or outright conquer the US and lead to tyranny.
So what neo-conservativism tries to do is moderate the tone, but has failed as an ideology because it's moorings took into consideration specific assumptions about people that are not necessarily true. The presumption with Hayek is that people whenever given the freedom will often choose to create something to help others, but we also must contend in the reality that there is no free lunch and scalability is a universal problem. What makes libertarians upset is the concept of a public good, because they have a natural predisposition ideologically to only see mistrust and value the individual. And the thing with a libertarian is that they are willing to take a lower standard of living as a sacrifice, however the people that I have encountered as libertarians tend to be white and come from fairly good backgrounds and have good jobs. So I have never really encountered a libertarian thinker that has really been hit hard, rather that libertarians who have been hit hard like Rand or Rothbard is that they escaped a place that tried to actively kill them. One of their fundamental, big, big big huge life experiences was to escape communism. Mises himself was German. Libertarianism is in large part a reaction to fascism and communism, rather than what we would call socialism today or in its modern strain social democracy.
The large thinkers often cited like Mises or Rothbard or Rand have some really bad intellectual moorings and really bad habits, including Hayek. The first problem with Mises is that he discounts the role of Madisonian factions in a multi-level system as he's never really experienced it in his life, to my knowledge. Hayek was enthralled to the concept of individualism and feared the rise of government in the Road to Surfdom, however he also placed too much weight on the ease of individualism to create something as well as leadership. Most people don't lead, they follow and copy other people's behaviors. Which then brings up Rothbard, which is probably one of the most paranoid and delusional intellectuals that I have crossed during that time period. For starters, some of his ideas are just out in left such as selling babies to families instead of having a formalized adoption system. He's an economist, not a political scientist or a social worker. His intellectual moorings come out of a fear of government, and it shows hardcore. Rand, the issue with her, is basically she took her fear that turned into hatred while having a romantic idea about personhood that she turned into a political ideology that lasts to today. There's some good tenets, but there is also a lack of understanding altruism and strategy in creating a civil society. She had romantic inclinations and was a romantic in her faith of people, but she lacked a stoic sensibility of scale within the realm of the individual and the capacity for harm.
The biggest issue with libertarianism is the non aggression principal, in which it typically is a worthless point because it basically codifies the social golden rule of "treat others as you wish to be treated" with the added caveat of "and I'll treat you the way you treat me if you hurt me." Which is a fine concept, until we get to the second area and then begin to look at the degeneration into a lack of justice without final and binding arbitration through a constant system of attacks and reprisals. Basically, there is no end to tit-for-tat until a large event happens that triggers an awakening moment. A civil society bypasses that event through rule of law, and thus far libertarianism has not created a soluble and stable system that scales well and as of yet nothing competes with Common Law that has been refined by many countries over centuries.
Now Hayek had some good ideas and a bit more moderate than most, which is why a lot of conservatives like him. Milton Friedman had some good policy ideas, because he himself understood certain dynamics. I severely question his son's politics, and overall I don't care for the younger Friedman generally because he is an anarchist for reasons cited above with a failure to understand Common Law's legacy versus a recycled version of the golden rule. What we need to do is to take within the context of the situation and the time period we live in and come to terms that we are not doing things right, and that the need for different ideas is coming back into vogue with Jacksonian politics, Tea Party, the rise of libertarianism, see Ron Paul and friends, and then came the left with failed starts and struts through the Occupy Movement. What we may see now is the rise of socialism over the next few decades and this is something that I have anticipated for multiple years as a yin-wang to libertarianism with market fundamentalism.
The key sequencing difference between a socialist, a communist, and a social democrat is that the social democrat has been tried out in multiple countries including Canada and to some respects, arguably Israel. Which is why I find it deliciously funny after calling Obama a socialist for decades, we in the conservative movement are going to get a real bona fide socialist in a refined tradition and saying "Hey, why can't we be like these success stories?" It is going to place better ideological competition and hopefully finally, finally force libertarianism to deal with its fundamental flaws such as an over focus on freedom without understanding that people want a sustained level of quality of life; the Hobbes trade off argument for security that the NAP is not qualified to contend with especially with the Common Law tradition for conflict resolution.
What socialism had to contend with was capitalism's success in the market economy, today a modern socialist in the form of social democrat would argue that capitalism is a wonderful thing and that free markets are great. This is no different than authoritarian capitalism, it embraces capitalism as one of the governing laws of a society. This is the greatest innovation that socialism and what remains of communism have had, is the adoption of the free market system. Now a libertarian would argue that a mixed economy isn't free, but for the most part Non-Austrian School academics and adherents will argue that a mixed economy is a free market economy. Mises and Rothbard disagree over this very tenet about a mixed economy, but like I said, most people don't know who these guys are and call the US a free market economy (which is a mixed economy and is free). That raises another problem with libertarianism, using words and definitions that are not within context of other more mainstream contexts and trying to be counterfactual within their own tradition creating an ivory tower problem.
With that said, social democratism does indeed have a problem with overregulation as seen with things such as metered internet use in Canada (think your water bill or phone versus your home internet access as Canada vs. US system). So there are also issues with freedom of speech, such as cases where you can write something about someone's dead Grandfather and get sued inside of a British Court. Granted Britain follows more of what is called Fabianism, but I digress. The point being is that you get less freedom of speech, higher taxes, more regulatory controls, but typically access to more public goods and more income stability.
I think what libertarians have to offer is that if you can win big, you can win big but you can also lose big. Hence SurgingChaos' point about being Izzet. Within the Izzet guild things blow up, and if you have a Selesnya political ideology that is horrible and scares the hell out of you. Probably because an Izzet society historically does destroy the commons and over time shifts to become Temur or some other tri-color combination over time like Jeskai during a low corruption phase or a Grixis one during a high corruption phase. A Selesnya society arguable, and I understand the oversimplicity here in color combinations, will during specific time periods become Abzan as they become more aggressive militarily to compete with other aggressive powers like what Canada did during World War II. Now with that said, these metaphors are simple for the sake of illustrating the point to people here that "ideas change relative to the time periods they're in." So a good idea from the 1800's US for policy may not be good today. So in essence that if you're playing and winning with Abzan, you should continue playing Abzan until you start seeing less wins. And we are at time period in US history where we are trying to take in new ideas for the 21st century.
And I've yet to touch on Jacksonianism, what the problem with what the Tea Party is trying to sell is basically that we don't need big banks and the government to intervene. Yet, as we see that is was incompetent regulators, a tradition that started under Reagan, and overly predatory companies that saw profit as the only sole good adventure. What Sanders rails against is the 1980's Gordon Gecko that "greed is good." Look, politically I am a conservative. But, but I have to read his Filibuster from 2010 and I have to say I agree with some of it:
http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/full-congressional-record-transcript-of-sanders-filibuster
I invite you to read it in full to really understand his perspective on things, and he does not sound as "crazy socialist" as people want to make him out to be. Sure, of course socialism as an ideology has problems, but unlike libertarianism it has evolved and has been practically used in smaller countries and can and is trying to be established in larger countries through the social democratic model. I do not think he will win, he is instead a sort of Walter Mondale that will speak to specific issues and make a sharp contrast with libertarianism. If he can really challenge Rand Paul, I feel it will make the conservative libertarian politics better and sharper for 2024. I just don't see Hilary not being elected only once if she is elected a first time.
Libertarianism is in its teenager phase, where now it has attention and is being tested some what in politics today. However, it lacks the more ancient moorings of older versions of conservativism and arguably I don't really consider libertarianism a form of conservative political philosophy if the person uses anarchistic tenets like NAP.
To place into context what I'm looking for:
1. An appropriate level of government for the time
2. A stable level of taxation
3. Stable level of economic growth that is willing to sacrifice speed for efficiency and stability
4. Tiers in society that people move up and down, but can still "make a living"
5. Freedom from government and freedom of speech within reason
6. The ability to provide a future for the next successor generation, not just creating a generation and leaving them on their own and destroying the moorings that bind societies together.
In the last few generations we have been irresponsible in believing that one thing is the solution, whenever the point is that every tool is a tool for our use. Collectivism is nothing more than a tool, individualism is nothing more than a tool. The main locus is to create a moral, just, safe, and successful place to live for as many beings as possible. Whenever we back away from that goal, we lose ourselves in the process. I'm one of the faceless, no one will remember in a few generations let alone know what I am or what I look like. I simply do not matter, what matters are the people I influence now who will act as the face in a chain of events that cascades forward into whatever will become of what we call human in the future. That is the meaning of individualism as a witness, but our responsibility to those that come from us and forward from us. We have a responsibility to them not to obliterate what has worked for previous generations by throwing our inheritance for law, wealth in all its forms, our culture, and so much more.
That is what the difference between Izzet and Temur is, that Temur thinks of what is and what will come and what has faded away while also building that better tomorrow. Temur takes pride where it came from, understands the savagery of growth, the need for individualism but also the need for community. Within that realm there is a need for tradition but also innovation. It is within that dialectical balance one can posit to see that whether you see extinct dinosaurs walking around or continue to see elephants roam the Earth a hundred years from now. Past and future. Collective and individual. Hate. Love. Creation. Destruction. Sacred. Desecration. Survival. That is what is meant to be human.
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For the most part, rather decent. Majority of countries have declining amounts of debt. Finland isn't doing great, mostly because our export trade to Russia is cut off, but it's not too bad either. We've had to move some schools three blocks apart together in larger buildings to save on costs.
No, but there are decisions that will shrink the economy but bring greater benefits elsewhere. And the plan isn't exactly to go bankrupt.
In my opinion, the goal of any economic policy should be to create well-being. Growth and jobs create well-being, but they are not the only things that do. Some byproducts of economic growth, such as pollution and inequality, also destroy well-being. Each economic system is a compromise. Some deliver higher growth, and with it higher possibility of making a fortune for yourself. Others deliver higher standards of living and lower inequality.
If the economy is the only thing that matters, laissez-faire complete freeform capitalistic anarchy that can form excessive monopolies and cartels is going to win out. I would not want to live in such a country, however.
I am not sure whether or not to take this strawman, print it on fine paper and glue it to every centimeter of my wall or to incinerate my computer for having had to display it. Furthermore it is a strawman regarding an imaginary situation. (See: Would not be.) The goal of that sentence was obviously to demonstrate the point that economic growth does not necessarily improve the living conditions for most people.
Increasing taxes to fund the centralized healthcare would cost US, as a whole, less money. Currently, you spend more than double the amount Finland does on healthcare, per capita. In fact, there are only two countries with higher health expenditure per capita than the US: Norway and Switzerland, both countries where everything is bloody expensive. Both still have better life expectancy to show for their spending, and actually spend a significantly lower percentage of their GDP. Centralized healthcare allows (as I have explained earlier in this thread) for higher leverages when negotiating prices and thus actually fosters competition. Right now Americans are forced to negotiate in smaller groups or alone, which ends up with them forced to either take really bad deals or risk their health.
The only people that benefit from the lack of centralized healthcare are the companies providing healthcare and the insurances.
Ok, (A) does not exist. There is no such thing as a plan that is desirable but unachievable. If a plan is not is not feasible, it is a bad plan.[/quote]
We did not talk about a plan. We talked about ideas. Bernie Sanders certainly does not have a plan.
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I'm about to read whatever it is Frostdragon4 posted again before replying to it. A few times, and probably Googling some of the terms. Not disregarding it, but a post that well thought-out requires a well thought-out response.
and acts without effort.
Teaching without verbosity,
producing without possessing,
creating without regard to result,
claiming nothing,
the Sage has nothing to lose.
I wanted to talk about this thing, and the modern conservative-libertarian argument against this as well, is that the reason socialism is bad because it hurts the Protestant Work Ethic. This means that during a time period, people used delayed gratification to earn money and build businesses and invent things and so on to build up a better quality of life. Sweden didn't exactly have a very libertarian environment, as there was a codification of the rule of law that was formed by traditions rather readily that the Swedish then used as a basis for their markets. It gave a merchant plug and play access to markets while they also delayed their own gratification by working and building up their business until they got the "epic win."
Dependency theory is the supposition that basically means by using welfare state, we created and degenerate people into a place that looks like learned helplessness where people do not advance themselves. We need to balance that against the institutions for plug and play, and that the exclusivity of the current market situation within the economy with concepts such as "overqualified worker" is something that makes people very angry. When people get very angry they tend to act, in this society through the Common Law tradition conflict resolution happens through the governing body of the legislature rather than through force of arms in a purely voluntary situation.
I feel that you're correct with the socialist model as seen in Canada and Nordic countries and a few other European countries and arguably Israel, as it currently doesn't work. It hasn't been invented yet at all, just scaled up models of Anglo-Franco-Germanic Capitalism and Singaporean Capitalism are probably the two largest strains we see today in competition. Basically, it's America vs. China as England vs. Singapore in terms of scale and originality.
But, we need to take a step back, rather than looking at freedom. Forget freedom exists in a context, but what makes me "decide to start a business" and what makes me "decide" to "do something." Well, a part of it is peer pressure from my parents to make something of myself. If my parents are capitalists, odds are I'm a capitalist too. If they succeeded at it, it means I'll probably do it myself. This is why early on the theory of the Protestant Work Ethic, but I think Weber is wrong about the work ethic. It was several factors, for starter during the Middle Ages if I started a business and was a seafaring merchant I could screw people over and take property and not give the other guy his money. Who would be on the hook for me screwing the town over? Why the town of course! There are towns that were invaded or attacked for money because merchants screwed people over, and they made everyone liable for the merchant's theft. There are letters of college students asking not to have to pay, because they cannot afford to off the merchant's theft costs and they felt it was unfair for them to pay for a stranger's costs. It was weird justice like that we have the insurance industry, 14000 modern banking rules, and massive upgrades to maritime and commerce law during the Commerce Revolution. Basically the emergence of modern trade and institutions, really.
Then we have the technological revolutions like double end book keeping and modern accounting among other technological upgrades.
But the difference between a Protestant and a Catholic was mainly cultural, in what is called Sola Scriptura. Sola Scriptura means scripture only, and the biggest biggest biggest deal to a Reformation Protestant was that they wanted everyone to read the Bible. If you can read the Bible, you can get information, if you can get information you can apply information better and interact with the economy writ large and the local government as to protect yourself against shady merchants. This has been one reason why Israel is called start up nation, take one factor about any given Jew like a Protestant; they like reading their scripture. And if people like to read, they read other things and they also have a high tradition of education too which has allowed Israel to maintain high standards and people entering science and so forth. Because they push people, the same with the Confucian tradition and the same with the Erasmian tradition to which Mises and others were educated out of.
Basically, it doesn't matter how good your work ethic is if you keep losing. You need people to keep off your lawn and make sure other people can't screw you in a business transaction. And what lacks right now is that America doesn't support good working habits, modern American companions do not train youngsters, and basically make a mockery of the system. Back in the 1990's it was easy to train people, but today we want off the shelf ready people. But that's a problem related to business also cutting people right off the cuff.
Equally, we need to look at how people get money to start a business, the real hint here is home equity loans. When the home equity line of credit dries up, so does a person's capacity to get money to build a new business as the modern example. The other debt free model, is to build up through having a side business eventually over take the old income. This is made more difficult by people not being able to find a job to pay for start up costs, and getting angel investors and other sorts of things are made difficult without even getting into the Kickstarter models and frustrations that do occur with that.
Capitalism isn't about freedom as a generic construct, capitalism requires a culture. Socialism doesn't trample on it, as Israel, Sweden, Canada, and other successfully entrepreneurial countries and even Communist China has entrepreneurs. This is just something we in the conservative and libertarian side of the equation need to get used to. There are other forms of capitalism than classical liberalism. And we must contend that Sola Scriptura, unlike Confusion tradition, is similar to Orthodox Judaism that it encourages a sort of rigidity in thinking by following only scripture and following a dogmatic fundamentalist tradition that limits learning and exercise. Evangelicals in the US right now are rather dead set against a liberal education, rather than redefining what a liberal education is. What a liberal education offers is the capacity to develop new brands and concepts. You can't make a Cthlulhu game without reading Lovecraft, but Lovecraft couldn't create Cthlulhu without Greek mythology as an early part of his own self education.
And what Sanders talks about in his 2010 Filibuster is about the New Deal, perhaps it is not Mises or Rothbardianism but rather our own experiment with the New Deal itself. Our tradition, unlike what Sanders wants to use isn't found in social democracy, but rather a form of New Deal conservatism that takes upon our long established Whig traditions over our Jacksonian attempts. From Polk through Lincoln there was a great experiment in trying to fuse Hamiltonianism and Jeffersonianism, Hamilton for many parts won the course. Why did Hamilton win? Because he looked at what other people did, and adjusted for success without necessarily discounting human stupidity and foibles. Madison took it a step farther with his statements about factions, and Jay with his opinions over the court. However, it arguably wasn't until a crisis that we are forced to reinvent ourselves. The last major revolution in the US that rebuild this country head to toe was the New Deal the second that succeeded in redefining policy would be Reagan Era in the last hundred years.
The issue with anarchism is that it's trying to undermine a system that has been in place for centuries, and arguably a tradition and existent that is trying to deny a thousand years of Common Law. Common Law like any other law is edited, which is why Shariah Law isn't very popular right now because it hasn't been massively redacted and edited. Our British Common Law tradition comes out of Roman Common Law. We have no true "tradition" of libertarianism, rather what is "libertarian" is a phase within a string of events that creates a stable civil society where a mixed economy exists. This experiment has been ran globally for thousands of years. The pockets that exist without it, are sparse and mostly have massive, massive issues with security. Whether that is Colonial Pennsylvania or something else that lived in fear of Indian attacks.
Social democracy is probably best called "social democracy market economy." That is a place with a welfare state, high levels of taxation, and a highly interactive market economy surrounded by institutions. And Sweden did inherit aspects of trade with other countries for their rules of engagement and was influenced by Common Law and other traditions as they transitioned away from feudalism to building the modern Sweden. The Swedish also had a strong literary tradition along with their capitalism. Perhaps the issue is not so much the issue from, but rather "to" that becomes the problem with hastle.
A socialist wants safety and freedom, while a libertarianism wants unbridled freedom in its raw form. A moderate wants to have aspects of both. A place proper to have unbridled freedom, while also having the safety to practice that freedom. And therein is the paradox, you cannot have one without the other. It is love and marriage. Safety and freedom.
Socialism is also looking at the tribal model, where there was a lot more give and take in the system rather than take by the few. Meaning that children were a village's concerns to raise and there was a system in place to make people into adults. There was a role for you, if you were blind you became a priest. If you were a limp, you learned how to make tools. You get the idea, but those services were done for free to an extent in some early communities or relatively easy to get established.
The issue is more of the capacity for businesses to be more selective in the way they interact with people in cryptic ways through their hiring processes rather than anything that has to do with capitalism itself. What may make cost in the benefit-analysis sense does not always find itself into reality, as right now the system is built towards exploitation in a poaching game for experienced workers as one such example. What the Germanic system tries to do is work counter cyclically by making sure that people are educated and retrained for jobs that work within the market. I've talked with people who do work in social services, the issue isn't money it's coordination.
Sadly, I see the need to reform the welfare system and I see mainly that it is the argument for dependency theory. We already see through some experiments with welfare like the Harlem Children's Zone we see a better and more efficient form of Comenius' dream. And frankly, the creator of the Harlem Children's Zone has went about to state that "we know how to do it, we just need to scale it up." Federalism is the fastest way to scale something up, not local communities that are post industrial without an identity other than a post office zip code and a dairy cow. To use Mises' artifice with the term socialism, in that everything that government does is socialistic we must therefore portend that socialism is indeed a part of the answer just as capitalism is.
What Sanders is saying, you take the money out of the hands of private capital and you put it into the public trust and then redistribute some of the profits back into the community to build roads, bridges, educate people, take care of the sick and elderly, and do basic research. Even Thatcher agreed with all that, even Reagan did. But Rothard didn't, and that's what makes Rothbard so different and a footnote in intellectual history versus that of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek who conservatives lament over. But Friedman and Hayek had some very, very wrong things with their ideology with laissez faire. That laissez faire isn't fair, and that moralism enters into the equation with humans and within that distribution leads to insurgent groups like the Golden Dawn and Molly Maguires who are discontent groups who gain power through terrorism and power grab. Which coincides more with Madison's views about humanity about faction, rather than the profit seeking advent of Rothbard's view of human nature.
What libertarianism is built on a reaction to fascism and communism. If we consider that Alisa Rosenbaum when she had lung cancer was on government social security, we would think that fine until we consider that she is Ayn Rand. Ron Paul receives social security payments.
The issue is this, that a pension system has been done since the Roman Empire with a census and accounting system. We've done it for hundreds of years, and sometimes it fails and most of the time it works for a very long time before needing to be rebooted.
Thus far, we may portend that the New Deal in its long standing capacity to mutate from older traditions is more ideal than the musings of an intellectual is by far better for America than Jacksonianism or anarchocapitalism. Coming out as a geological-cultural determinist over that of an economic determinism is an interesting aside. What comes first, the geographical adaptation or the economy or the culture? Rather than screwing with Robinson Crusoe, like so many economists like to start with, or something more esoteric and alien from most people like Colonial Pennsylvania after the time that the Penns left the colony or somethings like Spanish Civil War Spain, it might be better to start with the Pilgrims to argue out how a society needs to adapt and build itself up. Which is interesting, because I can actually tie in Progressivism and the Nazism going that route.
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It's econ 101 that monopolies and cartels are economically inefficient and create huge dead weight losses. So your argument that a focus on maximizing economic growth necessarily promotes monopolies is dubious. A freshman economics student knows that monopolies harm economic growth.
One thing that creates monopolies is crony capitalism, i.e. the ability of monied interests to influence government policies in their favor. The ability of the big guys to squeeze out the little guys through superior influence. It's not clear to me that socialist policies would do anything to eliminate or reduce this effect. On the contrary, because the government is larger and more powerful under socialism, the ability to lobby the government would likely become a more important and effective tool.
As I understand Scandinavian socialism, most of the money is collected at the national level but spent and distributed at the local level. This, among other factors, makes is difficult for lobbyists to influence government policy. But that is not how things are in the US. If we take the US system of top-down spending and overlay socialism on top of it, we would get more monopolies, not fewer.
I think as much as such ideals would be appealing to some in practice it will simply just never work. The money for socialism has to come from somewhere and seeing as company tax and income tax of the lower and middle classes is where most of all government money comes from this is the place where governments will have to go if they want to increase there tax income in any meaningful way.
The thing is though seeing as we live in a truly international corporate stage governments simply cannot just increase the tax burden of there nations companies. Companies are increasingly having to fight for corporate survival on an international stage and to cut revenue of companies such a hefty margin will have far reaching consequences.
People are under the impression that if you tax the higher income bracket just more then things would simply be better. This is pure socialist tripe. If the US truly wants to introduce socialism they will have to increase the tax of the majority of Americans not just the top 2 percent. That would mean a tax increase for those who are the majority of earners in the US ie 30 - 100 K a year.
Is that a start?
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I know more about it from an ecological standpoint and hence have global figures, because climate change is a global issue.
I think it isn't radical to say that America spends too much on the military and most of that money is funneled into private firms like Blackwater, Northrop Grumann, KBR, Titan, etc. We don't need newer versions of drones. I question how many of these contracts would be necessary if the American military hadn't bit off more than it could chew: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/09/private-military-contractors/303424/
$470 billion in tax breaks to oil companies: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/04/oil-subsidies-renewable-energy-tax-breaks
"In 2013, the U.S. federal and state governments gave away $21.6 billion in subsidies for oil, gas, and coal exploration and production." :http://priceofoil.org/2014/07/09/cashing-in-on-all-of-the-above-u-s-fossil-fuel-production-subsidies-under-obama/
I think you can find money for the costs of healthcare, education, and green energy somewhere in there. And that's just me googling things in between my school work. Mind you, could he do these things through Congress? Probably not, but the conversation is worth the effort.
Over the past century. Slightly misleading to omit that, don't you think?
The official CBO number is $3.2 billion. Now, that's just for the energy tax; maybe you can get it up to $21.6 billion when you factor in other tax credits. But I'm not going to do your homework for you; if all you do is google for a bit, that's all I'm going to do too. Anyway, the interesting number here is that renewables received $7.3 billion from the same tax credit, more than twice as much. And if you read more of the article, it throws out various estimates for federal spending over various periods on fossil fuels vs. renewables (vs. nuclear), which I won't repeat in detail but certainly put the lie to your implication that renewables aren't competitive because Uncle Sam is unfairly favoring big oil. They're getting a lot of federal money. So maybe we should cut those subsidies too, if we really want to save?
EDIT: Okay, I see, the $21.6 billion number is factoring in the state governments' subsidies as well. Which are pretty well outside the constitutional authority of a hypothetical Sanders Administration.
I think you seriously underestimate those costs. Even AzureShadow in his defense of socialized medicine above quotes the healthcare cost figure at "only" $830 billion per year. (And he may be wrong; he didn't cite his source.) This is why the numbers are so important. It's easy to say "stop oil subsidies and we'll have more money!", and yes, if we stop oil subsidies we will have more money, and maybe there are other good reasons for doing it too. But basic math says that $3.2 billion or $21.6 billion or even $50 billion is way, way less than $830 billion. So if you're trying to pay for healthcare, cutting oil subsidies will not be nearly enough. The government would have more money if they opened a lemonade stand in front of the capitol, too, but that doesn't make "open a lemonade stand" a credible policy proposal for paying for socialized programs.
Just so I'm not a complete Negative Nancy, I will say that I think the real path to paying for healthcare is in finding effective ways to control healthcare costs, rather than trying to find a gazillion dollars in the federal couch cushions. But getting into the details of healthcare policy really belongs in another thread. What I'm trying to say here is that Bernie Sanders' rhetoric, like yours, relies on a non-quantitative, math-free understanding of the federal budget: oil subsidies cost "money", and socialized medicine costs "money", so if we take the "money" from one budget item and give it to the other budget item, we should be fine, right?
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
However, you still have a problem with numbers: you say "only" 830 billion is being spent on the current healthcare plan. Taxing everyone who makes over a million dollars at 100% of their income will leave you wanting by, what, 163-ish billion dollars? And again, that's the spending with Obamacare in effect, not a health care plan for everyone that Sanders is talking about.
I'm not getting figures for how many people are currently enrolled in the Obamacare plan, apparently in January it was 9.5 million people, but let's bring it as high as 12 million people. The US has 318.9 million people. You're talking about the government providing for the health care of all of them.
So I ask again, where's the rest of the money coming from?
You plan on increasing government spending when we are very much in debt and spending more than we have. Where else does this plan lead but bankruptcy?
More hot air. In a debate about the soundness of economic policy, we focus on economic policy. Saying, "Yeah, well, what really matters is that people are happy right? Right?" doesn't help your case.
Oh well that changes everything. [/sarcasm]
An idea that is not feasible is a bad idea when it comes to governance. If an idea fails to work, then you don't want it.
Replacing insurance with the governement is not "cut[ting] out the middleman," it's replacing one middleman (insurance) with a different middleman (government). In order for this to result in a better state of afairs, the government needs to allocate healthcare more efficiently than the insurance companies do.
It's certainly possible for the government to be more efficient than the insurance companies at administering healthcare. But it's also possible for the government to be far less efficient and/or corrupt. That's why Bernie's specific plan for implementing universal healthcare is so critically important and why people are skeptical of vague platitudes.
Also note that making the "cost plummet" is not the end goal here. The easiest and fastest way to make healthcare costs plummet is to bulldoze every hospital and doctors office in the US. Healthcare spending would plummet overnight because there would be little to no healthcare available to buy. Instead, the goal is to reduce costs while keeping quality and availability the same (or better). This is not an easy task and, to repeat myself, whether this is achievable relies heavily on the specifics of the plan.
And in the second year the no-longer-freshman student will learn why things he learned in his first year are not always correct. The deadweight welfare loss does not apply in situations where the monopolist is better capable of exploiting economics of scale, in which case the profit maximizing equilibrium can very well reach a lower price point and higher output than under perfect competition. The MC under a monopoly can very well increase in different rate to the unit production than under competition leading to different MR=MC. There is also the special case of natural monopolies where competitors cannot reach MES and as such, encouraging competition and forcing the competitors to invest the required sunk costs actually creates inefficiency. Indeed, one of the main reasons why monopolies tend to be inefficient is because they don't understand economy and act rationally, or are able to lobby for subsidies where such would not be needed*. Because they can afford to be stupid, don't care, or whatever.
Monopolies form under free competition as well, when one company is capable of competing others out of the market, suggesting that they are able to perform very efficiently in order to secure their position - this is something that the hypothetical freshman student would be incapable of explaining. The common 'explanation' that monopolies are capable of destroying competition through predatory pricing has been shown to be faulty. Thus fundamentally inefficient monopolies would rarely remain monopolies for long.
As an aside it should be noted that vertical price restraints and vertical price fixing are not per se illegal in the United States, and instead fall under rule of reason as of 2007 (See Leegin vs PSKS). Thus it could be assumed that allocative efficiency really is not a concern. (Also see United States vs Apple Inc, though - there seems to be some confusion.) Furthermore, MAP is a legal practice, and essentially a form of vertical price fixing.
Sure, and this works the other way. The costs of lobbying in order to maintain their monopoly position also increases the inefficiency of the monopoly, as that money could have been spent on more efficient production or research.
*: There are also some cases where the monopolies are right. Sometimes it is better to subsidize them and force them to operate at margins where they would otherwise generate a loss (Without the subsidy), especially in the case where other industries rely on said monopoly and allocative efficiency is paramount. I.E: There are even situations where subsidized monopolies promote economic growth.
Scandinavian countries also have laws forcing transparency. The fact that someone had donated a certain party something around 600€ as Bitcoins and it was impossible to track who they were due to the anonymous nature of the currency broke the news barrier in Finland.
US currently spends $9146/capita on healthcare. Finland spends $4449. Assuming that the US should be able to reach similar efficiency as Finland (When realistically due to higher self-sufficiency and larger scale economy the efficiency should be higher.) this spending could be reduced to roughly the same amount. Thus, the US could increase taxes so that the increase is anywhere between $4449 and $9146 per capita and use that to fund centralized healthcare. Numbers higher than $4449 leave the government with more money than they would spend to fund the healthcare system, while still maintaining same quality assuming similar efficiency. The extra money could be used to, for example, pay off debts.
Now, this is not exactly how it works out, but hopefully you can understand the basic idea.
Your argument is like saying that when justifying where to build a new charcoal plant, we should decide to erect it right in the middle of the largest city because the decision is one of finances, and proximity to consumption reduces the costs of energy transfer. That consideration completely disregards pollution, risks, and well-being of people near the plant. In other words, you are trying to simplify and streamline the situation where doing so leads to omission of important data. You cannot ignore a number of consequences of any certain policy or action and tunnelvision on others. You need to think of everything.
*sigh*
You are missing the point. If someone would find it desirable but believes it is unachievable, it is possible to change their mind about that. If someone believes it is undesirable, that is a different thing to change one's mind about. Hell, I find the idea that everyone would be happy forever and stop being rude nice, or that everyone would learn to stand in lines efficiently to maximize throughput, rather beautiful and desirable. I also do not see a good way to make that an actual thing. That does not mean I should never discuss the topic because it is very much likely that I am wrong about the fact that this idea cannot be realized. Likewise, someone can see the move towards more socialism as desirable but unrealizable, and it thus might be worthwhile discussing why they think so and whether or not they are right in their beliefs.
I get the impression that you are simply trying to kill or divert the discussion here.
This is very much true. And while the insurance companies are evidently doing a really bad job at efficiency, I would not leave Bernie Sanders in charge of it either.
and acts without effort.
Teaching without verbosity,
producing without possessing,
creating without regard to result,
claiming nothing,
the Sage has nothing to lose.
I totally agree with you. Not just is it the replacement of one middleman with another it is also the removal of the profit motive. A thing which when removes takes with it all incentive for an entity to do things efficiently.
Ezra Kline did an article a few years ago on Clinton Era Welfare Reform that had a few good ideas in it. So in order to fix Medicare, there were grants given out for companies to try different things out to help people.
The article is here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/04/28/if-this-was-a-pill-youd-do-anything-to-get-it/
The basic gist is with direct assistance targeting the people who cost the most money to treat and prevent those problems we save a lot of money. There are similar programs in other cities right now that look at hospital data, target specifically the highest cost people for insurance or hospitals, and then keep those people from getting back into the hospital by putting in a long term treatment plan with proper support. And to be honest, I don't see charity being a huge thing here.
We're seeing fire stations not being able to buy equipment or train people based off the old bingo and lunches gambit or donations, and local communities are moving to all employed or a mixed company department and imposing a fire tax. Charity is inconsistent, this is why we simply do not see private roads everywhere because the failures to support a commons. You have one person who stops paying into the system, then others retroactively stop paying into the public pool until the system fails.
A hybrid system, where you use either a profit or tax based system combined with charity seems to work best. This reflects Ostrom's research on common pool resource problems, where you have an admixture of public, private, and NGO activity in the sector or what is Madisonian factions. Each of a series of different factions wants something, and they have to negotiate within the sphere to find an equilibrium. That equilibrium is constantly shifting, but the question comes down to really "how much innovation do we really need?"
For the most part, many of the major revolutions for trauma care come out of war. And given the US fights a war every decade, that's a given. The second biggest contributor is exploration in the old school sense, which we have not been doing to the degree that we used to as a species. We must also contend that the "sexy effect" for specifics like breast cancer are large or some kid that has a messed up pallet. You see people there, but not a mentally ill guy on the street with a beard and a jacket. This is specifically why some libertarians want a kind of government system to take care of the people that the charities won't take of care, like the crazy that has an unknown mental illness that is telling you the end is nigh.
Yes, what works for breast cancer does not work for all diseases. There are some diseases that with a little bit of research dollars could have large rewards, because frankly we're ignorant and haven't explored those areas. They're not sexy, either because few people are afflicted with them. We're talking perhaps a few hundred thousand.
I'm not a huge fan of taxes, I'm not a huge fan of Obamacare, but let us face it that it at least attempts to scale something that conservatives, especially whenever they win, fail to scale. Our medical system is not the envy of the world, it's our medical technology and even then the far more socialist Japanese do quite well because of their own innovative culture. So instead of looking at socialism as the great evil, we need to distinguish between what is efficient in what other countries do well and look at what would work well within our own system and then scale over time.
We've tried smaller government, and after the 1990's we got more expensive health care. That's a fact. So now we're trying government, my preference is to try to distinguish between free market enterprise and a public good. Health by its nature involves others and families, abuse and other things arranging from issues like alcoholism last for generations. It might not be government's job to be everyone's big brother, the issue is we're looking too much at 1984 and not enough at Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. That is a country that ignore's people, and looks towards people like Kim Kardashian for entertainment rather than looking out for their next door neighbor. That's not government's fault, that's just our individualistic culture outsourcing those duties to government and private enterprise because we're too lazy.
American people don't want bothered with a problem or anything, especially if it costs them money. Yet, a person will donate to the Good Samaritan a few dollars during Christmas, because its going to a good cause. The point is we need to start connecting our taxes to good causes and good ends that people actually believe in, rather than always looking to individuals who have basically not given us any answers at all to the problems facing the American healthcare nightmare.
I'm a conservative that supporst the tenets of the New Deal, so rather than wasting time trying to scrap the whole system. We need to look at reconfiguring the system itself to be better maintained. If social security is good enough for Ayn Rand, then it's good enough for Ron Paul, it's good enough four hundred years from now.
And frankly, after five years of "repeal and replace" why is there no conservative healthcare bill to add new systems in place to bring down the costs? It's a useless debate, because there are no alterations such as a healthcare savings account available to all Americans. Teaching people to save for a rainy day is a good thing, but do we conservatives do that? No, we're too busy talking about "government bad" "market smash!"
Obamacare has:
1. Allowed for people to job hop from job to job looking for better work without being tethered to one job
2. Allows entrepreneurs the capability to maintain health coverage for their family as a start up
3. No lifetime caps
It's time we stopped just thinking of individual autonomous units that can "magically" make it in the world, and just say some people get screwed and if you work harder than the guy to the left and the right of you you can still make it.
Everytime I see one of those young men going around killing people with some mental illness, I feel that we're failing them somehow. They must've been having problems as a kid, and had they got the help they needed they would have grown up better. Might not be captain stability, but at least they wouldn't be dead or in jail. Or looking into that face of that homeless person and thinking, "Why the hell are you there?" Asking those people that question is hard, because it takes so much to help those people and some people in those circumstances are just beyond one person's help.
Our lives are disorderly, we dislike being inconvenienced. Yet, we overpay for health insurance and teach the world what not to do with healthcare. We're not making people more independent, we're showing that socialism is the answer rather than when necessary it is a part to an answer for a very complex problem and set of issues.
US follows a service provided model, so for instance you get a fracture treated. They'll charge you like $100 just for gauze since they don't charge labor fees among other hidden charges. It's cleaning up the billing system that insurance companies are too lazy to do so. They're more interested in other ways that have been hazardous and stupid. Such as denying one kind of medication and having a person go on a "cheaper" treatment plan that is more intensive and makes the patient take more pills than necessary whenever another more expensive pill would do.
Insurance companies are incentivized to collect money, not treat patients. That is the problem before we entertain about people without health insurance and improper long term care.
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Yeah, cost containment, access, and quality are the three themes when talking about a health care system. The issue is how to do any sort of cost containment without negatively affecting the other two. The one benefit have a universal payer would be over the current mixed system we have is that costs would be a lot more transparent. This is too much to go into without dusting off my old healthcare econ books, but suffice it to say that what people think constitutes quality and access doesn't always reflect the reality of clinical care.
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And without a viable economy, where is the well-being?
Taking that own list you will find that the happiest countries are also among the richest (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?order=wbapi_data_value_2013 wbapi_data_value wbapi_data_value-last&sort=desc) and more economically deregulated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom), which is no surprise for the people in the field of development economics.
The correlation is obviously not 1-for-1 (it NEVER is!) but the it's definitely positive and should get even more positive the moment you start to controlling for variables (like oiling exports which adds a lot GDP for a few countries but little economic activity for their populace) and do some real statistics rather then this crude meaningless thing we are doing right now.
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Total population of Spain, Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and Cyprus is ~76 million. This is less than one sixth, or roughly 15% of the EU population. Government Gross Debt as a percent of GDP is also significantly lower overall in the EU (89% to 107%) than the United States. When we look at countries with higher debt/GDP ratios than the US, the total population of Ireland, Greece, Italy and Portugal is ~88 million. This is still less than one fifth - roughly 17% of the EU population. Considerably less of the Europe as a whole.
It is also notable that Greece does not need to default. In 2014 the amount of money Greece had to spend to pay interests as percent of GDP had fallen significantly from 2011 (7% to 4.3%), largely due to the subsidized loans with low interest rates. In other words, they are in much less trouble than they used to be. Greek defaulting will be a policy decision if it happens, rather than a necessity. They could easily balance their budget, they simply choose not to. I am not sure what will happen if/when they default, but the shock to the European stock market has been significantly lower than the decline in the Asian stock market, so apparently the business world isn't too concerned. (Or perhaps the potential crash of Greek economy is detrimental to some export market in Asia - I am not actually sure about that.) So in a way the bailing out Greece has worked, so if they default they default despite that - not because of it.
I do not disagree with the fact that a crashing economy destroys well-being. The point I am trying to make is that strong economy does not necessarily lead to well-being. US already has a stronger economy than a lot of other countries, but lower well-being than those countries (At least according to statistics I could find). Single-minded focus on more economic growth with no other policy changes is unlikely to lead to high increases in well-being, and good results could be achieved with policies that would not necessarily contribute much to the growth. Furthermore, as I understand there is rather good projected growth on the economy of the States, which would suggest that now might be a good time to divert some of that cash flow towards reducing poverty and improving healthcare.
I am not saying US should go all socialist, but moving towards it should help. Laws enforcing transparency of funding of political parties and transparency of lobbying would be on thing that would likely slightly stifle growth as large companies would be less able to pass laws that benefit them at the cost of general populace. Government-funded healthcare, as I already stated I believe, would be something that would be beneficial to the US as a whole and could be funded through increased tax and organized at a better efficiency than the insurance companies are currently able due to economies of scale and improved leverage. I also believe that something could and should be done about the prison system - even if it means having to fund rehabilitation programs more. I do not believe these would bankrupt US, though they would likely reduce the rate of growth in the following years - which I would consider an acceptable tradeoff. And I believe something like this is what Bernie also believes, though the specifics might differ.
I am not exactly sure what point you are trying to make. Care to elaborate?
and acts without effort.
Teaching without verbosity,
producing without possessing,
creating without regard to result,
claiming nothing,
the Sage has nothing to lose.
Bernie Sanders has a Dirty Secret: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/bernie-sanders-vermont-119927.html#.VbDUwfkq7fY
I don't like the title of the article, but after reading it there's an understanding about his past. He's a single father of one, and lived off of welfare for a number of years living as a social activist trying to run for office and a career politician. It makes sense with his idealism and focus on morality, and it fits his own narrative. It is a good read on the "man behind the man," however I feel it does underscore an import point with socialism. Whenever we consider socialists they tend to be activists or thinkers.
The interesting part to me is that whenever you consider moderates such as Clinton and Obama and Team Bush, you end up with people who have professional backgrounds and success. Then we entertain people like Sanders, Ayn Rand, Mises, Rand Paul, and so forth those people tend towards an extreme in their personal biography. Even Jack London for his literary success had issues early on his life, and he was an ardent socialist.
I think this is why personal biography telling about people, that those who come from stranger backgrounds tend to have a harder push towards one extreme or another. I really tend to dislike certain aspects of the "gotcha, look at what they said" politics. I prefer understanding their long trajectory and growth as a person, such as Donald Trump's necessity in his brand to say he's worth more than he actually is. That his wealth is a significant part of his brand and who he is as a person. I really don't look at what people say, I look at both what they say and how they lived. It is no different than an alcoholic saying "don't drink and drive" or a person of means saying that "wealth doesn't mean anything" at the top.
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I think you have the arrow of causation flipped. It's not that having a conventional background makes you a moderate while having an "extreme personal biography" makes you more of a political extremist. I think it's the case that the political moderates (i.e. those most likely to win presidential elections) have been carefully pre-selected by their respective parties and political backers, ensuring that they don't have controversial personal histories. Candidates with extreme political positions (i.e. candidates who are less likely to win) have not been selected and vetted, so they tend to have a wide variety of backgrounds, including more "extreme" ones.
Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard were both Jewish immigrants from Soviet Russia, and created market based philosophies to counteract Marxism. Ludwig von Mises and Wilhelm Roepke were both affected by fascism and communism, and built within the same intellectual framework as Rothbard. Rothbard and Roepke were students of Mises inside of the libertarian tent. Much of libertarianism can be traced to taking classical liberalism ideas and applying that to WWII as a reaction against fascism and communism.
We can then see why someone like Ted Cruz's father, a Cuban refugee, and Ted Cruz himself would both be a part of reactionary.
Jack London, author of White Fang and Cry of the Wild and other books, was born poor and while many attempts to finish his education was never really able to do as much as he liked until he was older. While socialism was in vogue intellectually, and he was commercially success, we can see as a part of his own personal growth why he was a supporter of socialism. Then whenever we consider Bernie Sander's own personal biography, linked in a former post, we can consider his lifestyle choices and continued support of those ideals.
In part, the ideals that reflected one's own successes and fears in life can be seen in one's own political ideology. Even Hilary Clinton was a conservative in her young life, but still maintains similar to her husband a support of neo-liberal policies like free trade.
The vetting process sure has a lot to do with tone and moderation and talking points, much like Reagan or Clinton or Team Bush. However, we must conclude the basic tenets of their cherished philosophies have a bearing on their upbringing and locality and what determined success. For Bernie Sanders it was government, for Clinton it was both the private sector and government, while for others it was the private sector.
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