Eliminate Social Security - Dont 'Privitize it'

[Agathon]

On the other hand, for the cost of one hip replacement, you could provide vaccinations for over 1,000 kids.

Or you could just provide both, as I remarked above.

[pchang]

At some point, we will have to choose.

[Berzerker]

It's a pointless waste of time and money. Part of living in a society is that you occasionally have to do things you don't like, have to put up with things you don't like, and suffer people you don't like.

But hey, everyone else is in the same position. Accepting it is called "growing up".

Then upon what basis would you oppose using taxes to commit immoral acts? Forcing others to fund immoral behavior is not "growing up", it is the expedient action of the physically strong but morally weak.

But it isn't pointless, much of what government does is called "pork" or worse. How many people would pay taxes so Bob Dole can appropriate money from the treasury for an agricultural museum in Kansas? How many people would actually earmark taxdollars to chase pot smokers as terrorists are running around? Fiscal sanity depends on prioritising and the people paying the taxes are better at it than the politicians spending the taxes.

It's exactly the reason. It's the same reason why private car insurance is compulsory in many countries.

If the owners of those roads won't let people drive them without insurance, they have the moral authority to require insurance. That is a flawed analogy since you don't have the moral authority to come into my home and demand that I help pay for your police protection.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Agathon
This isn't a lifeboat choice.

We live in the most productive era in history. We can easily afford to keep people in reasonable health and ensure them a decent retirement income until they die.

Frankly, we can't, not for everyone, not for everything.

[Kuciwalker]

And even if we could, in theory, why should we dedicate our entire society to providing every possible bit of health care?

[Dis]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
And even if we could, in theory, why should we dedicate our entire society to providing every possible bit of health care?

we could provide health care easily enough (though not for illegal aliens- they are what breaks our system)

but our health care would fall to the quality of nations such as Canada.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

who said that was ok? i didnt say grade school use was ok. but your point is moot since if drugs were legal, there wouldnt be any gangbanger homies

[Sava]

Originally posted by Patroklos
For some reason people assume medical care to be a right

Yeah, some really crazy people think medical care is a human right. What morons...

[Odin]

The real problem is, as usual, that people want to have their cake and eat it too. It's not as if there is a lack of wealth in our society, it's that people would like to spend theirs on consumer goods and hope that someone else pays for the upkeep of the elderly.

Thats is why the US is so f*cked up, people want thier social services but don't want to pay for them because Lord God Reagan said taxes are the scouge of the Earth.

[Ming]

Originally posted by Lawrence of Arabia
who said that was ok? i didnt say grade school use was ok. but your point is moot since if drugs were legal, there wouldnt be any gangbanger homies

Yeah... right...



Just like make booze legal eliminated organized crime

[Berzerker]

Yeah, some really crazy people think medical care is a human right. What morons...

You don't have to be so hard on them, misguided will do.

Of course people have a right to health care, the right to contract with a provider of health care or treat themselves. But the left has turned this into a right to force others to pay for that health care. So now the working poor subsidise the health care of retired millionaires - Brilliant!

[Agathon]

Frankly, we can't, not for everyone, not for everything.

For most things we can. Many countries have universal health care. Extremely rare and expensive treatments are probably out, but they are after all extremely rare.

But we spend so much on clothing, DVDs and Chocolate that one or so less of those a week would probably be enough to fund an extremely lavish healthcare system.

Remember that there are costs of not having universal healthcare. People get sicker and are not as productive.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

Just like make booze legal eliminated organized crime

v

yep, all organized crime based on booze went away. do you know of any gangs based on selling booze? are you this out of touch ming? why do you close your eyes to the problems and stay stuck in the old wrong ways. i mean, it is easier to plug your ears and repeat whats familiar, but ignorance doesnt make you right.

[Agathon]

You don't have to be so hard on them, misguided will do.

I find it amusing that someone who believes in an extremely spurious doctrine of natural rights for which he can offer no reasonable argument should be laughing at another right claim that is also offered without argument

Then upon what basis would you oppose using taxes to commit immoral acts? Forcing others to fund immoral behavior is not "growing up", it is the expedient action of the physically strong but morally weak.

We live in a contractarian society. In such societies people agree to disagree over most of what we would call moral issues, and leave the law to a few issues which most people agree on (like serious physical harm to other people).

This means that people will pay tax that might go to fund a homosexual dance troupe or something else they find disagreeable. On the other hand, the homosexual dance troupers will probably be subsidizing church events (since religious organizations get hefty tax breaks). Neither likes what the other does, but if both can put up with the other leading their own lives, then both are happier.

This is how our societies are organized, and there's a spectacularly good reason for it. We cannot achieve many of our goods without collective action, and the larger a society gets the more diverse the opinions of its members on what constitutes the good life grow.

In the old days this was solved by the law siding with the majority and persecuting the infidels. But this doesn't work. So contractarian societies developed in which everyone is expected to contribute and receives the benefit of not having the state intefere in their sex life or their religious life unless they are harming others.

This is so obvious that it shouldn't need to be repeated... but..

But it isn't pointless, much of what government does is called "pork" or worse. How many people would pay taxes so Bob Dole can appropriate money from the treasury for an agricultural museum in Kansas? How many people would actually earmark taxdollars to chase pot smokers as terrorists are running around? Fiscal sanity depends on prioritising and the people paying the taxes are better at it than the politicians spending the taxes.

Of course there will be problems with any sort of economic organization. I get annoyed that my phone bill costs what it does because the phone company flies its executives off to Hawaii for "motivational sessions".

But if the alternative is worse, then we just have to put up with it and reform where we can.

For example, some government programs are inefficient (not all - public health care is actually a lot less bureaucratic than private systems) but if those programs provide something that people really need and at an acceptable cost and which the market would either fail to provide or provide at a massively inflated cost, it is worth putting up with the inefficiency.

Everyone gets pissed off with government waste. But hey, corporations waste money too, which we pay for in higher prices. But these are just the costs of the kind of society we have. In the absence of any evidence that privatizing everything is a panacea, it is best to try for incremental reforms where it can demonstrably do some good.

If the owners of those roads won't let people drive them without insurance, they have the moral authority to require insurance. That is a flawed analogy since you don't have the moral authority to come into my home and demand that I help pay for your police protection.

Why would a road owner care about that? The road owner is not responsible for people who have accidents on his road. If they damage the road, they have to pay him, but he owes nothing to the other people they hit - and to force him to would violate your conception of his rights.

If I owned a road I would expressly state that I was not responsible for accidents due to bad driving, since I would want more people to use it and it doesn't bother me if they are insured or not.

Of course you could argue that insured people would pay more to drive on roads that only allowed the insured, but that would involve a ridiculously inefficient amount of redundant road building, involving two different systems of roads.

More to the point, it would be extremely difficult to check who was insured and who was not. In a libertarian society people are going to object to having their cars bugged.

So people will attempt to free ride by driving without insurance or by being underinsured, knowing that if they hit someone else whom they can't afford to pay, the other person will just have to suck it up.

You can either go through the expensive rigmarole of trying to work out who is insured and who isn't, or you can force people to take responsibility for themselves by having the government pass a law that you cannot drive uninsured on pain of jail time.

[Patroklos]

Yeah, some really crazy people think medical care is a human right. What morons...

Damn straight, but since you decided to use a sorry example or sarcasm, please provide me the legal source for your right to medical care.

Then again that isn't really what I said is in Sava, god forbid you actually addressed a poster's actual words.

For some reason people assume medical care to be a right as opposed to the consumer service it is

And you have every right to use your personal resources to procure said services. Hell, use all of them if you want, its your money.

However, as Agathon said given the state of our society there is no reason we can not provide BASIC medical care for everone. Flu vacinations count, hip replacements don't. But just because it is within our means to provide that service in no way makes it a right.

But that is okay Save, go exercise your "right" to bus service, and have fun excercising your "right" to use the Interstates.