Eliminate Social Security - Dont 'Privitize it'

[Agathon]

If you want to stop this sort of free riding Berz, you will need an agency with the power to compel people to pay for the risks they expose others to. To be effective this agency will be suspiciously like a government.

[Lung]

How do you get private enterprise to give money away??

[Agathon]

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.

I don't know about that. People with ****ed hips aren't much good at work and slow me down when I am trying to get down the escalator. Plus, I don't like seeing people crippled.

I guess that's why I'm prepared to pay taxes to fund things like wheelchair ramps, so that people with disabilities can live happy and productive lives rather than being stuck inside for 50 years.

[Agathon]

How do you get private enterprise to give money away??

By having the state, which has a monopoly on force. Hobbes pointed this out over 300 years ago. We give up some of our liberty to the state in order to preserve the rest of it, for with complete market liberty we would end up in a state of nature.

[Agathon]

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

Why shouldn't buses be free, if it is cheaper to fund them collectively than it is to spend millions and millions of dollars on pollution belching cars?

[Agathon]

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

You mean fall up??

Canadians are on the average healthier than Americans and pay far less as a %age of GDP than the US to provide health care to every single Canadian.

Hint: there's nothing wrong with Canadian health care compared to the US.

Hint 2: Canada has a much lower rate of violent crime too.

Hint 3: It might have something to do with the US being totally wrong about how to solve these problems, not with anything bad the Canadians have done.

[Patroklos]

Why shouldn't buses be free, if it is cheaper to fund them collectively than it is to spend millions and millions of dollars on pollution belching cars?

I agree, but it is not some "right" that you must be afforded. When cities get in budget crunches they suspend bus services. When an interstate needs repair, they close it. It is a service, which becuase society is capable of supporting it they do so as a service to the public.

[Patroklos]

Canadians are on the average healthier than Americans and pay far less as a %age of GDP than the US to provide health care to every single Canadian.

That has nothing to do with their inferior health care system, it is because they have a healthier lifestyle.

[Agathon]

That has nothing to do with their inferior health care system, it is because they have a healthier lifestyle.

Have you been to a Canadian donut shop lately? Or had a plate of poutine? Or one of those bagels with half a ton of cream cheese in the middle? And everything here is absolutely loaded up with sugar.

There's not that much difference between the Canadian and US lifestyle. It's the health care and the welfare. People that are desperately poor eat a lot of high fat foods because they're cheap.

I agree, but it is not some "right" that you must be afforded. When cities get in budget crunches they suspend bus services. When an interstate needs repair, they close it. It is a service, which becuase society is capable of supporting it they do so as a service to the public

Sure, I agree. Questions about entitlements come before all this stuff. I think the wheelchair ramps are pretty close to a clear case of entitlement though, don't you?

[Patroklos]

Sure, I agree. Questions about entitlements come before all this stuff. I think the wheelchair ramps are pretty close to a clear case of entitlement though, don't you?

The wheelchair ramps are a discrimination thing, and they do have a right to not be discriminated against.

I think I am missing what your saying about entitlements, please explain when you get a minite.

And I have been to Canada many a times, I stick by my lifestyles comments. I would venture to guess that most experts agree too, but I can't be arsed to look up a sourse.

[Agathon]

The wheelchair ramps are a discrimination thing, and they do have a right to not be discriminated against.

You can spin that argument further though. Why should people who are in poor health through no fault of their own be disadvantaged with regard to health care.

Re: entitlements. I suppose you have a conception of justice (equality, utilitarian, etc.) and then you just work out the way to come as close to that goal as possible.

Differing theories of justice will yield different results. But my point was that things that people think are questions of justice are often practical issues. For example, there is no "right" to free travel, we just want to make travel as easy and efficient as possible and if public funding is the solution, that's what we do. If it isn't, we don't. It's not a question of justice, but of efficiency.

[Patroklos]

Differing theories of justice will yield different results. But my point was that things that people think are questions of justice are often practical issues. For example, there is no "right" to free travel, we just want to make travel as easy and efficient as possible and if public funding is the solution, that's what we do. If it isn't, we don't. It's not a question of justice, but of efficiency.

I agree with that completely. My beef with SS and the like in that framing is that even if government health care is efficient than private, which is by no means a truth, it is imaterial because the government as a whole would be more efficient useing that money for something else.

You can spin that argument further though. Why should people who are in poor health through no fault of their own be disadvantaged with regard to health care.

No inequality as far as the government purposely treating classes of people different. I think ALL people deserve help with their basic health care (ie vaccines, ER stabilization, emergency response).

But health care is a consumer service. The inequality is based on wealth, and in my opinion anything beyond basic healthcare is a luxury. Welcome to capitalist society.

Now we can argue all day over what "basic" healthcare is.

[Berzerker]

Aggie -

If you want to stop this sort of free riding Berz, you will need an agency with the power to compel people to pay for the risks they expose others to. To be effective this agency will be suspiciously like a government.

I'm not the one citing "free riders" to justify legalising robbery on a massive scale to pay for government. Why attribute this irrational fear of free riders to me when your side always brings it up?

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

I wasn't laughing, I said there was no reason to be so hard on them. But I do offer a rationale for my belief in "natural rights" and you know it given how many times we've debated the issue.

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).

That agreement is how we define morality, if ~everyone agrees "A" is immoral, then "A" is immoral by virtue of the strength of our agreement. The problem is some people want to ignore this and start defining rights based on lower standards, like "democracy" or majority rule, or personal taste. When this standard conflicts with the higher standard of ~universal desire, you end up with immorality masquerading as morality...

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.

They aren't leading their own lives, they are using government to rip each other off. And not surprisingly, "The Land of the Free" now has millions of laws because people like to attach strings to how others behave (image a puppeteer) when they're footing the bill. Universal healthcare means more laws about what we can and cannot do so that we don't "cost" the system money.

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.

The competition for survival and resources drives evolution, not Marxism.

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.

Then your earlier assertion that we live in a contractarian system (social contract?) is wrong, we have all sorts of laws that restrict people when they aren't harming others.

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".

There is a difference, in the marketplace I can seek businesses that show better fiscal sanity. We don't have that option with Congress controlling our lives.

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.

The inefficiency we see in health care was caused by government. Wage and price controls during WWII started the practice of businesses affording health care packages to employees and the 3rd party payer system was born. And claiming the government bureaucracy is efficient ignores that government programs put alot of the burden on doctors who've become flooded with government paperwork. It ain't efficient for them to spend their resources complying with all the federal and state laws dealing with government run health care programs. Our family doctor had to join an HMO because of all the paperwork he was dealing with from government amd insurance companies.

Why would a road owner care about that?

All sorts of reasons, he uses the road too. He wants his road to be safe for others and insured drivers are better than uninsured drivers. If he attracts more motorists by requiring insurance, he has made a wise business move. But the owners of public roads are the voting taxpayers and they've required insurance, so why does that need further explanation?

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.

Where did I say I would force him? I said the owner gets to decide.

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.

Then that's a business decision you will have to make, what's your point?

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.

People aren't going to build roads they don't need, that's the function of government.

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.

A sticker works now.

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.

They do sell insurance to people to cover getting hit by the unisnured.

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.

And that's fine when the roads are public. You're trying to use this argument in a thread about SS and other "social contract" programs the left wants that violate the principle of ownership used in the public road example.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Berzerker
How do "democrats" feel about letting voters earmark their taxes so they won't be forced to fund what they find immoral?

I think they'd feel pretty good about it, since Demcrats pay more in taxes. They could really screw the Red States.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Patroklos
For some reason people assume medical care to be a right as opposed to the consumer service it is.

Most people assume health care is a right. That makes it a right. A right is what people say a right is. Rights don't exist independently of human beings, society, and social agreement.