There’s one other point I wanted to make that I missed earlier. I agree entirely with Bricker about this:
It is completely reasonable to give markets the initial benefit of the doubt.
They work extremely well in many contexts, and even if we have a demonstrable need to regulate, which is often, we should as often as possible use market-based solutions for that regulation, e.g. a cap-and-trade system to reduce pollution. He claimed, originally, that markets had the presumption of efficiency, and frankly, that’s totally right. They deserve that presumption. And this entire thread has undercut that presumption. The free market for medicine never worked correctly. With problems of adverse selection and asymmetric information, health care is not a typical market. That’s the entire reason we have Medicare. Old folks couldn’t buy health insurance, and so without Medicare, they’d have no insurance at all. So we created this miserable system of ad hoc patches to keep the boat from sinking. But that’s not going to work forever.
Meanwhile, other countries use a universal system that covers everyone and costs almost half as much per person. Universal health care costs less. It is, to use Bricker’s own words, “the most efficient answer”. In the sense that our current system is leading to a spike in the price of health care, that spike could easily be considered a form of “socialist” taxation. We are transferring an inordinate amount of money to our health care industry, nearly double what other industrialized countries pay, simply because we have a bad system. What health care reform advocates are proposing here is to decrease the cost of that health care “tax” caused by our poor system.
Bricker’s original postulate, which I entirely agree with, has been satisfied. Repeatedly.
And what happened next? He simply jumped to a new postulate, a new principle, this whole “no tribute” thing. He flushed his first principle like you flush a condom, use it and forget it. He did so just as quickly as he couldn’t defend it any longer. “Socialism”, instead of being generally disfavored for its inefficiencies, has now suddenly become a negative in and of itself. Anything with the label is wrong, regardless of his earlier hollow hypocritical pleas for “efficiency” when he thought that argument would work. It didn’t work. And so now, contrary to what he said earlier in the thread about choosing markets due to their presumption of being the most efficient system, he now freely admits that he’s willing to have less efficiency. As long as it has the right label, as long as people continue to get bills they can’t pay, he’s fine with the way things work. We can forget all of that nonsense he wrote about wanting “the most efficient answer”. Fuck efficiency, people. It’s all about labelling.
We just have to realize: Labels are what made this country great.
