Ok. Since walking east on K Street is, in fact, taking you towards the Chesapeake, this example seems to vitiate your point a bit.
I don’t agree, at least in this case. The more people come to rely on subsidized health care, the more they will vote for its continuance and expansion.
Nor am I endorsing a collapse of our vocabulary to good, ungood, and double-plus-ungood. I am merely saying that it’s not incorrect to characterize the changes proposed as part of the health care package as moving us towards socialism,. It’s also correct, and a suiitable rejoinder, to say that the net effect of the move is similar to the two-block walk on K Street you mention above.
Yes, that’s true. Without responding to each of their posts, I certainly and cheerfully concede that social security, public libraries, public roads, fire depts, police depts, public schools, the Center for Disease Control, NASA, the Veterans Administration, the FDA, and the rest are all socialistic in nature.
I’m no fan of the RNC, and this presentation certainly sounds bad. But I have to admit - all political campaigns use fear, to one extent or another. “Vote for X, or a Parade of Horribles will be brought down upon us all” is common rhetoric. And it’s often, in my view, correct - “Vote for a Democratic President or we risk further erosion of our civil liberties” was a common fear-based argument in 2008, but that doesn’t mean the argument was wrong, dishonest, or exploitative in itself.
Similarly - of course the Republican base is reactionary. That’s what conservatism is, and conservatives view it as a virtue. I don’t - but then, I’m not a Republican, let alone a donor.
And if Obama’s political opponents simply admitted this, and then gave specific reasons why health care, specifically, should not be brought further under government control, then you might have a point.
But their political rhetoric has been nothing but “He’s a socialist!” They have completely and (IMO) intentionally elided the fact that many aspects of the American economic system, including programs that Republicans and conservatives more generally support, are socialist in nature, and they have done this in order to frame the debate in a dishonest way.
And THAT is why, despite your undoubtedly genuine and sincere attempt to educate us chumps about the socialistic nature of universal healthcare, the political efforts to label Obama a socialist are dishonest and misleading, in the broader context of American politics and economic policy.
So your point is, if I understand it: yes, UHC is socialistic in nature, but because the attacks against it that call it socialistic fail to acknowledge other things that are ALSO socialistic, they are dishonest.
Um… yeah, sorta. I see that. My own opinion is: why add another socialistic program to an arena that already has too many of them? But I suppose there are listeners who don’t think of that at all, who believe that everything we do is genuine, Austrian School, Adam Smith and Ludwig van Mises-style free marketism, and this is the first step to collectivism.
And that this approach intentionally fails to make it clear that we already have PLENTY of socialistic programs, some of which may not seem too bad.
You’re right. I think the GOP has no desire to make that point clear.
The problem is that you can’t explain why there’s anything automatically WRONG with socialistic programs. Why NOT add one more? That’s what you and your party have to explain. You have to actually say why this particular goal is bad, not just hang a disnigenuous and essentially meaningless label on it in order to evoke images of the Soviet Union. That’s pure demagoguery and sophism, not debate.
Here’s the reason TO add “one more socialistic program” – because if we don’t, the country will go bankrupt. Rebuttal?
Here are my postulates: we start from the proposition that the free market is the most efficient answer to all issues. For anyone proposing a more socialistic solution, the burden is on them to provide compelling reasons. So for the military, police, fire, and the TVA, that burden has been carried. For UHC, it has not (yet).
I do concede, again, that the argument also works on the level you complain above, and that the GOP is not particularly interested in educating people about the nuanced approach I just described. That doesn’t make the nuanced approach invalid, of course, but it does lend weight to your complaint.
No, it won’t.
There. As my high school debate teacher was find of repeating, “A gratuitous assertion may be equally gratuitously denied.”
Yes it has. The current system is a massive failure and it’s going to bvankrupt the country. This is an immediate crisis.
I don’t accept your postulate in the first place, by the way. I don’t agree that the free markjet is the most efficient answer to all issues. You don’t get to declare that as an axiom by fiat. Prove it.
Yes it will. The economy cannot indefinitely sustain the rates at which medical costs are rising.
It didn’t occur to me that this was a crisis you would actually deny exists. Even the Republicans don’t deny it.
It’s not like this is surprising. Opinion makers are cynical manipulators. Liberals often get zinged as ‘elitists’ because they don’t hide their disdain for the reeking masses as well as conservatives do. But it’s no great shock that the propagandists of the Republican party considered their base a bunch of rubes to be skinned in the most expedient manner possible. Funny, but mostly because it’s true.
I’m looking forward to the wackiness that will ensue as this is spun. Unfortunately, it could be as boring as simply asserting repeatedly bald-facedly that it was all taken out of context by the liberal media and Michael Steel taking back his renunciation.
Every once in a while Bricker amazes me and drops my opinion of him another rung. He’s has no interest in debating intelligently. He just wants to win, hopefully because his opponent will not bother to refute his bullshit.
Not only are they failing to acknowledge those things, but they are, in many instances deriding the “socialism” of universal health care while also supporting or (in some cases) fighting for increasing in spending on things like the military.
They have also, in some cases, fought against the “socialism” of Obama’s plan by arguing that it will result in a reduction of funding to Medicare and Medicaid. It is possible that this specific criticism of Obama’s plan has some merit, but a person’s intellectual credibility is pretty low when they deride a program as “socialist” while also arguing against it because it might result in a shrinking of similar socialist programs.
Finally, and most importantly, most of the opponents show no interest in debating the specific merits of the plan, or in asking whether it might actually improve things. There are plenty of reasonable arguments that could be made in this debate by people opposed to UHC in general, or to Obama’s plan in particular, but they are much more concerned with the rhetorical power of the word “socialist” than they are with debating the actual issues.
This, of course, is not a condition specific to Republicans, although they seem to be far better at it than Democrats.
But why do we have to start from your proposition? Firstly, the argument about maximized efficiency generally assumes actors in the market making decisions in ideal circumstances and based on perfect information.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, even if we concede for the purpose of this debate that the free market is the most efficient system, it does not automatically follow that the most efficient solution is the best one for a society. It msy be, but it also may not be. “The free market is the most efficient” is NOT the same as “The only criterion we should look for is efficiency.”
The problem is that too many debaters on matters of economics are unwilling to disentangle the normative and the positive when making their arguments. For them, what is most efficient automatically equals what is best, without any consideration that a human society is not simply an efficiency-driven machine. Hell, the father of the invisible hand, Adam Smith, recognized that fact over 200 years ago.
When you argue that “for the military, police, fire, and the TVA, that burden has been carried,” you are conflating the normative and the positive. Yes, the burden has been carried, but it’s not necessarily a burden of efficiency. There are economists who suggest that each of these (with the possible exception of a national military) could, in fact, be done more efficiently using a free market solution.
The burden these things have passed is not the positive burden of economic efficiency; it is, for the most part, the normative burden of political and social desirability. Quite a different thing. We have police forces and fire departments and national parks and freeways funded through taxation not because that is always the most efficient way to do things, but because we, as a society, believe that these things bring with them certain benefits that outweigh the (social and political and economic) costs of setting them up and keeping them running.
Also, efficiency can be measured in various ways, and can take into account different types of externalities. Again, lets assume for a moment that the free market healthcare system is the most efficient, in a general sense. Let’s assume that it attracts capital to areas that are most profitable, and that this produces a level of care that is extremely advanced. I don’t think anyone would deny that, in certain sectors of the industry, this is true. It is a fact that America has some of the best healthcare in the world, in a variety of fields of medicine.
But should we measure efficiency this way alone? Why can’t we incorporate, in our analysis, the “externalities” of those who are left out of the system? Can’t we evaluate how the system works for those at the bottom, rather than simply evaluating the top, or even the mean? If, for example, System A treats the top 50% of its citizens slightly better than System B does, but System A leaves 15% of the population out altogether while System B manages to treat everyone, isn’t that, in some way, a measure of efficiency?
Look at the former Soviet Union, or any state-directed economy. It’s not the most efficient answer to all issues, but I think Adam Smith’s invisible hand is the *default *answer to any market, until there’s a compelling reason to think otherwise. He probably overspoke, but any capitalist would at least lean toward free market until seeing that it doesn’t work well in a particular case.