[QUOTE=Struan]
Double-digit inflation, huh? I’d recommend a quick google on French and German inflation rates Sam. Making an absurd claim like that really renders your other arguments unpersuasive at best, and mendacious otherwise.
[/QUOTE]
That was a typo. I meant double digit unemployment.
[QUOTE=Rysto]
This is exactly what I’m talking about. I’m willing to lay even odds you don’t even know what a natural monopoly is.
[/QUOTE]
And you’d win that bet, I guess. I was not familiar with the term, and assumed you were just talking about non-mandated monopolies. Congratulations!
[QUOTE=VarlosZ]
Right, hence a police force to arrest those who intimidate, bully, or threaten others to make a living, and hence civil courts in which those who swindle others can be sued.
Libertarianism =/= Anarchy.
[/QUOTE]
That’s why Libertarians are so much in favor of the plaintiff bar, no doubt.
The Liberatarian model of a consumer is someone who is like the classical economics model of a consumer - someone who works to maximize his benefit by making purely rational decisions. The problem is, that person does not exist, as behavioral economics has shown time and time again. The rational person maximizes his 401K investment whether or not it is the default, the real person is more likely to do the right thing if investing is made the default. Rational people don’t over-extend themselves, real people do. Libertarians seem to think that if everyone were as smart as they are, there would be no problems. Maybe, but they aren’t.
They also think everyone has the time or ability to research the market to get extensive knowledge with which to make a decision. No FDA needed - just read the research studies.
Isn’t it better to prevent a problem than to sue for recovery, especially if the suit would take years, the reward would be reduced by lawyers’ fees, and the outcome is risky?
Liberalism is not about state control, it is about putting a fence around the market place so that no one wanders to the edge of the plateau and falls off. For UHC, those of us who are healthy and are employed with a good health plan are fine - but it is the underemployed person with no insurance or insurance where the deductible is a hefty chunk of their salary we have to worry about.
BTW, the poverty line for a family of 3 is $17,600 a year. (Cite). Double that is $35K, 4% of that is $1400. If you think you can get decent health insurance for a family privately for just over $100 a month, you must be smoking something.
[QUOTE=Musicat]
And while there will always be those rare individuals who try despicable tactics, I cannot believe that most people feel it is better to be a bully than an honest worker who gets an honest day’s pay.
[/QUOTE]
As game theory (and evolutionary theory) shows, though, it only takes one “cheater” to subvert the entire process.
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
Other people can take away your freedoms just as readily as any government can. Heck, the government is other people.
[/QUOTE]
The government is in place to ensure that nobody else takes away your freedoms.
Again, Libertarianism is not the same as Anarchy.
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
Getting beyond the economic issue (because economic freedom is only one aspect of Libertarianism) the central fallacy of Libertarianism, as I see it, is that they make the assumption that the government is the only source of tyranny. And that’s ridiculous. Other people can take away your freedoms just as readily as any government can. Heck, the government is other people.
[/QUOTE]
That’s factually incorrect. The government is given a monopoly on the use of force by the people, and it’s that monopoly that is feared. It would not be legal for a private citizen to take away your freedom under a Libertarian government.
[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
That was a typo. I meant double digit unemployment.
[/QUOTE]
That’s true of Germany, but the latest unemployment figures for France are around 7.5%. It’s at a 12-year low, and hasn’t been in double digits for awhile.
Sam, you’re on (IMHO) the right philosophical side of this debate, but you’re being a little quick to say things that aren’t true. Countries with strong trade partnerships DO go to war. France DOESN’T have double digit unemployment. It’s ridiculous to suggest kids in one-room schoolhouses generally got better educations that kids today, amphibian beavers be damned. Slow down and make sure you grab the facts.
[QUOTE=RickJay]
That’s true of Germany, but the latest unemployment figures for France are around 7.5%. It’s at a 12-year low, and hasn’t been in double digits for awhile.
Sam, you’re on (IMHO) the right philosophical side of this debate, but you’re being a little quick to say things that aren’t true. Countries with strong trade partnerships DO go to war. France DOESN’T have double digit unemployment. It’s ridiculous to suggest kids in one-room schoolhouses generally got better educations that kids today, amphibian beavers be damned. Slow down and make sure you grab the facts.
[/QUOTE]
I am curious RickJay, once you strip out the illogical claims and inaccurate facts from Sam’s libertarian manifesto what exactly is left of the philosophy that wouldn’t count as liberalism?
In instances where government intervention does more harm than good liberals are opposed to such interventions (they are not, for example, central planners and they tend to support civil liberties very strongly).
Libertarians do not have a monopoly on love of freedom. But what libertarians do do is to emphasize negative freedom (freedom from) especially when negative freedom is understood as freedom from the interference of government. But as others have said, the government and its monopoly on the legitimate use of force is far from the only coercive power of concern. Unregulated corporations, for example, have a great deal of power to harm individuals and groups (by, for example, discriminating, or by polluting, by adulterating products, price-fixing, etc. etc.). Liberals think not only in terms of negative freedom (freedom from) but also positive freedom (freedom to). In practice people who grow up the victims of poverty and/or prejudice typically have so little positive freedom that they are in no position to enjoy negative freedom.
That was the lesson of the largely laissez-faire capitalist era that stretched roughly through the whole of the ninteenth century up through the postwar era (though certainly there was a gradual increase in government regulation from about the mid ninteenth century on in both Britain and the U.S.)
Labrador I wonder if you find the latter statement hilarious because, roughly speaking, that’s what was meant, I think, by the suggestion that libertarianism was tried (and failed) prior to the Great Depression.
Really? So if I’m walking down the street and somebody points a gun at me, I should assume he’s the government?
The government does not have a monopoly on the use of force. It doesn’t even have a monopoly on the legal use of force. It’s throwing out wild claims like this that show how Libertarianism can be out of touch with reality.
Suppose somebody decided to take away my freedom illegally? Would a Libertarian government do anything about it?
If the answer is no, then a Libertarian government is useless. There’s no point in declaring you support freedom or anything else unless you’re willing to take some form of action to uphold it.
If the answer is yes, then a Libertarian government is a lie. A Libertarian government that is willing to use force to defend its own beliefs is no different than any other government.
This is usually the point where self-proclaimed Libertarians start arguing about what Libertariasm is. Get back to me when you guys figure out what it is you believe.
[QUOTE=Musicat]
The “model” Libertarianism relies upon is the natural tendancy of people to better themselves; to provide what others want because there’s a buck in it. You don’t have to educate or force most people to do what comes naturally, just give them the freedom to pursue it.
[/QUOTE]
It may be a natural tendancy, but just about everyone pursues it, at least some of the time, irrationally. At least according to the most recent studies of real economic behavior of people. The biggest flaw of standard market theory is that it presumes people behave rationally in their own best interest, and that’s far from true.
Ed
[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
That was a typo. I meant double digit unemployment.
[/QUOTE]
It’s an understandable typo, given that you seem to be typing with your ass. Neither French nor German unemployment is in “double digits”. Not that they are great figures in any way, as I’m sure a cursory google will reveal, but you are only hurting your argument.
This is funny though:
Which State do you live in, Sam, and how familiar are you with the western European countries? (Obviously there’s a big difference between rural Bulgaria and, say, London, Paris or Berlin). I’m keen to see if your stated opinion in this matter lives up to the standards you’ve already set.
[QUOTE=RickJay]
That’s true of Germany, but the latest unemployment figures for France are around 7.5%. It’s at a 12-year low, and hasn’t been in double digits for awhile.
Sam, you’re on (IMHO) the right philosophical side of this debate, but you’re being a little quick to say things that aren’t true. Countries with strong trade partnerships DO go to war. France DOESN’T have double digit unemployment. It’s ridiculous to suggest kids in one-room schoolhouses generally got better educations that kids today, amphibian beavers be damned. Slow down and make sure you grab the facts.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah well, I was writing that more as a late-night polemic, but you’re right - I should have taken more care with it.
The larger point remains - central command is a poor substitute for the market, to be exercised with the utmost caution and only when absolutely necessary.
I still don’t understand why modern liberals are willing to trust that government can enact all these high-minded programs properly. Approval ratings of Congress are all all-time lows. Congress is less popular than the president. And at the same time, Liberals want to give that Congress much more power and have them manage their very health. I wouldn’t trust those clowns to take care of my house for a weekend. They’d throw a big party, get drunk and vomit in the pool, give away half my stuff, run up a huge liquor tab and stick my kid with the bill.
[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
Liberals want to give that Congress much more power and have them manage their very health.
[/QUOTE]
Can you please say which of the health plans being proposed by liberals aims to to give Congress power to mananage anyone’s health? The plan that Hillary Clinton was promoting proposed to subsidize the purchase of private healthcare for all those who could not afford it. It would mandate that all Americans were insured but through the insurer of their choice. Though it has fewer mandates the Obama plan, according to his website, “will create a National Health Insurance Exchange to help individuals who wish to purchase a private insurance plan. The Exchange will act as a watchdog group and help reform the private insurance market by creating rules and standards for participating insurance plans to ensure fairness and to make individual coverage more affordable and accessible.”
I’m not sure which part of either plan involves giving Congress the power to manage anyone’s very health. Perhaps you have some other “liberal” plan in mind?
And I’m still waiting for evidence of the supposed liberal investment in “central planning.”
[QUOTE=Plexi Guy]
UHC is not a benefit for the collective good. It’s a benefit to a select few. There’s only something like < 10% of people in this country that want to buy health insurance, but can’t.
[/QUOTE]
That is far from the entirety of people who will benefit from UHC:
Plenty of businesses and individuals are paying insurance premiums that cause real pain.
There are lots of small employers who don’t get to hire the best employees because they can’t afford to buy them health insurance.
There are lots of potential entrepreneurs who never start their dream business because they would lose their health coverage.
Health insurance premiums are currently a barrier to entry when starting a business, and they decrease the competitiveness of companies that compete against companies based in countries with UHC.
I would go so far as to say that the only people who don’t benifit from UHC are those employeed by insurance companies. I don’t even see a flood of Canadian and English doctors flocking to the US to cash in under our system.
[QUOTE=RickJay]
I’m not advocating a libertarian, free-market-over-all position, but I am wondering how it is you figure those things are not subject to the laws of supply and demand. Of course they are.
[/QUOTE]
Because corporations have shown they will collude. The last thing business wants is competition. It costs profits. They will do everything they can to prevent it. In theory competition would be to the consumers advantage. That is at the bottom of corporation calculus. To obtain a free market ,it would require a lot of regulation. Regulation that is not bought off by the industries that they are supposed to monitor. That of course does not exist.
[QUOTE=Dorothea Book]
Can you please say which of the health plans being proposed by liberals aims to to give Congress power to mananage anyone’s health? The plan that Hillary Clinton was promoting proposed to subsidize the purchase of private healthcare for all those who could not afford it. It would mandate that all Americans were insured but through the insurer of their choice. Though it has fewer mandates the Obama plan, according to his website, “will create a National Health Insurance Exchange to help individuals who wish to purchase a private insurance plan. The Exchange will act as a watchdog group and help reform the private insurance market by creating rules and standards for participating insurance plans to ensure fairness and to make individual coverage more affordable and accessible.”
I’m not sure which part of either plan involves giving Congress the power to manage anyone’s very health. Perhaps you have some other “liberal” plan in mind?
And I’m still waiting for evidence of the supposed liberal investment in “central planning.”
[/QUOTE]
And how are those plans NOT management through Congress? Obama wants to set up PUBLIC health insurance. That means it will be run by government, and overseen by Congress.
His plan ‘guarantees coverage for all’, regardless of health. Looks like all the ill people will be flocking there. So it’s going to be expensive. But wait - he also guarantees low payments, and greatly enhanced coverage. So I guess government will be paying for it. He’s got new laws that will mandate standards set by government, demand reporting of health outcomes, force employers to pay into the public health system, yada yada yada. That document you linked to is frightening. Wait until they try to implement it - the number of regulations on business and health providers is going to explode.
And inevitably, there will be problems with whatever they decide. Unintended consequences. More plans will be offered. It may not be direct state ownership of health care, but it’s still management of the health care system. Just as sugar tariffs and corn subsidies and price supports manage the farming industry. All of these are attempts to subvert the market and force it down a different path, or to take control away from the market entirely.
For the record, I do believe there’s an honest market failure in health care, and there’s a role for government to play in correcting it. Health care insurance is a ‘lemon market’ - the people with the worst health have the greatest incentive to seek insurance, and insurers have the greatest incentive to insure healthy people. And the insurers can’t determine the real risks they face with an individual because they don’t have perfect knowledge of the individual’s medical history. Therefore, they assume the person is not as healthy as the average person, and price accordingly. That pushes healthy people out of the insurance market.
That’s why insurance companies want to pool their clients, and why employee pools are so desirable - they’re a decent statistical cross-section of the public, so insurers can price their insurance more efficiently. But that causes problems with job mobility and forces people to accept the insurance their employers offer, whether or not it fits their personal needs. So the whole system is somewhat inefficient.
The thing is, being a libertarian who can recognize a market failure, I think that choices are maximized if the government acts to correct the market failure, but does no more than that.
However, I’m also a pragmatist, and I can see that the public is clamoring for some kind of health care support from government. As a pragmatic libertarian, I would support the proposal that involves the least amount of government intrusion that would satisfy the people, while preferring no intrusion at all. Barack Obama’s program isn’t it.
[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
The larger point remains - central command is a poor substitute for the market, to be exercised with the utmost caution and only when absolutely necessary.
[/quote]
The opposite of libertarianism is not socialism. Please tell me who in the US is advocating central command. For the most part regulations don’t say what a company must do - it says what the boundaries are.
I suspect the reason for the low rating for Congress is that the Republicans are blocking all the stuff the people want. The people wanted Congress to end the war, and they didn’t. Whose fault is that?
Take a look at this very recent poll.
Before you say how horrible your health care system is again, and how great ours is, maybe you’ll show me a poll with these kind of numbers of Canadians saying your system is fundamentally broken.
[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
And how are those plans NOT management through Congress? Obama wants to set up PUBLIC health insurance. That means it will be run by government, and overseen by Congress.
[/quote]
My company limits my insurance choices far more than people’s choices would be limited by one of these plans, yet my company does not manage or control my health or my treatment. Nice try, but unresponsive.
Yeah, all those people suffering in France or Germany will be flocking here. If our health costs can be reduced to world averages, which haven’t made any industries explode as far as I can tell, we’d all be pretty happy. Even if we get down to Canadian average costs.
That’s right, this kind of thing is totally new in the world, and never has worked anywhere before. sigh
This is the moral equivalent of the traditional Republican way of responding to obvious problems like pollution by trying to get companies to promise to do better. 54% of people want fundamental changes, and another 36% want the system to be completely rebuilt.
But I do hope the Republicans follow your advice. That response will get them stomped in November.
An answer?
[QUOTE=VarlosZ]
Right, hence a police force to arrest those who intimidate, bully, or threaten others to make a living, and hence civil courts in which those who swindle others can be sued.
Libertarianism =/= Anarchy.
[/QUOTE]
And who is going to pay for a police and judicial system that works for the common good of the society? Private sponsorship perhaps?
That would be just peachy when you try to sue a company for selling contaminated drinks when the judge wears a robe with a Coca-Cola logo on it.
I know, you can go to Pepsi´s court system, ain´t choice great?, but then, why would Coke accept its rulings?