Well, I can’t claim to be a “great intellectual figure” who “personally studied under the great Austrian economists” and “frequently embarrasses the Fed chairman with his probing questions” like Ron Paul, but I do try to stay reasonably informed. 
Health insurance in America is more or less based on free market principles. the federal government up until the health care bill was PROHIBITED from regulating insurance in any way. It was all done at the state level by the state insurance commissioners. BTW when you talk about insurance regulation, most of the regulation has to do with making sure that the money is there when it comes time for the insurance companies to pay up.
You either have an incomplete or erroneous definition of insurance.
Insurance requires only risk shifting and risk distribution. Insurance is basically a communal rainy day fund. When you buy fire insurance, you have shifted the risk of that fire to the communal fund and the fund collects premiums from large enough pool of homeowners that the insurance companies can reasonably predict how much they will have to pay out year to year.
Sometimes insurance is a communal savings mechanism (life insurance falls into this category).
In the realm of health insurance, insurance companies quickly realized that if they eliminated the 1% most costly insureds, they could eliminate a very large portion of their claims. They try to do this in teh front end with underwriting (cherrypicking as some people call it) which leaves us with a population of uninsurable folks and in teh back end with claim adjustment (and trying to knock out legitimate claims and get rid of expensive insureds) which leaves us with another population of uninsurable folks.
However, it does add up to my statement that simplistic government solutions can create unintended consequences, which many well-intentioned statists completely fail to grasp.
[/QUOTE]
Here’s your problem; you are assuming that these business owners are rational.
It’s really not as automatic an assumption as you might think. Businesses aren’t always all about making maximum profit; sometimes owners are motivatedby personal or emotional interests. Honestly, I think you’re doing what you’re accusing others of doing - accepting commonly accepted definitions of political beliefs and applying them rather than actually looking into it. A racist owner of a business might well decide that he or she preferred to sell only to whites, even if that meant less profit for them. In the real world, people aren’t all supremely rational, reasonable, knowledgable humans beings.
And even when they are about maximum profit, there’s plenty of reasons to minimize customer base in order to make maximum profit - for example, if you were intending to sell a range of high quality cars, you might purposefully limit the number you make to sell in order to give off an impression of exclusivity. Selling a million cars for $100,000 might actually make you less money than selling 20 cars for the same price. Too, generalisation means you cannot target as specifically, by nature. If I sell a line of one-size-fits-all plain white tshirts, I will likely enough sell less than I would sell, say, a single size of a shirt with a band logo, or with Che Guevara on the front, even though those shirts have a smaller potential market. And then you have those situations were a generalised product does not have the same interest at all as a specific one - Coca Cola, for example, could simply sell water, increasing their customer base by allowing those allergic to or have some adverse reaction to their current Coke formula to buy from them - but i’d guess they’d do rather less business.
That you’re apparently incapable of understanding any sensical situation in which a business might well limit its customer base seems very surprising. It happens all the time, it makes plenty of sense, and it works pretty well. In the real world, companies limit their customer base all the time - it would be very, very hard to find a company which doesn’t purposefully limit their market in some way. You really think that’s nonsense?
I think he may have watched several hours worth of YouTube videos. It’s just like college!
OK. First, let’s drop the posturing that “liberals” demonize capitalism and profits. There are a number of people on the economic or political left who do demonize capitalism, but this is pretty much an American audience where the left is a couple of steps to the right of center and you will find very few attacks on capitalism, per se. Even the late Senator Howard Metzenbaum, notoriously the most liberal member of the Senate, for years, was a healthy respecter of capitalism–it was how he made his millions.
So let’s drop that straw man argument.
Then, you are arguing against facts, based on personal belief, and it will not go well. Your response that some number of capitalist industries would never engage in discriminatory behavior was posted in response to actual incidents in which they clearly did behave in a discriminatory manner. Arguing that little Johnny would never hit little Billy because that is not in Johnny’s nature as a response to finding Johnny in the act of smashing Billy with his shovel is a failed exercise. Clearly, some of your premises are wrong and it really does not matter, from the perspective of your opponents, which premise(s) contain(s) errors because they can see that your conclusion is absurd regardless which premise(s) failed.
It slipped my mind that they’d actually done that at one point. It was even found to be potentially carcinogenic at one point, if I remember right. Really, I think it serves to prove the point; Dasani really isn’t as successful as standard Coke, even in countries where it didn’t have a vast marketing disaster.
It HAS been done before. Our country was on a gold standard all the way until 1971. After that Nixon closed the Gold Window and, also with the movement towards globalization, we created a worldwide fiat currency with no restraint on the printing presses. This has never happened before in world history. There were many at that time that knew things would end badly.
The goal is replacing the current reckless monetary system with a commodity backed currency with restraint on the bankers. Reestablish free markets and capitalism (along with bankruptcies, antitrust laws and no subsidies) based on savings and production.
Far from being “untried”, it is the system that made the United States the superpower we once were. Now China is our banker and we are on the decline.
Even if you don’t trust what I am saying, surely you can see that we need to replace the current financial system with something more viable.
Six pages of posts, a few hours of youtube videos, several tens of thousands of words of cites and you finally present an appropriate debate topic.
If this was what you wanted to discuss, why the fuck didn’t you say so in the first place?
Tell me, how much Austrian literature have you read? Keynesian economists like Krugman are merely establishment shills and it is an embarrassment that he was awarded the Nobel Prize. You know who else was awarded the Nobel Prize? Al Gore and Barack Obama. Sometimes they get it right, sometimes they get it very wrong. Krugman’s problem is that he is so caught up in mathmatical equations and theoretical models, he can’t see the bigger picture. I’ve followed what Krugman has said diligently since the crash. All he can think of is more stimulus, more printing of dollars and more inflation. He thinks nothing of the deficit, nothing of the adverse consequences of inflation for the more vulnerable and nothing of the patent immorality of bailing out the very institutions that got us in this mess.
Peter Schiff, critiques Paul Krugman here:
Krugman is not living in reality. If you support him, tell me, what does he say about the possibility of hyperinflation or a dollar crisis and the possibility of the United States becoming like Greece in short order?
Obviously he needs to clear the air and get it all off his chest before honest and actual debate can occur:
We’re the unwilling beneficiaries of all that pent up frustration.
“Constitutional experts” decided it, huh? Well, I’ll just leave it that there is significant disagreement among said experts on this topic.
The weird thing is that this was the least egregious unconstitutional act among all that I listed, but you ignored the rest. Even if one takes the most broad interpretation of the constitution, there are blatant infringements of that document in Obama’s first 18 months in office.
I know Bush and past presidents did unconstitutional things as well. But none of them, as far as I know, claimed to be an expert in Constitutional Law. If Obama is as smart as many claim, he would know better.
You know who was the one who brought up the Nobel Prize as an award indicative of one’s authority on a given subject? You.
Too caught up in theory and can’t see the bigger picture?
Now what political party does that remind me of…
I think it is fair to be somewhat put off by the tone of my essay. It wasn’t so much directed at any of you, but out of frustration on many of the comments I have seen in the media and on message boards (including this one) that were given without any thought. So, no offense intended.
As to the media reaction, they did not give Rand Paul any benefit of the doubt whatsoever. Variance of opinion is not allowed in our public discourse. Ideally we would have a media which would inform and educate. There are lots of sensible positions that Rand Paul and certain members of the Tea Party hold, but many people will come away with the assumption that they are all racists because that is the media generated storyline.
I think it is sad. The only hope is that this old media dies out and we embrace fully the internet as a means to get information.
I doubt many on here are willing to change their political beliefs based on anything I wrote, so that is a non issue. There is plenty of links to Ron Paul’s writings online. I’ll help you out:
http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/
That should get you started. If you want to take issue with anything he said in any of his speeches or writings, let me know.
Be careful what you wish for. It might become widely known how close Ron Paul is to the John Birch Society:
You idol is a right wing crackpot.
Sure, there are differing viewpoints. And there are valid critiques of Austrian Economics no doubt. If you are claiming what I said is “tendentious, factually wrong, or occasionally so misguided that it is not even wrong” (whatever that means) then you should elaborate. I have no idea what you are talking about.
The issue for me is not to get bogged down in the minutiae of comparing macroeconomic theories and axioms ad nauseam, but to express what I consider the most important aspects of the federal budget and central banking:
-
I want a balanced budget and a low, preferably nonexistent public debt.
-
I want low inflation, or no inflation.
-
I want to limit government from expanding without the peoples consent.
-
I don’t accept the notion of a secret central bank able to create money out of thin air with no oversight. Nobody should have that kind of power.
If I, or anybody else desires these things, we must reject Keynesian economics and central banking outright. We must believe in a commodity standard for our currency. These are things that Austrian economics would provide.
What is wrong with any of those points?
What you have just demonstrated is a complete lack of comprehension or ability to form a cogent argument. If you want to think that Rand and Ron Paul are intellectually inferior to Sarah Palin :smack: you had better back that up. Find anything that Ron Paul has said that makes him inferior to Sarah Palin in any way.
That was a very fair assessment. Thanks for the link. Pay attention media, that is how you report on a candidate fairly.
That still exists?!
Barry Goldwater also enjoyed the Birchers’ support – might not have won the GOP’s nomination in 1964 without them – but even he thought they were cranks. See Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, by Rick Perlstein.