National Healthcare.Follow

Who do you thin is paying for them to do that now?

The counterargument is generally this:

"I can afford health insurance, it's not a burden for me personally. I get the best level of care possible right now, it's irrelevant to me if other people die because of lack of health coverage. I'm terrified that my level of care might go down if there is a change made"

That's about it.

Yep.




Yep, and the KKK is known and I'm not.

Eb

That's not based n any sort of fact, whatsoever, by the way. The idea that government being the main provider for R&D has really crippled the defense industry. I mean we're light years behind with military technology.

No. It'd be fair if everyone was born into the exact same socio-economic circumstances in a world with no rasicsm or classism. Health care is a human right. Your argument is fallacious and you know it. One could easily make the same argument for education, public safety, infrastructure, whatever you want. IF the only roads the government built had $90 tolls on them, well that sure would be an incentive for the people driving through feilds to be more sucessfull.

I stand by my statement. That guy won a 14M award because for some screwed up reason, our society has decided that his loss merited that award. Blame the lawyers, blame the legal system. Blame whomever you want, but obviously, somewhere along the line we (that's a collective "we") decided that guy deserved 14M dollars. Presumably the "value" that society gains by giving that money to him is in punishing the companies that produce and sell tobacco products (that is the whole point of punative damages right?). Think it through...

That's also a super rare exception anyway. For most people, the connection is very straightforward. You perform a task. That task generates some amount of value. No matter what it is, presumably the act of "work" adds in some way. This is the same basic concept whether your work is digging a ditch so that someone else can lay a pipe (which presumably is of value to someone), or whether you simply choose to invest money which then is used to generate jobs and new products. All have a value. Your "pay" is equal to the value you added. That's the beauty of a free market system. The money you get *must* be equal to the value of what you do over time. If it's too high, people will not pay it. If it's too low, you'll go elsewhere and get more.

That's why it boggles my mind when people look at the fact that people make different amounts of money and proclaim it "unfair". Um... It's completely fair. It *has* to be fair. Unfair is trying to force the result of the system to be "equitable", when the values people generate are not. In a free market system, if that guy is making 10M a year, it's because he does something that is worth 10M to the economy as a whole. If he didn't, he wouldn't make the money. It's really that simple. It's only when people (like Smash) try to change the result to be "fair" do we encounter situations where people get something that they didn't earn. Yet somehow this system is "unfair"? bizaare...





Ah. Yes. So highly trained and specialized that someone in India with the equivalent of a 6th grade education can do the same job. Got it.


Look. I work in IT. I've seen the whole process. There's one thing I can say about IT. There are a lot (and I mean a *whole lot*) of people with IT credentials and certificates and training that aren't worth the paper their stuff is printed on. There are a ton of people who got into IT with big dollar signs in their eyes and dreams of "easy money". There are tons of people in IT who signed up for those 2 month training programs they saw on TV with promises to "double your salary in 6 months". And it never occured to them that if they could take a 2 month program to learn that job that maybe *anyone else* could as well?

Again. Your earnings are going to be related to the value of your service. If your job can be done by a guy making 1/3rd what you are asking, then the actual value of your service is 1/3rd what you are asking. That's "real" economics. Everything else is an attempt to uneven the playing field in your favor. That's a house of cards folks. Passing laws to "keep american jobs safe" is ludicrous. What needs to happpen is for american workers to be competitive. Given that our relative cost of living is so much higher then the rest of the world, that means either making sure you've got skills that can't easily be duplicated, or that you are doing a job that can't easily be outsourced. That's the way real economics works.

Ok. That's a valid question. But lets look at the alternatives here:

1. You've got someone (presumably a group of someones who are also presumably wealthy). That person is manipulating the value of your service to his advantage. But ultimately, his goal is to make money, right? At some point, the result of his labor and the labor of everyone he's manipulating, must be of value to someone else, or he wont make any money.

If he makes 10M a year while underpaying his employees, someone else will look at that and think: "Hey. I'd be happy to make 9M a year, so I'll pay people 10% more for the same job and take his skilled people away from him for *my* profit". Feel free to add in evil cackling and such if you want...

That's how the free market works. With some exceptions (which are generally covered in anti-trust laws), it really does work that way. Competition for resources (which includes labor) ensures that the relative value of everything will end up being appropriate to the "real" value of that good or service within the context of the market.


2. Instead, you have the government arbitrarily decide that "they" (the manipulators above) are being "unfair". So they put in price controls and wage controls. Um... But now you are just having the government decide what something is worth. Which I suppose would work fine except that the value of things does not stay constant. I'm relatively sure that the wagon wheel making industry is not nearly as profitable today as it was 100 years ago. Presumably also, a guy who was really good at making wagon wheel's skills s not as valuable. But if the government had already placed wage controls prior to that change, we'd still be forced to pay that guy as though his labor really was valuable.

There is simply no way for a government to correctly reflect real values of things in a market. It's been tried before. It always fails. There are many things that the free market really does best, and setting relative "real" values on things is one of them that it does amazingly well. Why legistlate something when it doesn't need it?



As to being "unfair"? That's really dependant on your point of view. To me, making someone pay more for something then it's really worth is "unfair". Ultimately, that is what you are arguing for. You are arguing that the employers should have to pay more for labor then that labor benefits them. That's a recipie for economic disaster. In relation to health care, it's still the same thing. People are recieving a service (medical care), that they did not provide enough value back to earn (equivalent to getting pay that is in excess of the value of their work). Sure. You can look at medicine as a humanitarian issue, and there is certainly some merit to that. However, it also does cost money. Real money. Someone's going to have to pay for it. In our current model, you get back what you put in. The more valueable your labor, the better your health care. It's really very straightforward in that respect. Any kind of national (socialized) health care system would require that the result you recieve will *not* be in proportion to the value of your labor. That, while you (and I to a point) may see it as "better", is by definition also "unfair". Anytime you have people paying different amounts for the same thing, it is unfair.


I'm not saying that there's no value to it though. Heck. Like I said earlier. I'd love for there to be a working system in place. However, I'm not naive enough to think that it would require just a minor increase in taxes. I'm also not naive enough to think that it would have no impact on the overall quality of care, or that there would be no increase in costs down the line far in excess of those originally estimated. I would be much more willing to see if our government could find ways to ensure that more people could afford the care that's available, then just blanketly paying for the care. Yeah. It's a semantic difference, but it's critical. IMO, the most important part about any good is that you pay for it directly. You take money out of your wallet that you earned and you pay for the service. That's the only way to balance the system out.


Look at it another way. You "vote" with your dollars when dealing with an industry. A business has the goal of making money. The easiest way to do that is to make a product that people will want and can afford to buy. If you socialize medicine, you take that vote away from the people. We already see reductions in quality of care with HMO systems. You know why? Because once you take the money transaction out of the hands of the consumer, they lose the power to chose. With a fully socialized system, you have *no* power as a consumer. You can't chose to go to a different doctor if you don't like the one you've got. You can't choose a different insurance handler if you don't like the one you are using. Free is another world for "something you have no power over". In this case, you are giving that power to the government. They will decide what the priorities are in medicine. Not you. Not the bulk of the consumers. Once again. Why would you think that the government would do a better job of making sure that the medical field was providing a good range of "products" for their consumers (patients) then a free market medicine system would? There's no reason to expect that result. While you can force it to happen, you lose a ton of efficiency and costs will rise. They always do...

Ya see, that's the problem. There is such a thing as voting with your money. And the more money you have the larger the weight of that vote. There are PACs and all kinds of underhanding smoke-filled room dealings that control the government and ultimately the economy.

The fatal flaw with your arguement is that this free-market is not free at all. It only SEEMS to be free, and while people like you are being fooled into thinking that it's the poor who are taking money out of your pockets. It's actually the rich. And with every dollar they steal from you and me their ability to steal becomes greater.

Eb

Hmmm... This ties more into the other thread, but we seem to have spilled into both. Hehe. Gotta love forums like this!

You're missing a key point. The distinction between consumption spending and investment spending. Those uber-wealthy people who "get richer" due to loopholes in tax laws, and super low capital gains taxes, only do that because the vast majority of their money is tied up in investments. Investment is *not* consumption. Investment is (kinda) at the supply side of the equation.

Consumers vote with their consumer dollars. You decide what products and services you wish to pay for. Investors technically vote as well, but they do so in a wishful thinking kind of way. They don't spend their money and generate profits for someone (not usually anyway). They spend their money and then hope that the result of the money will be something that other people (consumers) will want. And then they hope that they want it enough to pay back the money they invested and make a profit for them.

I can invest in a company that makes left handed smoke generators all I want. Heck. I could sink millions into it. But if no one in interested in buying them, then I wont make any money. No amount of me spending my millions will make me more money if ultimately someone else doesn't desire a product or service that I generated. So no. The "rich" don't have huge votes with their money. They are the ones that consumers influence, not the other way around. If lots of people want something, that's what the investors will put their money into. They follow the will of the consumers. If they don't, they wont make money.

You are making a huge mistake in thinking that all money is the same. More of it is just more, right? Wrong. And until you understand the difference between what the wealthy do with their money and what everyone else does with theirs, you'll never understand what I'm talking about.





Yes. Those darn rich people (insert life of Brian backround). So what have they ever done for us? Nothing, right?

Who spent the money to design the TV you watch at night? Who built your house? Who designed and built your car? How about that DVD player you have? The CD in your stereo system? The computer you are typing on right now? The monitor you are looking at? Heck. The keyboard? The chair you are sitting on? The desk your computer is sitting on? You have AC? Who designed that? Look around the room you are in right now. Look at how many items there are. Now start looking at the backs and bottoms of those items. Odds are just about every single one has some corporate name stamped on it. Many may have patents listed as well. Every single one of those represents some company that spent upwards of billion of dollars researching, developing, designing, producing, and then selling each of those items.


Now. Tell me again that they didn't do anything to earn their money? Would you rather those companies didn't exist? Do you really think all that stuff would exist if they didnt?

Why do you always try to put word in people's mouths? It's like you have a preconceived notion about who or what I am.

I am not saying that nothing a corporation or company has done has any worth. What I am saying is that the corporate structure of the U.S. lends itself to corruption.

This notion you have of consumption spending and investment spending is a semantic argument. It doesn't matter what form the money takes. The power behind the money is there. More smoke.

Eb

Everything "lends itself to corruption" Pickle. Until you present me with an alternative that will have less corruption and more benefit to the people, then I'm not sure what exactly you are arguing for.

You argued that it's ok to tax the "rich" more for a national health care system then the "poor". After all, 5% of a rich persons income is probably far more 5% of a poor person's, yet they'd recieve the exact same benefit from the national health system, rigth?


Your apparent justification for this (please correct me if I'm wrong, but this is what I gathered from your arguments) is that it's ok to make the rich pay more for the same service because they have more, and it's unfair that they have more (ok. I'm pretty sure Smash actually argued this and you just agreed with him, but again if you have a different point to make then make it). We then argued about why it's unfair, and you still have given me no good reason why that is the case. So far, nothing you have said (in either thread) has even come close to supporting the notion that a wealthy person should pay more for the same service just because he has more money.

And if you're trying to say something else, then please explain it clearer. I have to guess what you're trying to say because instead of coming out and saying it, you just argue using innuendo about how wealthy people have more power and well... more money. And that's a bad thing... Or somehing...






What power? Again with the innuendo. Of course, there's more "power" in an absolute sense. That's what money is. It's a representation of influence in the economy. It's a placeholder for goods and services. Obviously, someone with 100 dollars has more power then someone with 5. I'll ask again: Why is that a problem?


Which is worse? Someone having power because he's intricately tied into the economy of the counry and has multiple investments in successful businesses that earn him a good amount of power, or someone who has power because he's got a bunch of goons with guns who will shoot anyone who doesn't agree with them?


Pick one. Then suport your choice. Heck. Write in another one if you think it's applicable. But ulitmately, your choice between government power and free enterprise power is a choice between dollars and bullets. Everthing is a combination of the two.

/yawn.

I'm not arguing against anything, dumbass, I was merely pointing out where your argument came screaming off the tracks as usual.

I have no problem with people haing things they don't need, I'd just like to make sure that they have the things the DO need first.

The level of Scoialism I advocate has little if nothing to do with what you're talking about when you use the term which is whacko insane totalitarian Socialism.

I'd like every citizen to have food, shelter, access to medical care, education, and equal opportunity to succeed.

That's all. I don't want to nationalize Coca Cola. I want to tax them at a sufficent level that the poor can reap the benefits of their own exploitation to a tiny degree.