I guess we have a different vision of America. Mine doesn’t include old people dying without care…

mycowardice on June 15, 2009 at 8:27 PM

As someone else pointed out, this is a straw man argument of the worst kind – typical liberal fare of the kind that has no intent or purpose but to demonize conservatives or any other pro-capitalists as mean and uncaring.

Let’s just nip this bullsh*t in the bud. A major academic study was carried out not too long ago which found that those who believe in self-responsibility (i.e. conservatives) give four times as much to charity than those who believe it’s the government’s job to care for others (i.e. liberals). Basically what it all boils down to is that conservatives care enough about others to actually do something, while liberals would much rather the poor and vulnerable were hidden away and dealt with by the state without them having to get their hands dirty.

In fact the only time that liberals express “concern” for the needy is in the course of smearing conservatives as mean. In every measurable quantity of “concern” – from donating money to giving blood to doing voluntary work – conservatives put liberals to shame many times over despite them earning less on average.

And yet the meme persists: “liberals care about the needy, conservatives only care about the rich.” It’s an old, outdated, discredited claim that has about as much merit as the idea that the mothers of illegitimate children should be locked up in insane asylums. Yet since it’s the entire meat and potatoes of the left’s argumentative position (without which they would have withered away long ago), it survives to this day.

You talk about your “vision” for America. Well, our vision does not involve old people dying without care. It involves a health care system subject to the same benefits of free market competition and consumer choice that have made advanced technology such as TVs, microwaves and computers available even to the poorest of people in Western countries at affordable prices.

Have you ever stopped to think where the culture of dependency and welfare is taking us? Huge swathes of the population, including multiple generations of families, have been effectively taken out of the economy, stripped of the capacity (or will) to produce and have become nothing more than idle consumers of other people’s wealth – wealth that, were it left in the private sector, would be put to much better use investing in jobs for such people so that they could pay their own way and perhaps regain some of the pride in themselves that liberals wish to deny them.

Our vision involves an America in which everyone who can work does work, in which the huge sinkhole of welfare is replaced with the production of wealth. See, it’s not just the millions of people who are banished from the means of production and given a slice of everyone else’s paycheck that’s the problem. It’s also the hundreds of thousands of people who are employed, not in production, but in the administration and distribution of their benefits and entitlements. The economy would be far healthier if all of these people were involved in the produciton of wealth instead of the destruction of wealth.

Please tell me you understand this most basic of concepts.

When people don’t see the care of others as the responsibility of the state, they are far more generous with their charity. If everyone who was fit enough to work actually worked, all we would have to worry about would be those who are physically unable to work, i.e. a small proportion of those who are currently out of work.

And if it’s not the job of the state to help those people, why, it’s our job. And help we will. Alms are a very different thing when they consist of voluntary donations given by people of their own volition. They tend to be directed at those who genuinely need them, instead of being dampened and distorted and corrupted and diverted and displaced toward a million different wasteful social projects devised by faceless bureaucrats and corrupt politicians whose “vision” extends to the next election and no further. When I donate to charity, I do some research and make damn well sure my money’s being spent wisely. If it’s not, then it goes to another charity who can satisfy my criteria. Compare this with the control I have over how my tax dollars are spent and who’s on the receiving end. Oh, it’s a day center where teenage lesbians learn how to weave baskets? Tough sh*t!

The trouble with leftists like you is you don’t understand what wealth is or where it comes from. You refer to “the wealth” or “the resources” without any notion of who owns it and who turned it into wealth in the first place. What the hell was oil before someone with brains and a vision figured out what to do with it? A useless black goo, no good to anyone. How much was silicon worth before someone with brains and a vision figured out how to make computer chips? Wealth is not a finite pie, it is virtually limitless, bound only by our imagination. If someone figured out tomorrow how to power an entire city from a thimbleful of seawater then they will have turned the oceans into the largest source of wealth imaginable.

And you have no idea what drives people to create wealth or what kind of conditions persuades them to keep creating wealth. You have no vision except to slow economic growth to a crawl, to send it backward – while expecting the economy to keep supporting your perpetual stash of core voters – welfare addicts. It doesn’t occur to you that it would be better if private health care was cheaper and more accessible to consumers in an economy strong enough to allow them to save for their old age. You would rather they remained “victims,” convenient props in your never ending games of class warfare and anticapitalist ideology.

Capitalism, by the way, more than doubled the average life expectancy of Americans in less than 200 years, without a shadow of a doubt the most significant achievement of mankind to date. Its conditions of relative prosperity slashed infant mortality rates and increased birth rates, creating the most dramatic explosion of population since the dawn of man. All this without liberalism, medicaid or socialism of any kind.

I choose my vision over yours any day of the week.

Sharke on June 16, 2009 at 1:09 AM

Can’t be just money, can it? If not, how do you explain the Open Source movement, that produces high quality product yet where the creator are clearly not out there solely to make money?

No, it can’t be “just money,” since money on its own is worthless (it has a low nutritional value, for one). However, people are driven by the need, desire and instinct to make life better for themselves and their families.

The open source movement is comprised of computer enthusiasts who enjoy their hobby and take it seriously. They still have to earn a living – which, by definition, they don’t make from their open source projects. They have jobs. And by the way, as much as I admire free products like Open Office, the fact remains that open source projects have as of yet to beat the quality and functionality of two of my most used Microsoft products: Outlook, which I use to handle all of my employee scheduling – and Visual Studio, the best code development environment on the market bar none. I was extremely willing to pay money for both of them and don’t regret one penny of the cost. The revenues enjoyed by Microsoft also allow them to release excellent software for free, such as Visual C++ Express, an IDE which is unmatched by any open source IDE available.

You guys have this perception that health care is like a box of cereal in the grocery isle. Somebody come’s up with Corn Flakes. The other kind invents Pop Corn. The third one has Honey Bunches of Oats. The consumer passes in front of the isle, chooses a box, and moves on.

No, we don’t perceive health care as boxes of cereal in a grocery isle at all. That would be another of your cartoonish straw man arguments.

Health insurance doesn’t follow that model. First, the risks are not the same for everyone. And neither are the costs. Some seniors might require a lot of health services, while some might not.If you really go free market in the logic of you pay for what you need, it’s clear that a number of senior people just won’t be able to afford the care they need. If you don’t spread the risk over large segments, then the costs are horribly high.

First of all, you’re presuming that under a free market health care system costs would be the same as they are now. That is not the case. The health care industry has never been allowed to compete freely in the same way as other areas of the economy. I know how you liberals love to pooh-pooh the idea of free competition as some kind of delusional “magic wand” that only free market “fanatics” believe in, but the fact is that free competition (capitalism) has been responsible for making virtually every other area of technology available to the masses at cheap prices.

What is technology? At its heart, it’s the marriage of science and capitalism. Science cuts new ground and lays out the theory, while capitalism provides the capital and the resources to get that science onto our shelves for consumption at accessible prices (and the more accessible it is, the more profitable). Many relatively poor (by our standards) American families have computer chips in their homes which are thousands of times more powerful than the chips that launched and navigated the first Space Shuttle. Consumer choice and free competition are absolutely without a shadow of a doubt responsible for making such technology available to us at cheap prices. There is no reason on Earth why the same process could not apply to health care technology. Yet the entire industry is choked by regulation and mandates which make free consumer choice impossible.

Don’t even try preaching to me about socialized health care because I’m originally British, still hold a British passport and am intimately familiar with the quality of British health care. I know exactly the consequences of a system in which the risk is “spread.” Some renal wards in Britain have been described as resembling those in the third world. Hospitals are on the whole vastly inferior to those in the US. I have extensive experience with both. The quality of care given to people of all ages, not least the elderly, is far inferior in the UK than it is here. It’s not a myth that people die on waiting lists – it’s true. People go onto waiting lists with operable cancer and by the time their turn comes around the cancer has spread and their chances of survival have been greatly reduced.

I was diagnosed with skin cancer here in New York 3 years ago. I was told by my specialist that to retain a 95% chance of survival (scary enough as that was for me) I should have surgery within 6 weeks at the very latest. At the time I was uninsured. Everyone told me I was mad to pay thousands to have surgery here when I could easily fly to Britain and have it done for free. So I made inquiries and it turned out that I would have had to wait at least 12 weeks to have it done on the NHS. Not surprisingly, I had it done here in New York, it cost me over $10,000 (and no I’m not rich) and it was the best money I’ve ever spent. If I had to go into debt for the rest of my life I would have still spent the money. They did offer me a payment plan, by the way. I can’t think of any other purchase that would have been worth so much to me.

Health care in countries like Britain is rationed. That’s why the waiting lists are so long. And your place on the list is often determined by the lifestyle that you’ve led. For instance if you have lung disease, you’re relegated down the list and have to wait longer if you’ve been a smoker at any time of your life. If you have heart disease, doctors will operate on you sooner if you’re thin than if you’re fat. These are the choices the bean counters of national health care systems have to make, contrary to the naive beliefs of supporters of socialized care who seem to think that such a system is conducive to equality and fairness in contrast to the “inhumanity” of the private system.

In short – there are ways to reduce the cost of health care. But there is no getting around the fact that like any other area of life and survival – food, shelter etc – those who have more money are better able to afford it. “Spreading the risk” is not the answer, not least because it is morally unacceptable to physically force people to pay for the welfare of others. Reduce the cost of private care by unleashing the same process which has reduced the cost of other areas of technology – and the cost will be far less of a burden, not least because the money saved will be money invested in other areas of the economy, which means more jobs, more prosperity – which means less people unable to afford their own health care. And for those who still genuinely cannot afford to pay for their own care by any means, there is private charity. Liberals pooh-pooh private charity because since they’re not very good at donating toward it, they presume that nobody else is either. Yet curiously enough, even though they have such a dim view of man’s capacity for volitional empathy, they somehow believe that the same men undergo a magical transformation of morality once they’re elected into office.

And insurance companies have an incentive to get rid of the people that cost a lot of money.

That’s because not only is health care too expensive for the reasons mentioned above, but over the years the consumer has met less and less of the cost of health care out of their own pockets and the burden of payment has shifted increasingly to the insurance provider. This has led to a situation in which we consume far too much health care and are much more likely to visit our doctors and take ourselves to hospital for minor ailments which are self-treatable. Who cares? The insurance company will pay for it all! The situation is ironically similar to that of countries with socialized medicine, in which the perception is that health care is limitless and free and people abuse it.

Reduce the cost of health care and shift more of the burden of payment to the consumer and there is no reason for insurance companies to feel like they have to “get rid of” customers who are, at the end of the day, customers. Liberals love to tell us that it’s “tragic” that people have to spend money on their own health care, while at the same time compelling them to purchase homes they can’t afford (sound familiar?) and ignoring the fact that most people spend a frightening amount on their money on useless crap that they don’t need (as well as booze and cigarettes etc). It’s time that people stopped seeing themselves as children of the state and started taking the ultimate responsibility for their own lives.

The solution to all this is anything but free market. The solution is to force insurers to cover everyone, and to force them to control prices so that they are not telling senior citizen 1 that his cost will be $60000 because he had a heart surgery.

You obviously don’t understand economics, in particular the basic mechanics of the price system and the reasons why every single attempt by a state in history to control prices and dictate business practice (fascism) has led to abject poverty and a shortage of consumer goods.

I think there is nothing (more?) dangerous than a fanatical love of capitalism (or any system for that matter). Capitalism has its limits too. Plus, if you look at America for the last 50 years, it has also involved a lot of socialistic measures. So if you want to use that as a measure of success, then realize it wasn’t just Capitalism.

You think there is “nothing more dangerous than a ‘fanatical’ love of capitalism”? Don’t be so melodramatic and shrill. Firstly, why do liberals always mistake a calm, collected consideration of objective facts and reason as “love”? It’s rather childish is it not? Secondly, I suggest you look up the word “fanatical” and take some time to consider why it’s a completely inappropriate word to use in this case. Why am I “fanatical” for pointing out that capitalism has improved human lives more than anything else in human history? That is not conjecture or fanaticism, it’s empirical fact.

Furthermore, if you “look at America for the past 50 years” you will see the origins of the deep financial mess we’re in now, none of which have anything to do with the “free market” despite the economic misunderstanding and outright myth that passes for intellect in the modern liberal arena. Aside from the reasons for the current economic crash, we could go into the ways in which welfare-obsessed liberalism has destroyed our inner cities and slowed economic growth, as well as the ways in which labor unions have, contrary to the majestic piles of steaming bullcrap they release as propaganda, caused unemployment and an increase in the price of consumer goods and have done absolutely nothing to increase our standards of living over the last 50 years.

Sharke on June 16, 2009 at 2:48 AM