Forum Overview :: Motherfucking News :: Re: I like it when you make up things. It's funny.

[quote name="Lizard_King"][quote name="Damocles"] The fact that you tried to use the words "natural law" in regards to a social science like economics is really funny. And downright Marxist, as a matter of fact. [/quote] Of course. Because little things like cause and effect are no longer at work when people like you are adding the numbers. Or supply and demand. Or any other basic precept on which nature functions. You jackass. [quote] Does this even have a meaning? Government paying for something is not inherently "socialist"; it can be Keynesian, or liberal, or just common sense. Socialism, as understood <i>by socialists</i>, is the ownership of the means of production by the proletariat. Considering that a) the government isn't the proletariat and b)Americans don't even think of themselves as a "proletariat" in the first place, it ain't socialism. It's just government. [/quote] No, what you define there is orthodox communism, circa turn of the 19th century. I don't think even Stalin was functioning with those terms except at a rhetorical level. Even Lenin had his backwards, "vanguard of the working class" workaround for ensuring no proletariat actually controlled a damned thing. [quote]I mean, fuck, government providing services predates the <b>concept</b> of socialism by only several thousand years. [/quote] Only if you are so stupid as to regard modern socialism as a wholly separate creature from what predated it. Were Christian communes not socialist because Karl Marx had not vomited out his works yet? How about primitive collectivist tribes, etc? [quote] Horseshit. First, shut up about "me and my kind" spending everyone else's earnings, unless you want to dig yourself in even further by bleating "taxation is theft". Government spending is as legitimate as any other. [/quote] I can and will. Government spending is by definition <i>not</i> as legitimate as any other, rather it requires more justification than a rich guy buying himself a Benz, because government does not <i>earn</i> money, since in the markets that it does involve itself it artificially enforces monopolies on its behalf. At gunpoint, if necessary. There are plenty of places where government central planning is an adequate solution for ideological, common sense, or other reasons, such as in national defense. Taxation is then justified for practical purposes. [quote]Second, health care doesn't operate like other commodities, because people don't behave like rational consumers when their <i>lives</i> are on the line, and don't know enough about the service to judge who's good and who's bad. [/quote] Ah, the old "people are too ignorant to spend their own money" argument. How do you propose that a "system" of any sort is going to provide better judgement? By having experts decide who should get what treatment from whom? Perhaps we could have a central service, let's call it, I don't know, GOSPLAN, to do it. People are rational consumers in any non-emergency situation and even sometimes in those(ie, while emergency room visits may not be covered by rational decision making most of the time, the bulk of medical care is). Simply because they do not necessarily prioritize matters in a manner that you find palatable does not make them wrong; if they wish to roll the dice and spend their money on consumer electronics rather than health insurance, it is THEIR FUCKING BUSINESS. As a corollary, there is no way that having rich people subsidize health care for the poor except voluntarily is anything but corrupt and inefficient. [quote]Third, even if they were, insurance irrevocably screw things up anyway, because doctors can game the system. That means everything costs more, while drug companies and medical specialists make out like bandits from all the insurance cash. The only way to deal with any of this is a monopsony, where there's only one health care consumer.[/quote] That is patently absurd. You must have known it when you posted it. You seriously claim that in a free market environment (which does not, in fact, exist now, rather some sort of cartel/socialist hybrid) insurance companies will not audit receipts and question the judgement of the health care providers? That is what your beloved courts are for, for christ's sake. [quote] Oh please. Yes, Government-provided medicare ends up costing <b>less</b>, as any number of studies could tell you, for the reasons I stated above. [/quote] Yes, and if we devoted 20% of GNP to pineapple growth, for instance, pineapples would end up costing <b>less</b> as well, so long as you do not take into account the growth you deprive other sectors of the economy by taxing the shit out of investors and diverting their funds <b>inefficiently</b> as any industry without a profit incentive inevitably will. That is because economy is fundamentally based on choosing to divert scarce or limited resources, something which socialists perennially fail to understand will undermine the rest of the economy if concentrated inefficiently in centrally planned crusades rather than spent as much as possible at the lowest or initial level of decision making, the individual. You know, the only person that KNOWS what he wants, rather than what you think he should prefer. [quote]Also, plz define "massive taxation", these mystery costs and these "long term effects", because I think you're yanking this out of your ass in the vain hope that I don't know that the Laffer curve is a load of shit and hard monetarism is long discredited. As is this "interrelated economies" stuff... if you mean internationally you're just wrong, and if you mean within a country I can only say "so"? That could also be an argument for free market firefighting, and that's just stupid. [/quote] Massive taxation=the amount of money it costs in the People's Republic of (Canada, Germany, France, etc), which they lop out in their high tax rates, to fund their AWSUM health care. Clear enough for you? I mean nationally. As in, I can't invest my money in x industry which I think could provide a favourable return, incidentally employing people etc, because it's going to fund this massive bureaucracy that will provide tongue depressors in ghettoes because the government has to tax a greater share of my money from me. Clear? [/quote]