Bfgrn
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Conservatives and Empathy
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Again, this notion that it does not go far enough only assumes that a role of government is to meet people's needs. If there is a need to be meat the private sector will, and far more efficiently, meet those needs. Just perhaps, the founders were smart enough to figure out what government was best able to do and what givernment would not be so suited to doing.
Bfgrn
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A huge pile of bullshit. Health insurance will NEVER, EVER be a fit for the private sector. The 'free market' model CANNOT work for both the consumer and the insurance corporations. Are you folks on the right so thoroughly indoctrinated that you can't see the built in conflicts?
Why not? It works for the consumer and every other type of corporation that produces good or services for consumption. What is this conflict you speak of that ONLY exists in the health insurance industry?
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Bfgrn
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You REALLY can't see the problem?
OK, let's take buying a car. You buy a Chevy and you are not satisfied with the car, what are your options?
Immanuel
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Sorry, I live in the real world and have felt and heard the facts out of employer mouths.
Ezra Klein lives in a fantasy world fed to him by liberal politicians that want to justify the bullshit they forced down our throats in 2009.
Immie
Immanuel
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Part of the problem is that there is no "free market" involved at the moment. Government regulations in such things as limiting which insurers can do business in which states has wiped out the "free market" in every state.
Immie
Pretty sure I know where you're going to try to go with this, but I'll play along for the moment. If you buy a new car and aren't satisfied with it, your options depend on the situation. My parents just happened to have bought a new car and weren't competely satisified with a few things. Had a spot on the interior roof or something and the dealership fixed it for them. If you are talking about it just not being the car you want or something like that, then I would imagine you could return the car for refund if you're within the exchange period. So I'm guessing this is the part where you explain to me why it is not possible for the free market to provide a similar level of service where health insurance is concerned.........
Bfgrn
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Immie, you keep parroting the same BS. There is no free market model that will ever work. Are you also oblivious to the built in conflict?
Immanuel
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I'm not parroting anything and I didn't say there was a "free market". Hence the "there is no 'free market'". We do not have a free market anywhere in America. However, the freer the market is the better things work to a certain extent.
Government interference should be kept to the absolute minimum possible.
I think it is you socialists who are the ones that are absolutely clueless. You have no concept of the word freedom.
Immie
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No Immie, they do have a concept of freedom. It's just that freedom to them means no one should have a care in the world and if you do, government ought to fix it for you.
- Thread starter
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Freedom is a meaningless word outside of context. As for jobs the worse record on jobs has always been the republicans, that is fact. Jobs created during U.S. presidential terms - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
As long as American corporations outsource and Americans buy foreign products because they are cheaper, we will have high unemployment, seems simple but blaming Obama is the easiest job.
15 Shocking Facts Show That the Middle Class is Being Wiped Out | Economy | AlterNet
As long as American corporations outsource and Americans buy foreign products because they are cheaper, we will have high unemployment, seems simple but blaming Obama is the easiest job.
15 Shocking Facts Show That the Middle Class is Being Wiped Out | Economy | AlterNet
2twsted4colorTV
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And just why do you think corporations outsource? They can't afford to pay the ungodly wages the unions want them to pay. These people want more and more money, they simply can't afford it. Start a business why don't you and see how well you do. There are people around the world who are willing to work for wages people here in American don't. People here was 30 bucks an hour without even so much as a high school diploma. Then they won't work, won't show up on time, do shoddy work and want more and more money. It's that simple. Wake up.
Bfgrn
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Well Immie, I turned your head around on Rev. Wright, but you absolutely refuse to listen to Wendell Potter who was an Executive VP for Cigna, one of the largest insurance corporations in America. I guess the truth would be too uncomfortable for you, carry on.
Wendell Potter on Profits Before Patients
Freedom, in the context the Founders understood it, was the unalienable right to think anything, say anything, want anything, believe anything, create anything, aspire to anything, acquire anything, own anything, or DO anything that requires no involuntary contribution or participation by any other person other than his/her noninterference.
Absolutely nothing apart from that is a right.
The concept of the Constitution was to provide a central federal government with sufficient authority to secure the rights of the people and would then leave them entirely alone to form whatever society and state and local government they wished to have. In other words the people would govern themselves in whatever way they saw fit short of being able to violate anybody else's unalienable rights with impunity.
It was the recognition of unalienable rights that made this different from anarchy that respects nobody's rights and also different from any form of government the world had ever known. It also produced the most free, most innovative, most productive, most prosperous nation the world had ever known.
We are at risk of losing it if we continue to allow the federal government to acquire more and more power and dictate more and more of what we may own or keep of our property, what we may say, how we must work, and otherwise how we may legally live our lives.
Conservatives seem to have a great deal of empathy for these concepts.
Liberals too often seem to have had their empathy bone removed when it comes to the concept of unalienable rights.
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Immanuel
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I have read plenty from Mr. Potter. He has not convinced me that I am wrong. ACA is/was a jobs killer. I am a living victim of that piece of shit legislation.
What don't you understand about that?
The article from Mr. Potter, that you presented earlier, didn't even discuss the effect this legislation had on jobs. It speaks of access to health care.
Volunteer Doctors Can't Keep Up with Needs of Uninsured and Underinsured | Center for Media and Democracy
I'm no fan of insurance companies, but I damned sure would prefer them to bureaucrats in Washington who can begin taxing us what ever the hell they want as soon as they have destroyed the private industry.
Immie
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- #257
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary." James Madison
I don't pretend to be an expert on thought in early America but I know your interpretation is way too simplistic and almost utopian. It would only take a few quotations from the time to contradict your assumptions. Here's one: "... legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property... Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions or property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right." Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Madison 1785 [more quotes below]
The constitution and federation of America occurred because people ( and states ) don't get along, plain and simple, the idea today that government is the problem grows not out of our founding, but out of the oppositional rhetoric of power and money when faced with regulation and law. Plutocracy along with corporate power and big money are powerful forces today. (see book at bottom)
Unalienable rights, like freedom, are meaningless concepts outside of context and community. No one has unalienable rights as that is one enormous abstraction given everyone can only act within a time and a place. Empathy as I use it in this thread is not favorable opinions on concepts, I consider it about people. That is a consistent distinction between liberal thought and conservative thought: conservatives live by formula, liberals by utility. Read Tom Paine sometimes as he influneced our revolution.
If government were to leave people alone we'd have anarchy. Law and its consequence is the only thing that keeps some - many - most people honest in affairs of profit and property. Our recent real estate crash demonstrates this once more, but humans do not seem to learn. Just think if some regulator had done their job with Madoff?
"The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government." Thomas Jefferson
"Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came." Thomas Paine
"The republican [not party] ideology derives from a variety of sources, both ancient and early modern. Within the context of early American history, republican ideology usually refers to a strain of political thought that emphasized the need for the government to pursue the public good. Republican thinkers believed that liberty was a very fragile thing that had to be carefully guarded. In order to successfully protect liberty, politics had to be carried out by virtuous men who would protect the public good rather than seeking to benefit private interests." David J. Voelker http://www.uwgb.edu/voelkerd/handouts/republicanism-by-david-voelker.pdf
"Historian Phillips-Fein traces the hidden history of the Reagan revolution to a coterie of business executives, including General Electric official and Reagan mentor Lemuel Boulware, who saw labor unions, government regulation, high taxes and welfare spending as dire threats to their profits and power. From the 1930s onward, the author argues, they provided the money, organization and fervor for a decades-long war against New Deal liberalism—funding campaigns, think tanks, magazines and lobbying groups, and indoctrinating employees in the virtues of unfettered capitalism." [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Hands-Making-Conservative-Movement/dp/0393059308/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1247845984&sr=1-1]Amazon.com: Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (9780393059304): Kim Phillips-Fein: Books[/ame]
.
I don't pretend to be an expert on thought in early America but I know your interpretation is way too simplistic and almost utopian. It would only take a few quotations from the time to contradict your assumptions. Here's one: "... legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property... Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions or property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right." Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Madison 1785 [more quotes below]
The constitution and federation of America occurred because people ( and states ) don't get along, plain and simple, the idea today that government is the problem grows not out of our founding, but out of the oppositional rhetoric of power and money when faced with regulation and law. Plutocracy along with corporate power and big money are powerful forces today. (see book at bottom)
Unalienable rights, like freedom, are meaningless concepts outside of context and community. No one has unalienable rights as that is one enormous abstraction given everyone can only act within a time and a place. Empathy as I use it in this thread is not favorable opinions on concepts, I consider it about people. That is a consistent distinction between liberal thought and conservative thought: conservatives live by formula, liberals by utility. Read Tom Paine sometimes as he influneced our revolution.
If government were to leave people alone we'd have anarchy. Law and its consequence is the only thing that keeps some - many - most people honest in affairs of profit and property. Our recent real estate crash demonstrates this once more, but humans do not seem to learn. Just think if some regulator had done their job with Madoff?
"The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government." Thomas Jefferson
"Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came." Thomas Paine
"The republican [not party] ideology derives from a variety of sources, both ancient and early modern. Within the context of early American history, republican ideology usually refers to a strain of political thought that emphasized the need for the government to pursue the public good. Republican thinkers believed that liberty was a very fragile thing that had to be carefully guarded. In order to successfully protect liberty, politics had to be carried out by virtuous men who would protect the public good rather than seeking to benefit private interests." David J. Voelker http://www.uwgb.edu/voelkerd/handouts/republicanism-by-david-voelker.pdf
"Historian Phillips-Fein traces the hidden history of the Reagan revolution to a coterie of business executives, including General Electric official and Reagan mentor Lemuel Boulware, who saw labor unions, government regulation, high taxes and welfare spending as dire threats to their profits and power. From the 1930s onward, the author argues, they provided the money, organization and fervor for a decades-long war against New Deal liberalism—funding campaigns, think tanks, magazines and lobbying groups, and indoctrinating employees in the virtues of unfettered capitalism." [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Hands-Making-Conservative-Movement/dp/0393059308/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1247845984&sr=1-1]Amazon.com: Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (9780393059304): Kim Phillips-Fein: Books[/ame]
.
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Unfortunately that isn't true. Science has shown through social experiements time and time again that lack of some authority does not automatically lead to chaos. Not that I am advocating for no government but an anarchist would argue that anarchy is not chaos, simply a lack of central authority in the absence of which spontaneous order would come about.
It is ridiculous to believe that the founders were big government lovers given what they came from. You quote Jefferson, but cleary out of context. While he stating how something could be done he clearly not advocating it. No one is advocating for no regulation midcan. But to believe a central authority (government) with ever more power is not the greatest threat there is to one's freedom is to be about as blind as one can be.
Oddball
Unobtanium Member
Then carries on as though he's the expert on thought in early America, complete with the all-too-usual strawmen, post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc fallacies, quotes taken out of context, outright lies, all topped off with condescending "read this epic liberoidal tome and you too might end up a bloviating genius like me" crapola.
Pure tragicomic gold.
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Bfgrn
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Our own economy grew faster when we abandoned the laissez faire of the 1920s and early 1930s for the proto-socialist policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It has become increasingly sluggish as we have moved back to a purer free market. Data of the past few decades show that our GNP and productivity growth have lagged those of our trading partners, who have mixed economies characterized by moderate government intervention.
BLIND FAITH
The gap between rich and poor is now the widest in US history. This is disturbing, for if history is any guide we have unwittingly placed ourselves in grave danger.
Over the last millennium Europe has witnessed long cycles of widening and narrowing economic disparity. In each cycle, once the gap between the rich and the rest widened beyond a certain point, it presaged decline and disaster for all of society, the rich as well as the poor. Could we be seeing the first tremors of a new cycle, the outliers of the next menacing storm? In recent decades, many US citizens have come under increasing financial pressure. Since the 1970s, our number of working poor has increased sharply. Nearly all of our much-vaunted newly-created wealth has gone to the richest.
For a country that has prided itself on its resourcefulness, the inability to address such problems suggests something deeper at work. There is something, powerful but insidious, that blinds us to the causes of these problems and undermines our ability to respond. That something is a set of beliefs, comparable to religious beliefs in earlier ages, about the nature of economies and societies. These beliefs imply the impropriety of government intervention either in social contexts (libertarianism) or in economic affairs (laissez faire).
The faithful unquestioningly embrace the credo that the doctrine of nonintervention has generated our most venerated institutions: our democracy, the best possible political system; and our free market economy, the best possible economic system. But despite our devotion to the dogmas that libertarianism and free market economics are the foundation of all that we cherish most deeply, they have failed us and are responsible for our present malaise.
The pieties of libertarianism and free markets sound pretty, but they cannot withstand even a cursory inspection. Libertarianism does not support democracy; taken to an extreme, it entails the law of the jungle. If government never interferes, we could all get away with murder. Alternatively, if the libertarian position is not to be taken to an extreme, where should it stop? What is the difference between no government and minimal government? Attempts to justify libertarianism, even a less than extreme position, have failed. Laissez faire, or free market economics, characterized by minimal or no government intervention, has a history that is long but undistinguished. Just as the negative effects of a high fever do not certify the health benefits of the opposite extreme, hypothermia, the dismal failure of communism, seeking complete government control of the economy, does not certify the economic benefits of the opposite extreme, total economic non-intervention.
It may seem odd, given the parabolic arc of our financial markets and the swelling chorus of paeans to free market economics, but despite the important role of the market, purer free market economies have consistently underperformed well-focused mixed economies. In the latter part of the nineteenth century the mixed economies of Meiji Japan and Bismarcks Germany clearly outperformed the free market economies of Britain and France. Our own economy grew faster when we abandoned the laissez faire of the 1920s and early 1930s for the proto-socialist policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt. It has become increasingly sluggish as we have moved back to a purer free market. Data of the past few decades show that our GNP and productivity growth have lagged those of our trading partners, who have mixed economies characterized by moderate government intervention.
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