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dktem
Trad climber
Temecula
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Mar 22, 2010 - 07:00pm PT
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This turkey will end up in court, and Obama may live to regret humiliating the Judges at the State of The Union
Are you suggesting that the Supreme Court makes decisions based upon personal spite rather than an interpretation of law?
If that's the case, then we've got a bigger problem than anything that could be caused by some health insurance legislation.
The law won't be seriously challenged in the courts anyway. There will be a few politicians that try to score some points with some contrived arguments. They will get lots of airtime on Fox, but they won't get far in the courts.
The bill was passed by a majority of the House and a majority of the Senate. That's all it takes. The Constitution requires a simple majority -- it always has. (The filibuster is the "parliamentary trick." The number 60 appears nowhere in the Constitution.) Fox news has really twisted the collective civics knowledge of our country in a bad way...
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Fat Dad
Trad climber
Los Angeles, CA
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Mar 22, 2010 - 07:04pm PT
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OK, Kris. I see your point. I think they had it coming but you're right that they aren't required to be there and may not in the future.
FDR, just like Obama put a band-aid on serious trauma. We still have more pain ahead.
Fatty, no one is arguing that this is the end all be all. However, compared to the lame, industry friendly "reform" the Repubs finally coughed up after a year of savage criticism, it's a step in the right direction. It's a far, far better fix than the right was ever going to implement.
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Bob D'A
Trad climber
Boulder, CO
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Mar 22, 2010 - 07:06pm PT
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"Are you suggesting that the Supreme Court makes decisions based upon personal spite rather than an interpretation of law?"
Do you remember the 2000 election...a sad day for America and the SC?
This reform is tame compared to what Nixon wanted to enact. I wish Nixon would have won that fight.
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dirtbag
climber
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Mar 22, 2010 - 07:11pm PT
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As an edit to FatDad while I was writing, the point is not whether Obama was right or wrong (although he did "misstate" facts,) but rather that he took the unprecedented step of cornering and attacking the Judges at a function where they could not respond and are not even required to attend but do so out of courtesy. I'll bet they sit his next one out.
President's criticize Judges all the time.
How many times has Roe v. Wade been criticized over the years in the State of the Union, adsressess in front of Justices who signed the opinion? I would bet it has happened plenty of times.
They need to grow a thick skin or, as Roberts suggests, stop attending such a blatantly political event altogether.
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dktem
Trad climber
Temecula
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Mar 22, 2010 - 07:18pm PT
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I'm really surprised there are still sour grapes about the 2000 election decision.
I voted for Bush in that election, but did not have strong convictions at the time. Like many, I did come to regret my choice.
However, I cannot see any interpretation of the facts that suggest the Supreme Court "stole" the election for Bush. It was a close election, the implementation got buggered up, and the Supreme court simply ruled that there was no way to go back and do it "right" in any reasonable time frame. So we had to move forward with the best count we had. Sure our electoral process is a mess, but those are the rules, and Bush won by those rules.
Since then, most research has confirmed that Bush did get more votes in Florida anyway
Forget about the 2000 election. It's just a quirk in history and has nothing to do with today's (serious) issues.
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Walla Walla, WA
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Mar 22, 2010 - 07:21pm PT
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Jstan, your comments were quite impressive to me (for whatever that's worth)! I think you are right at the heart of the issue, and I really liked your way of casting the issue:
Now, what happens to positive and negative rights when we decide we do not want to drive past people dying alongside the road. This is a choice. And as is always the case with choices, people get upset when they feel the choice was not left to them. When the community makes a decision that costs me money, the community (that's you or whomever else I am talking to) has taken a positive step that has injured me. Apparently I am not normal. I don't feel shooting you is a viable approach to making myself whole.
The central fact is in an entirely unplanned fashion we have said to the caregivers, "We have decided not to let people die beside the road. MAKE IT HAPPEN."
This has injured me, and many others.
Tell me how I can make myself whole. If I thought voting republican would do anything other than increase the profits gained by insurers and pharmaceutical corporations I would consider that option. But the data says pretty clearly that's an oxymoron. Perhaps even lower.
First let me say that I wholeheartedly agree that neither major party has a clue at this point. I echo your dissatisfaction with the Republican approach to things, and so the solution will have to take an entirely different tack than either party now contemplates.
But to your question, it turns out that the Kantian notion of negative/positive rights/duties addresses this as well.
Negative duties are considered "perfect" because, as I noted, I can satisfy them by doing nothing. In a logical sense I have a perfect, unlimited capacity to do nothing. This is to say that negative duties "cost" me nothing, so there can never be a conflict of negative duties. (It is of note that in the hundreds of years since Kant developed this distinction, philosophers have looked for a conflict of negative duties, which would be devastating to Kant's theory. None have been found, and philosophers are now quite satisfied that the Kantian distinction stands.)
Positive duties, by contrast, do require me to expend resources, and my resources are necessarily limited. Thus, positive duties are cast as "imperfect." No matter my best intentions and genuine efforts, I can only imperfectly satisfy all my positive duties.
So, turning to your example of leaving someone to die by the roadside, let's employ the negative/positive duties distinction. Assuming, as did the Founders, that you have only a negative right to life, I can't stop on the road long enough to murder you. That would be violating your negative right, which is the right for to be unmolested. And there IS a distinction between killing and "letting die." However, CERTAINLY I have a positive duty to you just in virtue of you being a human being! CERTAINLY I have a positive duty to help you, particularly when you are in dire distress!
So, the intuition that most people on this thread have is well-founded. CERTAINLY we have positive duties to help each other, particularly as the need becomes more and more dire!
But here's the problem with the collective legislating exactly how I will fulfill my positive duties: The collective decides how MY positive duties will get prioritized, and that necessarily imposes a certain set of value judgments upon me that might be entirely odious to me; and THAT is what the Constitution was designed to protect me from! While we debate the relation between religion and government ("Is America a Christian Nation?"), we must recognize that the value-judgments imposed upon me by government go far deeper than even that.
An example will help.
I'm driving down the road, and I see you laying by the side of the road next to your piled-up vehicle. Clearly you need my help, and CLEARLY I have a positive duty to help you. However, my positive duty is imperfect, and it falls to me to decide among my various priorities. In this example, it turns out that I am a notable surgeon on my way to the emergency room where another accident has severely injured my wife and child. They are on the brink of death, and there is nobody better fitted to save them than me. The ER is keeping them alive, just barely, but I NEED to get there to save them.
I can't save everybody... such is the nature of imperfect, positive duties. In an instant I choose, and I drive by you (making a cell phone call for help on the way past). After all, I can never have all the information that would help me choose. I can never be that epistemically privileged! So, constantly with limited information, I choose how to allocate my resources among my positive duties.
As I drive past you, I do not deny that you have a pressing need. But I don't know you. I don't know your circumstance nor how you came to be lying by the side of the road. But I do know my family! And there is nothing wrong (even in the Kantian moral sense) to prioritize those close to me, the situations of which I know best! So I choose. I drive past you, not knowing if you will live or die, choosing to allocate my resources as it seems best to ME.
The problem we are seeing now is that government is telling me more and more that I must allocate my resources to people that, not only do I NOT know most of them, but, worse, I would NOT choose to allocate my resources to if I did know them! A certain set of values and priorities is being IMPOSED on my by THE entity that historically and philosophically is LEAST qualified to hand down such judgments!
So, this is not a simple matter of saying that we as a society have decided to not leave people dying by the side of the road. The situation is much uglier than that. Now we have a society that says: "It matter NOT AT ALL how you came to be lying by the side of the road. ALL that matters is that you are lying by the side of the road. So, we ALL have the PRIORITIZED positive duty to fix you up!" Meanwhile, using my analogy, my own family is left to die.
Of course we can't make these analogies walk on all fours, and the prioritizing of positive duties is usually not as stark as in our example. However, the principle still remains. By imposing a certain set of values and priorities on me, the government (again, the LEAST qualified entity to do this) tells me that I MUST take resources from the values that I know and would prioritize, and I MUST prioritize those values that IT prioritizes.
At this juncture, people tend to divide into two camps. One camp says, "Yeah! You nailed it! Government should just STAY OUT OF MY LIFE." The other camp says, "What a superficial account! We ask the government to decide many such things for us, and it does at least a passable job of it."
The "government should just stay out of my life" camp IS superficial, because government DOES legitimately and Constitutionally do things for us that require it to be "in my life" in various ways. On the other hand, we CAN give a principled account of what is legitimate, Constitutional involvement and what is not.
It is true that we ask government to prioritize certain of our values, such as national defense, police and fire departments, and so on. So, it seems that just the nature of government is our willing abdication of some of our value judgments in the interests of "the collective."
There are two refinements to this idea.
First, as already noted by many, there is a problem denoted by the $6 band-aid! That point is exemplar of a whole body of related points that all make the same overarching point: Government is relatively effective at legislation, while it is astoundingly ineffective at regulation/enforcement. The "war on drugs" is just one of countless examples. "No child left behind" is another. When the government demands that we ALL must use a certain brand of band-aid, yet it cannot in principle ensure that this brand is the best (and priced fairly), then the government oversteps its legitimate bounds by forcing us all to be, in effect, raped. Practically speaking, individuals, then local governments, then States, and finally the Feds are on a hierarchy of inefficiency with the Feds being the least efficient. So, just practically speaking, "collective" health care is better handled (if it be handled by government at all) at the lowest levels of the hierarchy. We tolerate a certain margin of inefficiency in our national defense BECAUSE we recognize that "national" in this case is both necessary and inefficient. So we trade off efficiency for necessity in this case; but that is NOT an argument for such a trade-off in all cases.
Second, there is a qualitative difference between having government do something that we CANNOT in principle do for ourselves and having government do something that we CAN in principle do for ourselves. We cannot in principle defend our nation for ourselves. National defense is beyond the capacity of anything short of a national "collective." The "collective" IS appropriate in exactly these cases, and the Constitution explicitly refers to such cases! However, the "collective" is NOT appropriate when it is merely a stand-in for a subset of the citizenry merely being lazy or unwilling to take care of its own business. In such cases, necessarily government will impose a set of values and priorities upon people that are beyond its legitimacy or capacity to evaluate. Loss of individual freedom will be the necessary result.
In the case of national defense, I can agree with having it in principle, and still (through my legislators) try to hold defense contractors accountable for their pricing and efficiency. However, with no inconsistency I can also disagree in principle with nationalized health care and claim that government has no legitimacy being in that business.
But the intuition arises again and again that my thinking leaves "too many people laying dying by the side of the road." So, the thought is that "something must be done." THIS intuition is again and again the crux of the matter!
But this reminds me of a program I saw on TV recently that was an expose' of the morbidly (I prefer "grotesquely") obese as a "national health care priority." I well-remember the interview with the social worker standing beside the 800+ pound woman that had been entirely bed-ridden for years, yet, somehow (miraculously to my mind), had continued to gain weight. The social worker was literally wringing her hands as she pleaded with the nation, "We have to DO something to help these people! It is a national priority!"
And there's the rub! WHY should it be MY priority to "help" such people? I have the right/responsibility to chose resource-allocation among my positive duties, and I just don't agree that helping this woman get gastric bypass surgery (vastly expensive for a woman of such girth!) SHOULD be on my priority scale at all, much less HIGH on that scale! SOMEHOW this woman keeps gaining weight, despite the fact that she literally cannot get out of bed! So, I deduce that SOMEBODY keeps bringing her MORE FOOD than she needs to eat! Rather than to (inefficiently!) have government impose upon me the responsibility to provide gastric bypass surgery for this woman, I think that the case is SLAM-DUNK that (efficiently) ALL we have to do as a nation is simply tell her to quit eating so much, while we tell her "health care providers" to quit feeding her so much. Give her fewer calories than her body uses each day, and she WILL lose weight. It is that simple. There is no "national crisis" here. And I should be able to choose to allocate my resources to those more "deserving" than she is.
But this case is an example, writ-small, of the overarching problem with nationalized health care AS a response to the pressing health-care needs of the population, writ-large.
Let me recap at this point, as the argument might be seeming obtuse to some. Earlier we were talking about the political philosophy underlying this debate. A number of people found my account of a more libertarian (not the political party, BTW, but the philosophical position) mindset defensible and cogent. However, these people then questioned the practical implications of having such a mindset. The example was "leaving people to die by the roadside" as a society. I acknowledged the validity of that question and the intuition that underlies it. And I am now speaking directly to the practical ramifications of a libertarian approach to health care.
The problem with nationalized health care is that government is notoriously bad at managing such things at the national level. As you get more and more abstracted from individual cases, you necessarily (to have any semblance of efficiency) have to "lump everybody together." But THAT just is the problem! Because EVERY need then becomes "legitimate" (even providing gastric bypass surgery for people with better, cheaper alternatives), even WITHIN the health-care field resources necessarily get allocated inefficiently! So, ironically (just as we see in the Canadian system) resource-allocation (being imperfect) necessarily takes away from some legitimate needs in order to fund illegitimate "needs."
And the MORE fields that are managed by the Feds, the MORE inefficiency of TOTAL resource allocation is the result! The reason that communism was a dismal failure in the USSR was not, as many say, that people just lost motivation to work for things they never owned. THE reason is that people lost motivation to keep working in the face of such staggering inefficiency! The Russians LOVED their nation, and they WANTED their nation to be great. There are any number of books written about the motivations of the Russian workers prior to the collapse. THE problem was the increasingly galling inefficiencies that piled up and piled up, with the ONLY possible governmental response being to impose harsher and stricter oversight upon production (which actually added to the inefficiency), without solving the underlying inefficiencies; all of which had the net effect of causing a fundamental "cognitive dissonance" among the workers.
Our Founders recognized this basic principle, which is why we started with the libertarian form of government we did. However, no government is "perfect" in the sense of solving all possible problems to the absolute satisfaction of all citizens. So, we're inclined to "tinker" to make things "better." The problem with such "tinkering" comes when we don't merely "refine" a tried and true design, but we literally start "fixing what ain't broke" by adopting a wholly different fundamental design.
Proponents of nationalized health-care make much of how this "solution" satisfies our intuitions to not leave people dying on the side of the road. What they don't grasp is two-fold: 1) people will STILL keep dying by the side of the road, because NO iteration of a health-care program is going to prevent that; 2) there are better ways of keeping people from dying by the side of the road, namely, that individuals need to be educated to take PERSONAL responsibility for those in need that they KNOW they can help! We MUST take our positive duties much more seriously as individuals, and NOT expect government to solve all of our problems for us if we merely "pay our share of taxes."
Just as an example, my wife and I give right at 20% of our income to various charities, and we would give MORE if we were not already taxed to death! I'm not pounding my own chest. I'm trying to dispel the myth that libertarian-minded people just don't care about others or want to "pay their fair share" toward helping others. I take my positive duties SERIOUSLY, but, tragically, I will have LESS now to contribute toward people with legitimate needs, because now I'm going to be paying for gastric bypass surgery for people that simply need their caregivers to feed them less! And government is the WORST entity in existence to make these value decisions and impose them upon me!
So, the short answer is that we can do much better than we do to keep people from dying by the side of the road, IF we all very intentionally take our positive duties seriously! Government does a notoriously bad job of such things, and it guarantees that I personally will thereby do a worse job with my own positive duties than I would have done without its intervention. Finally, there is no such thing as PERFECTLY satisfying positive duties. This is why Christ said, "The poor you will always have with you." We WILL always have the needy with us, and we MUST always strive to help them! But governmental intervention here is the worst possible solution, and certainly in my own case, it will force me to give even less than I did before; so legitimate causes will suffer from this values-shift.
So, do we NEED nationalized health care to "ensure" that people are not left dying by the side of the road? No. In fact people will still be left dying by the side of the road (such is the nature of even our best efforts at satisfying imperfect duties). All we are doing is making ourselves "feel better" that we are "doing something," when actually we have simply abdicated our own moral responsibilities to the worst possible entity to take them over from us!
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Mar 22, 2010 - 07:21pm PT
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dktem: You mean we're not allowed to flog dead horses? You're no fun at all.
Underlying all this is the fundamental debate about the social contract and social goods, dating back to at least Socrates. The nag's still got a bit of life.
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Mar 22, 2010 - 07:24pm PT
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but dktem, you're destroying a myth upon which rests much of left-wing analysis of the 21st Century.
John
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Mar 22, 2010 - 07:25pm PT
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So the Amish and Christian Scientists are exempt from this bill based on religious beliefs, which is sweet because, as a Catholic, I'm exempt too.
Either that or this violates the 1st Amendment in addition to other parts of the Constitution.
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dktem
Trad climber
Temecula
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Mar 22, 2010 - 07:28pm PT
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Funny how some folks tend to always see themselves as the gifted surgeon who gets to make a choice, and not as the person lying on the side of the road.
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jstan
climber
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Mar 22, 2010 - 07:29pm PT
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Nixon's flat tax proposal. Now there is rich vein. Maybe even worth the attention of the knowlegeable people here. I, professedly, not being one of them.
In aggregate the flat tax gets its monies from a population the product of whose numbers times the percentage of whose income is spent each year - is large. Running such a model over IRS data could be interesting. You tempt me, grievously. Why?
The inefficiency of employing 150,000,000 accountants and lawyers out of a population of 300,000,000 begins to approach the point where we eat ourselves. Even the cost of putting all those people on unemploymen may be small compared to the gains we could get in overall efficiency. Tax dollars raised that actually go to benefit taxpayers. Oh my god!
What daemon would be so low as to raise such a concept?
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Walla Walla, WA
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Mar 22, 2010 - 07:32pm PT
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To continue the military-healthcare comparison, there are supposedly 40,000 people who die every year presumably due to a lack of medical care and insurance. That's probably a hyperbolic overstatement by the left, but even if it's only 1/4 of that amount...
If 10,000 Americans died each year due to terrorism, would the country do anything about it? You betcha. Big time. If 100 people per year died due to terrorism, there'd be a massive military backlash.
Yessiree, this keeps sounding better and better.
An order of magnitude more people die every year in this country from entirely preventable diseases! People eat themselves sick; it's that simple! You want to talk "resource allocation" and value-priorities, then let's talk about how we're NOT talking about THAT!
Either nationalize health care is going to IMPOSE some serious limitations on how people presently eat, or what it is INSTEAD doing is telling ME that I have a positive duty to pay for the overarching value there is in people consuming mass quantities of red meat, fat, and soda pop! I DENY in the strongest possible terms that I have ANY positive duty to support that lifestyle or pay for its consequences!
So, either IMPOSE serious limitations on that lifestyle or don't make me pay for it. I oppose the former because this nation was founded on personal liberty, and people should have the right to eat themselves sick if they want to. After all, we're all gonna die, so if you want to die sooner by "enjoying life" as you see fit, more power to you! Just don't expect me to allocate MY resources to furthering YOUR chosen lifestyle and cleaning up your chosen consequences for you!
By pulling us all into this "collective," you set up the false dichotomy of either FORCING ME allocating resources to values I do not share and in fact vehemently oppose, or I must agree to radical limitations upon your personal freedoms. I accept neither! The path our Founders took was neither! The path our Founders took was to establish a robust notion of personal liberty, along with the personal responsibility (to enjoy your own consequences) that logically follows from it.
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dktem
Trad climber
Temecula
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Mar 22, 2010 - 07:37pm PT
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but dktem, you're destroying a myth upon which rests much of left-wing analysis of the 21st Century.
That was clever.
I try not to see politics as a team sport, but these days I buy into the left-wing analysis more than the other side. (The other side is becoming a joke...)
But I don't think it started with the 2000 election. I think it started when the twin towers were burning and the dollar signs lighted up in the eyes of Cheney and company.
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GDavis
Social climber
SOL CAL
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Mar 22, 2010 - 07:40pm PT
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"Wait until all the fools in your base who were convinced it was evil end up insured and happy and Barry O. wins election number 2 against whatever geriatric out of touch walking corpse of a candidate you offer up to lead the country."
Not to nit pick, but it won't go into effect until after his term.
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Walla Walla, WA
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Mar 22, 2010 - 07:44pm PT
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Nutjob, your post gave the lie to your handle. I liked it very much, and you raised yet another critical issue:
1) Seatbelt laws protect children from irresponsible parents. Not just irresponsible people from themselves.
2) Healthcare laws protect children from irresponsible (or unfortunate) parents who avoid important healthcare for financial reasons.
In general, there is a very relevant philosophical consideration at the center of this debate: are children worthy of any protections in life beyond what their parents see fit to grant them in a laissez-faire world? Are all humans created equal at their birth and raised in a society that maximizes the chance of each citizen to apply their unique endowments for the advancement of the society, or are they prioritized by the socio-economic station at their birth and condemned to a strata of societal contribution and consumption as in the caste system? The reality at present is somewhere in between.
I would be much more sympathetic with seatbelt laws directly entirely at protecting children (rather than adults), and ditto for healthcare for children.
I guess I'm not a "pure" libertarian in that I would lean toward "giving away the farm" regarding helping children, when, philosophically that remains the parents' responsibility.
But now we are in the realm of very specific, quite fine-grained policy decisions, rather than in the realm of imposing sweeping "reform!" As long as I can remember, with NO changes to the existing system, children are ensured health care. The citizens have been paying for this at the State and Federal levels for decades.
The Founders often made compromises (against their philosophical perspectives) in order to "get something to work at all." I'm inclined to have the same perspective. Philosophically, I draw a hard line: "You choose to have kids that you can't support, and they are going to suffer. Your choice to have kids you can't support does NOT impose upon me a positive duty." However, while I wholeheartedly agree with that philosophy, I also cannot bring myself to have NOTHING in place to salvage the kids of poor families!
So, I would be in favor of a LIMITED role, probably at the State level, of health care provisions for children of demonstrated needy families, recognizing that some people are just going to BREED and nothing can be done for it. Keeping things at the State level means that people can move around with reasonable ease to adopt/avoid programs State to State. But these are policy details that need not be hashed out in this debate. Nationalized health care is an entirely different beast than we have EVER seen before in this country, and it goes far beyond (quantitatively and qualitatively) providing health care to needy children (which has been in place already since long before I was born).
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Walla Walla, WA
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Mar 22, 2010 - 08:00pm PT
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Funny how some folks tend to always see themselves as the gifted surgeon who gets to make a choice, and not as the person lying on the side of the road.
Nothing "funny" about it. The arguments ALL ask me to make the choice about who gets the help. So, in any such thought experiment, I am necessarily the "gifted surgeon" or some such thing. I am not the guy lying by the road, because he's not the one doing the choosing. He's the one asking for the help. How to DEAL with that request is the basis of the thought experiment.
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Bob D'A
Trad climber
Boulder, CO
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Mar 22, 2010 - 08:02pm PT
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Not to nit pick, but it won't go into effect until after his term.
Really...you might want to recheck your sources.
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EdBannister
Mountain climber
CA
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Mar 22, 2010 - 08:08pm PT
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say goodbye to local doctors in rural areas, one doctor practices will be , as Russ would say it,... GONE.
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bluering
Trad climber
Santa Clara, Ca.
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Mar 22, 2010 - 08:10pm PT
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Not to nit pick, but it won't go into effect until after his term.
Really...you might want to recheck your sources.
Maybe you can explain, Bob. I was under the same impression that we pay for a few years and then the benefits kick in....Kinda lick a ponzi-scheme, collect money and keep deferring costs to future clients.
http://www.sec.gov/answers/ponzi.htm
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