Roffey123 post=18.74687.867102 said:
Just a point to make - Britian has a national health service, we moan about ti of course - but god help us if we didn't have it. Another point, our Labour government is supposedly socialist - and dispite its many mistakes I'm still in my house, not a gulag.
Actually, the market would help you, not God. I thought you commies were godless anyway?
And I'd like to ask my American counterpart - why do you think the extra tax from your money, spent on free health care (actual health care, like free operations such as cardiac surgery), is a bad thing?
As for why I'm against socialized health care, there are many reasons, but here is the most basic. When something is socialized, it means that responsibility for it is shared among everyone. That means responsibility for my health is shared among everyone. But health is the outcome, in large part, of personal decisions made throughout your life: Whether to smoke, to exercise, to diet, to take vitamins, etc.
So how is responsibility for my personal choices to be shared? Socialized health care leaves us with only two choices. Either the government ignores the role of personal choice in health, or it takes it into account.
If it ignores the role of personal choice in health, then the government is asking the prudent, who have chosen to live well, to subsidize those who CHOOSE to damage themselves. The modest pay for the gluttonous. How is that right?
If it accepts the role of personal choice in health, then the government must start putting a price tag on choice. That puts the government in the role of pricing and regulating human behavior on a very broad scope. How is that good?
No, both of these outcomes are perverse. The former incentivizes people to ignore their own health and punishes the prudent; the latter creates an enormous invasion into freedom of action. Neither is acceptable to me.
If someone were to offer as an alternative that a portion of citizen's tax dollars would go into a shared insurance pool against catastrophic, random illness, to protect those who through no fault of their own, suffer grevious harm or sickness, then that is far more supportable. That is truly a safety net that protects those who are put at risk blamelessly, without taking away freedom of choice, or subsiziding bad behavior. But to date, that is not what health care "reformers" have sought. What they have sought is the actual socialization of medicine: Price controls, wage controls, government subsidies, etc. And that, I will fight, because I'm fighting for personal freedom.
And I'm sorry Archon - but I have to disagree, the European economic model works very well, thank you very much, and is a darn sight more whole than your S***y DOW index.
Sub Prime Loans anyone? Thought so.
Whether or not it works well now, it will not be working very well in the future. This isn't something I'm making up. Leading economists and politicians throughout Europe are saying it, too. Check out Brussels Journal [http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1234] for a great summary of the discussion from a European viewpoint. Sadly, telling me that the DOW is s***ty doesn't change your continent's demographics, sir, or the realities of economic growth.
For what it's worth, Europe is facing just as bad a market crisis as America. Iceland has already gone bankrupt. If Europe were fine and America were not, do you think the central bankers and world leaders would be eagerly sitting down with President Bush and Secretary Paulson to figure out a solution? No, they'd ignore him as a lame-duck. The reality is that Europe is in big, big trouble.
