fpb | Why the Republican objections and talking points are nonsense

One: there already are death panels in American health care provision. They are the accountants who decide how long the companies can afford to give healthcare to customers who have chronic or expensive conditions.

Two: the Republican notion that the current system can be tweaked or bullied to remedy such problems is nonsense. It is positively crazy. If seriously pursued, it will lead to a situation where corporations have to deficit spend to keep patients with chronic and expensive conditions alive, which will eat into their budgets and threaten the rise of a Fannie May and Freddie Mac situation.

Three: in order to deal with chronic, expensive or long-term cases, there is need of a body which is not only capable of but allowed to deficit spend. There is only one such body: the State. The State routinely deficit spends on such things as the police and the military, the courts and the jails, which never will bring in an income but which are indispensable for society. Indeed, Adam Smith's classic definition of the "expenses of the sovereign", by which he meant the public sector, is: all those expenses which are necessary for society but which the private sector cannot profitably pursue.

Four: it is an atrocious lie that people who demand a right to health care are "inventing new rights". The denial of health care to anyone is the denial of the three basic rights: life, because it places the person in the immediate and evident danger of death; liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, because it reduces what is left of life to a despairing struggle to be allowed to draw a few more breaths. If you think this is what the Founders meant, you are not only a fanatic, but a sadist.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

You are ascribing to me views I don't hold, of course; and yr statements are rather near the wind of being ad hominem - let alone suggesting I'm not familiar with Adam Smith, wh is really a bit much, don't you think.

I am not, of course, a Randian, come to that.

As for yr suggestion in the succeeding reply that I 'probably have more enemies' than do you, well, I suppose that's possible. In my experience, those who choose to be my enemies are the sort of persons whose enmity is a credit to one. They tend to be driven by political ideals, wh, although idealism is to be appluaded, they have conflated w their own self-identities. They commonly behave by indulging in ad hominem attack, reckless or knowing misrepresentation of my views and position, and an unseemly rejection of relations that were previously congenial, collegial, sometimes positively amicable, and in some instances materially supportive. I make certain you shd not wish to be that sort of person, naturally.

My point, such as it was, was that you shd have fewer enemies and more hearers were you to adopt a different mode: in homelier and more proverbial terms, honey rather than vinegar. But you must do as you will to do; you're under no obligation to accept the suggestion. You are obliged, I shd think, to treat it less as an affront deserving this sort of response, but that' yr pigeon, old boy.

Considering that I had already invoked Adam Smith's authority, your charge (in so many words) that I was economically illiterate only led to one conclusion, namely, that your view of economic literacy excluded Book Five (at least) of the aforementioned classic. Incidentally, you promised me a rebuttal of my denunciation of the last thirty years of Tory-Lab economic policy (http://fpb.livejournal.com/355190.html); I would suggest that if you want to attack my views, that would be a more constructive way to do it.

... the person formerly known as AJ Hall.

If you read my suggestion that there was an excluded middle in yr statist-or-sadist straw-man as suggesting you were 'economically illiterate', I apologise. (On the other hand, mere argument from authority is not necessarily exclusive of error or nescience on the part of the arguer.)

I am not (here) attacking what I have seen of yr views so much as I was deploring the fashion in wh you chose (and choose) to express them. As to your suggestion that I 'owe' you an essay, I can only say that I will doubtless take it up when time and inclination permit: that is not a failure of promised performance under contract, you know; this is after all a hobby, not my life.

Indeed not, and I did not use the word "owe". In fact, I should not have used the word "promise". It is an Italianism, in that in Italian the cognate has a less binding sense than in English.

As for my tone, I am still seething at an encounter with a so-called American Catholic who perverted everything I said and quite deliberately, and with the evidence in front of her, ascribed to me views that I have denied for years, in public, and in the plainest and most vernacular possible English. My experience of the American anti-health-care movement is generally bad, and I do not think I am going to meet many reasonable or even sincere people there.

Seethe away; I've met that sort. Quite understandable, under the circs. (Oh, dear: ought I to have written that in full for the benefit of yr - I mean your - friend?) Even so, the temptation to assume bad faith in one's opponents - a temptation w wh I struggle regularly - is a dangerous one. I make sure you'll find yr (er, 'your') equanimity once more, and soon.

Ad interim, we can return to discussing cricket, much more happily.

Why the Republican objections and talking points are nonsense

Well, if you'll not be said, you'll not be said.

Re: Well, if you'll not be said, you'll not be said.

You, my lad, want to calm yourself before you turn into...

Re: You, my lad, want to calm yourself before you turn into...

Yes, well.