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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.
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.
You, my lad, want to calm yourself before you turn into...
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.
Re: You, my lad, want to calm yourself before you turn into...
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.
Yes, well.
Ad interim, we can return to discussing cricket, much more happily.