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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.
One must, then, either be a sadist or a statist?
Then again, the third possibility - excluded in your attempt to formulate a false dilemma - is that one who disagrees with you is neither a fanatic nor a sadist, but, rather, possesses at the least an elementary knowledge of economics.
You know, if people look at you askance, my dear Fabio - and they do - it's not what you think. No, literally: it's not What You Think, which, bar the 'social conservatism' on abortion and sexual morality, is quite surprisingly congruent w the sodden and undigested mass of Euro-socialist, er, thought (to use the term loosely). It's the unnecessarily rebarbative fashion in wh you so often say it.
I'm commonly quite tolerant of this, but then, I'm a bird of rare plumage; others may be less so. I merely implore you, in a friendly manner and for yr own advantage, to consider a different rhetorical mode. It wd serve you better, and yr causes w it.
Re: One must, then, either be a sadist or a statist?
It also excludes the definition of the duties of the State in the Declaration of Independence: "That to secure these rights [life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness], Governments are instituted among Men". According to you, the State should do nothing to insure that a citizen's life is not destroyed by disease, his liberty reduced to a mockery, his pursuit of happiness turned into a nightmare. Congratulations. Real friend of liberty you are.
You right-wing anarchists all fail to understand what the Founding Fathers said - their actual words go in one ear and out the other. And as it never occurs to you to imagine that there might be an ethical foundation to the duties of the State - a foundation expressed by Jefferson and his co-signers in language so luminously clear that only ill-will can explain its being misunderstood - you end up with the nightmare of a State that is force for its own sake; from which you escape into anarchistic dreams that will never have any reality. The dreams go away; the nightmare bully State of your own evil dreams becomes reality - because you have rejected the plain substance of Jefferson's luminous words. And that is why every bout of Republican rule ends up leaving the American state more legally omnipotent, more unbound by law or custom, and more indebted and predatory, than it has ever been before. Ayn Randism and George W.Bushism are Siamese twins, and neither can live without the other.
Well, if you'll not be said, you'll not be said.
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.
Re: Well, if you'll not be said, you'll not be said.
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.
no subject
Re: One must, then, either be a sadist or a statist?
Re: One must, then, either be a sadist or a statist?
Re: One must, then, either be a sadist or a statist?
Not recognising standard British abbreviations, however -
Re: Not recognising standard British abbreviations, however -
Re: One must, then, either be a sadist or a statist?
Is this a verb form of blatherskite? I love it!
I'm also loving the scare quotes around "social conservatism", but in a self-consciously ironic way, unlike my love for "blethering skite" which is pure and untainted by this sinful world.
Re: One must, then, either be a sadist or a statist?