In article <4a88a99f@news.povray.org>,
Jim Henderson wrote:

> On Sun, 16 Aug 2009 17:45:06 -0700, Darren New wrote:
>
>> Jim Henderson wrote:
>>> No, just the vocal ones who oppose it.  And maybe not communism, but
>>> socialism.
>> 
>> I thought it was interesting to point out that insurance is, by
>> definition, socialism.  You take a little bit from each person, put it
>> in a pool, and then distribute that pool to those in need.
>
> Yeah, that is interesting.... :-)

If it is a fair insurance? Because when they deny treatment based on
languagelawyerism, then it becomes a corrupt communist authority? :P

Post a reply to this message

Jim Henderson wrote:
> "Let the market decide" - the problem (as I see it) with this is that 
> some things *shouldn't* be driven by the market (ie, money).  Health is 
> one of those. 

There are two problems with private health insurance (or, indeed, voluntary 
health insurance).

1 - If it's voluntary, only the sick people sign up for it. The insurance 
nature suffers therefrom, especially if those who didn't pay for it get 
treated anyway, which they do. That's why private individual insurance in 
the USA is so much more expensive than company-paid insurance - when it's a 
company plan, even the healthy employees pay in.

2 - Your health is worth virtually anything you own. How much of your 
personal wealth would you spend to cure your cancer? This throws a 
monkey-wrench into all sorts of shopping-around capitalism scenarios, in 
much the same way that having a program you need that only runs on Windows 
makes shopping around for other operating systems moot. The "utility value" 
of not dying outweighs almost everything else for most people. Plus, by 
eliminating coverage for pre-existing[1] conditions, you pretty much 
guarantee that shopping around for coverage makes no sense - if you know 
what your insurance needs to cover, the private insurance company won't 
cover it.

[1] And what's wrong with "existing condition"? Doesn't every existing 
condition "pre-exist" the present?

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

Post a reply to this message

Warp wrote:
>   At its core, capitalism is about free commerce, and it's precisely free
> commerce which keeps the cash flowing.

The current economic crisis in America is caused precisely by capitalism 
applied to that which isn't capital. The money here isn't real money. 
There's no "cash" flowing. All money is created as debt. When you go to the 
bank with your house or business (which is actual *capital*), you get money 
by taking out a loan based on a note, usually with a mortgage[1] attached.

However, the money the bank gives to you is also a loan. So what they hand 
you is a note, in particular, a Federal Reserve Note. You go to the bank, 
and they say "I'll promise to pay you some money in the near future if you 
promise to pay me more money in the more distant future."

Capitalism works well when restricted to capital. When you start calling 
notes, derivatives, options, and insurance policies "capital" you start 
getting into a crisis. The accounting books said the money that was owed 
back to the banks was some thousands of times the GDP of the entire world 
combined. That isn't capital. There's nothing real and of value you can 
create with those numbers. You can't rent it out, or build a car with it. 
The hundreds of billions of dollars of "money" being given to the banks 
isn't "real" either, which is why we're not seeing tremendous price 
inflation in spite of huge amounts of money supply inflation.

If money isn't subject to capitalism, then you get things like this economic 
crisis and the 1929 depression. When different banks issue their own money 
competitively, then banks with bad business practices and which take risks 
too large don't get many customers, so their failure is not more problematic 
than one stock tanking.



[1] - Loan = "bank promises to give money to whoever you write a check to". 
Mortgage = "You give the bank your house if you don't pay back the loan as 
specified in the note."  Note = "We promise to give you money in the future."

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

Post a reply to this message

Warp wrote:
>   In light of this, it starts sounding less ridiculous Steve Ballmer calling
> Linux "communism".

Viewed economically, isn't that what Linux is, in essence? Why would it be 
ridiculous at all?

(I mean, sure, Ballmer clearly was using the term pejoratively, but why is 
it factually incorrect?)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

Post a reply to this message

Warp wrote:
> Where do you think they get it from?

They get it out of banks, who pull it out of their ass, which is the 
essential source of the problem for the last 100 years or so.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

Post a reply to this message

Warp wrote:
> People tend to vote with their feet, so to speak.

It's interesting to note that when the idea of income tax first started in 
the USA, it was at the time that large manufacturing started. I.e., at the 
time when "wealth" meant "large immobile factories".

We didn't have income tax when riding a horse for three days took you to a 
different tax jurisdiction and you could carry everything you needed to set 
up a business in a wagon.

>   Taxing rich people a lot is not very productive because they are so few.

That's not quite true, methinks. In the USA, something like 40% of the 
income tax is paid by the top 1% of the taxpayers, with the top 0.1% of the 
tax payers pay 20% of the income tax. (The top 1% also earned some 23% of 
all the money, mind.)

At this point, it's hard to understand how you can earn $7 million a year 
actually doing something personally productive. At that point, I think you'd 
have to be playing with money. I suppose you could be a sports star or a 
Bill Gates, but I don't think that handful accounts for 1% of the people 
filing tax returns.

> Leveling out the tax percentage a bit raises low and medium wealth people's
> taxes only a bit, 

I think in the USA at least, this wouldn't be quite true. Plus, we already 
reward people for that, because businesses pay taxes differently, which is 
where the whole rich-people-don't-pay-taxes comes from. Rich people get out 
of paying taxes by not making any income. They simply have businesses that 
*do* make income buy them a bunch of stuff.

>   I really think that "rich people getting even richer" has been negatively
> hyped way too much. Personally I don't care how rich they get, if that helps
> everybody by keeping the country's economy running.

I think there comes a point at which the rich people being *too* rich is 
negative. They can unduly influence government, and they can have far more 
than they could ever spend while needy people are starving.

Certainly Bill Gates being rich makes lots of jobs, and Tiger Woods makes 
lots of jobs and thus gets rich. But when you start looking at (say) some of 
the feudal societies, perhaps, where the Kings built castles they never saw 
just because they could, while others were starving and freezing, yeah, it 
can go too far.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

Post a reply to this message

somebody wrote:
> comes to things like infant mortality rates, Canada ranks near the bottom,
> second to last only to US among OECD nations, IIRC.

A lot of this is disputed, in terms of infant mortality. There are rules 
you're supposed to follow about reporting infant mortality that many of the 
OECD nations don't follow. For example, if a baby lives only a couple of 
minutes, the US will report that as "infant mortality" while France might 
not report it unless the child lives more than an hour and Switzerland might 
not report deaths of babies born live but too early to survive even with the 
most intensive care.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

Post a reply to this message

On Sun, 16 Aug 2009 21:47:47 -0400, Daniel Bastos wrote:

> In article <4a88a99f@news.povray.org>, Jim Henderson wrote:
> 
>> On Sun, 16 Aug 2009 17:45:06 -0700, Darren New wrote:
>>
>>> Jim Henderson wrote:
>>>> No, just the vocal ones who oppose it.  And maybe not communism, but
>>>> socialism.
>>> 
>>> I thought it was interesting to point out that insurance is, by
>>> definition, socialism.  You take a little bit from each person, put it
>>> in a pool, and then distribute that pool to those in need.
>>
>> Yeah, that is interesting.... :-)
> 
> If it is a fair insurance? Because when they deny treatment based on
> languagelawyerism, then it becomes a corrupt communist authority? :P

No, it's interesting that the very people railing against Obama's plan 
are labeling it "socialist" when the idea behind insurance schemes 
typically *is* actually socialist in nature - and they want MORE of that.

Jim

Post a reply to this message

On 16 Aug 2009 21:47:47 -0400, Daniel Bastos <dbastos+0### [at] toledocom> wrote:

>If it is a fair insurance? Because when they deny treatment based on
>languagelawyerism, then it becomes a corrupt communist authority? :P

Are you using "communist" as a cuss word?
-- 

Regards
     Stephen

Post a reply to this message

On Sun, 16 Aug 2009 18:06:49 -0700, Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:

>
>Democracy is kind of like the counter-balance to capitalism - everyone gets 
>one vote, rather than what they're worth.

That sounds like Northern Ireland until the late sixties where you got extra
votes if you owned property, employed people, had a funny handshake or wore
orange underwear. No wonder they had Troubles.
-- 

Regards
     Stephen

Post a reply to this message