I was hoping this would provide some good food for thought. I'm impressed (for the most part) with the tone of the discussion in this thread.
I was always concerned about the poor people and people having access to basic necessities of life first, and second access to basic health care and other similar issues. How could we, as citizens, ever possibly do all the things that government does for us, including keeping the evil capitalists in line, building roads, providing police services, etc? Surely there are some things we must give up in order to allow the government to do it for all of us.
As for comments about libertarians only not wanting to pay taxes - that's a bit shallow, and although it may not have been meant seriously, there are enough out there who do think that. Of course we don't want to pay taxes. Not when there are better, cheaper and more efficient ways to accomplish the same task, and probably succeed. It's not about greed - it's about freedom and human nature.
I'm a neophyte relatively speaking, to thinking that everything I've been taught about economics and politics is completely wrong. I certainly don't have all the answers, and I doubt anyone who writes to the contrary of current political and public opinion has all the answers either. However, having been involved as a low-end worker early in my work life, a middle-level manager for a big company for about a third my work life, and an entrepreneur (unfortunately, up to now, not so successful, but I'm working on that) in the last third of my work life to now, I begin to see that most of what we are taught from birth by the powers that be is pure crap.
As an introduction to some of these concepts that show the fallacies of current thinking, what seems to me to be a great trend toward socialism and the Nanny State, I would suggest a book by Thomas E Woods called Rollback. I believe he does a succinct job of explaining some common fallacies in a relatively clear manner. Available on Kindle, I just finished it.
The problem is, I yet have a hard time explaining what I feel inside to be true after a bit more than 30 years in the workforce in the States overall, and about ten years of that as an entrepreneur. I never studied economics, and my political science studies occupied a few classes in college some years ago. I am understanding more and more the flaws of what is happening to the US, what has happened in general terms in Argentina, and also in Europe. And Nordic countries.
The best way for anyone to understand another point of view is to read the experts. I'm hoping to point people to some concepts that may open minds a bit related to what personal responsibility and freedom really mean. I'm not the teacher
Freedom and personal responsibility can never be instilled by the government. In fact, government is the exact opposite of personal freedom and responsibility. I'm not saying that government is inherently evil (though it can certainly become so), but neither are money, guns and other things that we encounter in life. It is always what people make of it. The problem with government is that it is a trap and the founding fathers of the US certainly knew that. They would all, I have very little doubt, each and every one of them, be apoplectic if they saw what we have done with the country they founded.
People who talk about the good things government has done for us don't understand that it was NEVER done for the good of the people, and it's rarely turned out for the good. The motivation is not there. The majority of people who work in government and run for political office don't really care about us. What they care about is expanding their power base and continuing things along the same lines. Those who do care are overwhelmed by those who don't.
I recently read a number of articles about the "Wild West." As everyone "knows," it was wild and lawless, with people killing each other willy-nilly and many people living in fear. These articles I've read cast a completely different light on the matter.
In fact, it seems that most of the problems really came when government got involved and began moving into territories it didn't previously control. The force of government gave monopolies to individuals and companies, backed often by the force of the US military or its money. Before the US began expanding behind the explorers who really tamed the west, people mostly cooperated, making their own laws between themselves, and one of the biggest punishments for going against the group was actually banishment, not death or imprisonment.
Becoming a state in those days had more to do with people who wanted power over the others in their territory and used government to enforce it.
People point to unions and talk about how necessary they are. They talk about child labor in the 19th and early 20th century, as if it were actual slavery and the evil capitalists were working everyone to death.
What they don't talk about is how poor everyone was to begin with. Have any of you actually spent some time in subsistence farming communities and seen what TRUE poverty is? A small percentage only of US citizens have done so. Such a thing doesn't really exist in the States any more. The worst is that some small farmers can't afford all of the technical gadgets that the big producers use and it takes more work and they can't compete. While on a personal level it may not be the best thing, for a society, what's better, that we continue to pay buggy-whip manufacturers after they've outlived their usefulness, or the market allocates them to different sectors? As it is, farming subsidies now go probably more to big corporations than they do individual farmers that need help to survive against those evil agricultural monstrosities that are efficient enough to feed us all.
I'm talking about not even having the ability to water crops, plowing fields with oxen, hoping like hell it rains or the bugs don't get your crop because if it does, you're going to go hungry because some of that crop goes to you to eat, and the rest to sell at such relatively low level for the work you did that, if you're lucky, you can afford to go buy some ratty used clothes. Forget about school books, leisure books, etc. Hell, most at this level can't read and write anyway.
This is how my wife's family lives in Paraguay. It's very common there. As we've seen recently, there is so much government interference that the people can't even keep the president they've elected. Monopolies are common, and all propagated by those in power. That's one extreme.
I mention all of that, because I feel I have a personal understanding of how people in the late 19th and early 20th century were better off than they were previously. There were jobs and opportunities, and people were so poor that sometimes they needed their kids to work as well. Well, they were already working on the farm to try and make ends meet - the factory paid in money to buy more than just food to feed themselves.
Wages and working conditions were already improving before unions came along. Unions were the result of Marxism and taking advantage of what were still, for sure, hardships to ignorant workers.
People who tout big government to take care of the people who "can't take care of themselves" also talk about the Nordic countries and how successful they are. I've seen mention that they supposedly outperform even the US economically and give better lifestyle.
Well, I don't think that's quite so true. Nordic countries have never outperformed the US, have often been in recessions, and are relatively well off because in many ways, aside from the social benefits they give out after taking from others, they actually have a freer market system than the US, with lower corporate tax rates (the US having one of the highest in the world), less regulation and other things that help them advance DESPITE their big government. But it's far from peaches and roses.
Here are a couple of links that talk about exactly this topic:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-603.pdf
http://mises.org/daily/2259
There are a lot more of those.
Of course, they may be from sources that people don't trust because the rest of the political and economic world, who have brought us all to the brink of disaster and are intent on pushing all the way over, have a vested interest in maintaining things the way they are until they collapse. As Marie Antoinette was reported to say "Let them eat cake." However, like many fools who are blind to their effects, she lost her head.
Corporations aren't inherently evil. Most monopolies that have ever plagued mankind have been set in place in one way or another by the government, giving the spoils to their cronies. There has yet to be a case of a monopoly that has come into a market place, lowered its prices to buy out or force out all competition, and then raised their prices to take advantage of their position - and been successful in a free market. The only time that has occurred successfully has been when government provided the force necessary to allow that to happen, usually in terms of licenses and special dispensations, sometimes even with force.
The fact is, the free market abhors a monopoly as nature abhors a vacuum. A monopoly simply can't continue once they are started. It gets pulled apart by market forces like a vacuum dispersing gas to fill the void. The book I mentioned by Tom Woods has a number of examples where people have tried to do exactly as described to set up a monopoly and they have all failed because people come in, even after other businesses have been put out of business, to take advantage of being able to beat the prices and offerings of the company that tried to corner the market to begin with.
As far as roads and other public services goes, the Libertarians have ideas about that as well, but I've not studied them too closely yet. I used to think it was insane to even think about everything being privatized, but now I'm not so sure. As it is, the federal government doesn't build roads in cities, counties and states. At one time they built interstate highways and now the states maintain them with federal money.
Is that really necessary? Probably not. If two cities want trade to pass between them, why can't they work together to build it? Interstate transport saw the introduction of private railroads that served to move goods from one coast to the other before there were even cars in any kind of quantity. People bitch about the quantity and danger of cars all the time, not to mention the dispersal of families as movement became easier. Hell, maybe that is actually an unintended consequence of government interference by building interstate highways before a great pressure to use them with cars existed - the interstate system was actually created to ensure the ability of the US government to move troops and equipment rapidly in case of invasion - or insurrection.
Maybe municipalities are another thing. As I've said, I'm not sure how far we should go with this. I'm not an anarchist, but neither do I want government in my life on any kind of frequent basis. It's not a miracle in this day and age, it doesn't have my good in mind, it's not something I should worship.
As for schools - wow. I went from schools that challenged us as kids (even though they still taught the propaganda that government is good and ours is the best), taught foreign languages, teachers that gave a damn because they were there as a vocation calling, not a union job that although may not pay wonderfully, was secure with decent benefits pretty much no matter what they did to schools that are failing in my opinion.
I've previously mentioned on this site somewhere, two different experiences I've had with the school systems in the States, one as a kid, and one as a parent. The latter with a "Zero Tolerance" policy.
As a kid, I was involved in a fight in the school cafeteria that, while started by the other guy, didn't have to go as far as I brought it. It involved punching, the flying of food and tables, and a little blood. We were scolded by the principal, the other idiot got detention and I got swats - our individual choices. This was about 1979 or 1980 in high school. I think I was a junior if I remember correctly.
My son, when he was 14, in junior high, or middle, school, was repeatedly accosted by bullies. He was a bit nerdish and didn't know how to handle it. My then-wife and I had already discussed it with the principal and the school counselor and nothing happened with that. I advised my son to stand up for himself, that the school wouldn't be able to help and it would never stop until he faced them. Sometimes physical pain is preferable to long term emotional pain. No matter what happened with the school we would support him in such actions.
They cornered him one day in the gym, alone. They were taunting him and throwing basketballs at him. One guy got close and my son rushed him and hit him in the stomach. At that moment, the coach walked in, saw that and took them all to the principal's office. They ALL (my son included) were suspended for three days. They had to go face some children's misconduct case in court (it was at the county courthouse - we lived outside the city, a juvenile judge). They had to do 40 hours of community service and do 5 sessions of anger management therapy.
COME ON.
The US is turning into a nuthouse. Everything is up for grabs. The liberals want to spend more money to take care of more people. Their hearts are in the right place, but THERE JUST ISN'T ENOUGH MONEY. We're in serious problems, facing the possibility of a global economic meltdown of epic proportions, and Obama (and everyone else, but what I say next is his idea) wanted to not only spend nearly a trillion dollars to bail out the economic sector that got us into the problems to begin with, along with the complicit aiding and abetting by almost all in elected offices to help that along - but he wants to spend untold trillions of dollars on some half-assed healthcare system that sits on top of existing, bloated systems that barely deliver a decent standard of health care, but at a staggeringly high cost as it is. AND loss of personal freedom.
Meanwhile the Republicans are every bit as complicit - they were into everything up to their necks as well. Most of the time, their response was not "why the hell?" but "how the hell much?". The supposedly fiscally conservative republicans. Hah.
It is beyond my comprehension how people can stand there, looking at all of this, on all sides of the isle, and not see how they are being robbed blind every freaking day.
It blows my mind that liberals can't see that all of these programs CREATE the welfare and the nanny state. They either don't understand that, or are complicit individually. Many look at someone and immediately want to give him fish instead of teaching him to provide. It's easier. Takes less time and washes the hands nicely. But it doesn't solve anything, ever. It makes the problem worse.
Same with the conservatives. For Christ's [sic] sake, get your bleeding religion out of my face. Practice it at home and in church and in your private life as shaping your being. Don't worry about mentioning it in public, it's OK, talk about it, enjoy being Christian and take solace from your religion, I'm 100% fine with that. Try to convert me on a personal level, cool, I'll have a philosophic discussion about spiritual matters any day of the week because the subject fascinates me on so many levels, but don't go putting a bible in the courthouse just to stir up sentiment.
Don't use government to legislate your view of the world on others.
Health care is the epitome of all of this. Socialism and/or state support has become so ingrained in parts of the society that no one stops to think that old times are not like new times. There's never a resetting of purpose, a fair and honest evaluation of what's going on, because government doesn't care about all of that. It can't possibly. There are too many viewpoints and a huge mechanism like our government simply can't take individual cases into account. It tends to force everything into a square peg. The bigger it is, bigger the force required to get it through. You can get something through that square peg that's not square the same size by pushing hard, but you may not like what comes out the other side. It probably won't even be square, much less its original shape.
I loved Arlean's post about health care. She's spot on. It reminded me of a story my grandmother used to tell me, which I won't go deeply into. It involved health care exactly like Arlean described. Doctors making house calls, taking care of indigents, accepting payment in trade as well as currency, etc. There was decent medical care for the time at the level of technology that existed, and it was getting easier for more to afford it as both technology and incomes increased.
My grandmother paid 2$ for a house call, and very little for medications prescribed. This was in the 50s.
She worked at a bank. The bank offered a new insurance plan to its employees, which was starting to become all the rage. At her next doctor visit, the doctor handed her the bill, which said billed to insurance $3, insured pays .50 cents. She asked the doctor why he raised his prices from $2 to $3.50, to which he replied that the insurance authorized him to bill $3 for a house call and the .50 cents was his fee for insurance handling.
Thus started the problems with health care in America.
When you're young nowadays, you want a full, comprehensive health care plan. Why? Because for god's sake, you'll grow broke if something happens to you in the current state of the health care system. Of course, even then, that's a bit exaggerated.
People think now that they need health insurance just to go to the doctor when they have a runny nose. People long for policies that give them low deductibles and small or no doctor's visit fees, medication supplements and free prescriptions, etc. That extra fee to deal with insurance companies is in EVERYTHING. And damn, the amount of money people are willing to pay for that!
I am divorced and pay child support and insurance for my kids. I pay out of pocket expenses, such as doctors visits, out of my own pocket. They rarely need to go and when they do, they usual go to a commercial clinic, not a private doctor. I have a catastrophic policy with a $5000 deductible and a $1,000,000 limit for each of my kids. I pay $250 a month for three. It's not unmanageable, but it would be even cheaper in health care were affordable.
And that's nothing. Hell, as late as twelve years ago when I used to work for a company in Houston, the company paid $900 a month on my behalf for one of those comprehensive policies. I started out paying nothing, but before I left I was paying $400 of that. I paid WAY more in insurance costs than I ever needed to just to go to the doctor, except one time when I cut my finger off at a knuckle and they had to put me back together. But catastrophic insurance would have covered something like that.
Who says you shouldn't pay for medical costs? Who says that indigents and poor people would have no access to medical care? The doctors and insurance companies and pharmagiants that all profit from the system. I say BS.
I say medical costs would be so low that most people could afford decent health care and catastrophic insurance in a free market system because competition would make it so, just like it does for electronics. And nowadays, even many poor kids have a relative wealth of electronics...in the States.
There would be even fewer of those poor kids if industry was booming because businesses and entrepreneurs were not saddled by the weight of government redistributing wealth.
And plenty of charitable money available to those who couldn't afford it, I guarantee.
Damn, I'm really rambling all over the place. Guess I was was waxing a bit maniacal tonight. I'll stop here.
