Yessiree that UK socialized medicine is great!

[piscator]

So let's imagine the NHS could require signing an instrument that would mandate a fixed sum limit of treatment after a certain multiple of average life expectancy. A citizen would have to sign the contract some time in his 30s, in order to receive NHS services beyond age 40 - This contrivance would be more morally preferable in your book than the NHS agreeing with doctors that it's horribly invasive and painful, and very risky, and an odd shot, and a certain waste of resources to give a 104-year-old in ICU with N-H lymphoma and no living family a complete bone marrow transplant?

Of course. Any time the relationship is consensual and mutually agreeable and the parties know the provisions of the contract and sign it freely and without any sort of coercion it's a proper relationship with any business partner, including the government.

So, the government says "We're offering you a defined-benefit health care policy that covers X dollars in care or Y years of coverage, whichever comes first, and you get to decide when the policy begins. You may begin coverage now, but it will expire when you are Z years old, or you may wait and start coverage at any other age and you will be covered up to the limits of your policy and its time limit. Or, you may opt out of the program and draw the maximum authorized amount over the life of the policy as tax-exempt income that must be used only for health care. If you choose this option, your withdrawals begin immediately and end after Y years and you are responsible for administering the money as needed. However, once your benefits expire, you are no longer eligible for public health care."

This has the advantage of costing the taxpayers a known, fixed amount per person over the lifespan of the individual's coverage, which prevents care costs from ballooning out of control.

It also encourages people to OPT OUT of public health care, take the cash and invest it wisely in a personal health care savings/investment account which ONLY THEY have access to and to which they can contribute as much or as little more as they wish as prudent planning for the future. Nor does this system prohibit the individual from using that income to purchase a private health care policy tailored to his or her precise needs.

If you insist on offering socialized health care, at least this plan makes costs predictable and lets people manage their health care themselves, without the government having to build an entire bureaucracy, with the attendant waste of time and money, just to administer it. Plus, it keeps the filthy fingers of bureaucrats OFF of people's health care money.

The same thing should happen with social security benefits.

That's not the thought experiment I laid out at all. You just pulled some sort of lump sum payout option out of your ass. And the agreement was only marginally consensual, as it would theoretically be made under a certain duress, that of losing something one would still have to pay taxes for if one didn't agree early in life to be cut off at a certain point in old age.

I knew the distinctions would overwhelm your morality, or at least your reading comprehension, yet you would still be compelled to reply. I was correct.

You don't get to dictate my response to your "thought experiment," particularly when it's set up as a strawman like the one you proposed.

It's not a strawman, it's a thought experiment deliberately set up with an extreme case where common sense says let the old man pass on rather than hollow out his bones so he can get another 4 months of ICU before he inevitably, well, passes on.
In short, a degree of freedom with no utility and heaping lots of downside, vs simple common sense.


You were forced by ideology to choose the former, of course. Your ideology has in fact limited your freedom to exercise common sense. You sensed this, so you imagined up a lump sum disbursement to make it look like you weren't so ideologically hidebound and blinkered.

But the real opportunities for you were, how voluntary would it be to sign that particular contract, seeing as how there is a metaphorical gun to the head in the form of "sign health insurance away later to keep health insurance for now"?, and the taxation without representation issue I alluded to earlier.

[Seth]

Why bother with insurance? Send everybody to the VA, look at the great job they're doing.

Exactly. The VA is a prescient preview of how socialized medicine will work...and does work elsewhere. "Reschedule him, maybe he'll die before his appointment..."

The VA is NOT socialized medicine, it's an obligation entered into freely by the United States that must be fulfilled.

So there'd be a VA under Libertarianism?

If that's what those who voluntarily agree to fund it want, yes.

Would you write new contracts so people who didn't benefit from Iraq and don't need prosthetics wouldn't be taxed?

You're discussing a transition from one system to another, which would be rather complex.

Would you write some kind of cap on VA bennies into enlistment contracts?

Probably. That's the nature of a contract generally. It would be possible I suppose for those who agree to fund it to make it unlimited, but that doesn't seem particularly wise to me.

Would the families of those 40+ dead servicemen be contractually limited in their response to civil breach of contract with binding arbitration before a VA judge arbitrator?

Dunno how that transition would work out, but in my personal estimation anyone involved in the shell game to deny them care should go to prison for the rest of their life and lose everything they have to the families of the dead. Libertarianism takes contractual obligations very seriously because the success of the entire society depends on people performing their end of the bargain, particularly where people's lives are at stake.

Shinseki and the Peter Principle aside, the VA is looking even more like a self serving Audrey II than it did after Vietnam. Maybe we need to send in Seal Team 6 again?

It's a national disgrace and we should impeach Obama and imprison everyone involved.

[Seth]

It's not a strawman, it's a thought experiment deliberately set up with an extreme case where common sense says let the old man pass on rather than hollow out his bones so he can get another 4 months of ICU before he inevitably, well, passes on.

The decision to suspend care for a patient is between the patient and his or her doctor and nobody else, and that explicitly and specifically excludes government bureaucrats and death panels.

If the old man has a billion dollars and he wants to spend it on every possible heroic effort to keep him alive ten seconds longer, that's his absolute right. If he has zero dollars then he's not entitled to any treatment at all unless he can persuade others to donate on his behalf voluntarily, in which case he is turning the economic decisions over to his benefactors, who get to decide what's done with THEIR money. As stated, his medical expenses would be paid for up to a certain amount decided upon by the people and collected through voluntary taxation to fund such a system. This was a hybrid suggestion to a strawman problem.

In Libertarianism however, in no case would the government be involved in any way whatsoever in such decisions because the government has absolutely no constitutional authority whatsoever to involve itself or intervene in any medical decision of anyone, anywhere, any time. It's simply beyond the remit of government to deal with individual health care. Government's health care remit extends ONLY to the suppression of communicable diseases to prevent epidemics.

In short, a degree of freedom with no utility and heaping lots of downside, vs simple common sense.

It's none of your or anybody else's fucking business how a person spends his money on health care.

You were forced by ideology to choose the former, of course. Your ideology has in fact limited your freedom to exercise common sense. You sensed this, so you imagined up a lump sum disbursement to make it look like you weren't so ideologically hidebound and blinkered.

I based that on the stated presumption that the taxpayers had approved some sort of social welfare/health care system that offered government-provided health care. That would not exist under Libertarianism at all for the aforesaid reasons.

[piscator]

It's not a strawman, it's a thought experiment deliberately set up with an extreme case where common sense says let the old man pass on rather than hollow out his bones so he can get another 4 months of ICU before he inevitably, well, passes on.

The decision to suspend care for a patient is between the patient and his or her doctor and nobody else, and that explicitly and specifically excludes government bureaucrats and death panels.

Like the insurance company has nothing to say in the matter...

If the old man has a billion dollars and he wants to spend it on every possible heroic effort to keep him alive ten seconds longer, that's his absolute right. If he has zero dollars then he's not entitled to any treatment at all unless he can persuade others to donate on his behalf voluntarily, in which case he is turning the economic decisions over to his benefactors, who get to decide what's done with THEIR money.

Right. Death Panels. Just like every American health insurance company has.

As stated, his medical expenses would be paid for up to a certain amount decided upon by the people and collected through voluntary taxation to fund such a system. This was a hybrid suggestion to a strawman problem.

As stated, any person's "voluntary" options were 3:

1. Pay into the system and "volunteer" to suspend treatment beyond a fixed dollar amount some time hence.
2. Pay into the system but "volunteer" to not receive any benefits beyond 40 yoa.
3. "Volunteer" to go the fuck someplace else.

In Libertarianism however, in no case would the government be involved in any way whatsoever in such decisions because the government has absolutely no constitutional authority whatsoever to involve itself or intervene in any medical decision of anyone, anywhere, any time. It's simply beyond the remit of government to deal with individual health care. Government's health care remit extends ONLY to the suppression of communicable diseases to prevent epidemics.

What about the VA? Should that be privatized?
What about combat medicine? Privatized too?


What about the Constitution, where it says the government was founded to promote the general welfare?
"Provide for the common defense" means trillions to the NSA and the TSA and Iraq, but "Promote the General Welfare" doesn't mean Jack Shit? Pull your head out of your ass.

In short, a degree of freedom with no utility and heaping lots of downside, vs simple common sense.

It's none of your or anybody else's fucking business how a person spends his money on health care.

It is, even in your ideology, when he's a fucking member of my healthcare insurance fucking pool and my fucking money's involved.
My insurance company has teams of lawyers working diligently to root the fuck out fraud and waste. They're trying to keep their fucking jobs after careers of rooting out preexisting conditions to deny claims, and removing long time policyholders before they're likely to file claims and cost fucking money. They'll have to work for the fucking government to feed their fucking kids if they can't earn their fucking keep in private contract law, so they're hustling motherfuckers. Why the fuck do you fucking think that is? Because it IS my fucking business how you spend my fucking money. Fuck.

You were forced by ideology to choose the former, of course. Your ideology has in fact limited your freedom to exercise common sense. You sensed this, so you imagined up a lump sum disbursement to make it look like you weren't so ideologically hidebound and blinkered.

I based that on the stated presumption that the taxpayers had approved some sort of social welfare/health care system that offered government-provided health care. That would not exist under Libertarianism at all for the aforesaid reasons.

Why wouldn't it? Would the Dictator not approve even if the taxpayers agreed?



I said it was a thought experiment. It was only two sentences. You took it on.

[Seth]

It's not a strawman, it's a thought experiment deliberately set up with an extreme case where common sense says let the old man pass on rather than hollow out his bones so he can get another 4 months of ICU before he inevitably, well, passes on.

The decision to suspend care for a patient is between the patient and his or her doctor and nobody else, and that explicitly and specifically excludes government bureaucrats and death panels.

Like the insurance company has nothing to say in the matter...

Well, in a Libertarian model there is no "insurance company" skimming 40 percent off the top. The individual has X amount of money and negotiates with the doctor just as in any commercial transaction. "Health insurance" is a scam based on Jonno-like paranoia deliberately induced by the government and the insurance industry to make money. People don't need "insurance" they just need to put money away in a savings account to pay for their medical needs.

If the old man has a billion dollars and he wants to spend it on every possible heroic effort to keep him alive ten seconds longer, that's his absolute right. If he has zero dollars then he's not entitled to any treatment at all unless he can persuade others to donate on his behalf voluntarily, in which case he is turning the economic decisions over to his benefactors, who get to decide what's done with THEIR money.

Right. Death Panels. Just like every American health insurance company has.

Until Obamacare, contracting with an insurance company was a voluntary act and if you didn't like the provisions of the contract you were not required to sign up...like me...I haven't had "health insurance" since 1996, I just put all that money I would have paid in premiums into a savings account, which makes money for me, albeit not much at the moment, given "quantative easing" and other fucking-about with the economy by Obama and his evil minions.

As stated, his medical expenses would be paid for up to a certain amount decided upon by the people and collected through voluntary taxation to fund such a system. This was a hybrid suggestion to a strawman problem.

As stated, any person's "voluntary" options were 3:

1. Pay into the system and "volunteer" to suspend treatment beyond a fixed dollar amount some time hence.
2. Pay into the system but "volunteer" to not receive any benefits beyond 40 yoa.
3. "Volunteer" to go the fuck someplace else.

Number 3 should be "don't pay into the system and keep your money and pay for your medical care a la carte as needed."

In Libertarianism however, in no case would the government be involved in any way whatsoever in such decisions because the government has absolutely no constitutional authority whatsoever to involve itself or intervene in any medical decision of anyone, anywhere, any time. It's simply beyond the remit of government to deal with individual health care. Government's health care remit extends ONLY to the suppression of communicable diseases to prevent epidemics.

What about the VA? Should that be privatized?

Everything. Just like school vouchers, VA benefits should follow the vet as a voucher that can be used at any medical facility of the vet's choice. Such a voucher would be, according to contract at the moment, unlimited lifetime benefits that force the government to pay for the vet's medical care 100 percent, but the care is provided by the free market, not the government.

What about combat medicine? Privatized too?

Sure, why not? Mercenary armies would provide all those benefits to their employees if they want. If they don't want to, well, that will affect the quality and quantity of warfighters they can hire, and that will affect their effectiveness as a fighting force, which will mean fewer combat contracts because they are poorly staffed. Free market dynamics at work.

What about the Constitution, where it says the government was founded to promote the general welfare?
"Provide for the common defense" means trillions to the NSA and the TSA and Iraq, but "Promote the General Welfare" doesn't mean Jack Shit? Pull your head out of your ass.

Your view of your upper colon must falsely persuade you that everyone sees the world that way. You're mistaken.

Federalist 41: James Madison
Some, who have not denied the necessity of the power of taxation, have grounded a very fierce attack against the Constitution, on the language in which it is defined. It has been urged and echoed, that the power "to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts, and provide for the common defence and general welfare of the United States," amounts to an unlimited commission to exercise every power which may be alleged to be necessary for the common defence or general welfare. No stronger proof could be given of the distress under which these writers labor for objections, than their stooping to such a misconstruction. Had no other enumeration or definition of the powers of the Congress been found in the Constitution, than the general expressions just cited, the authors of the objection might have had some color for it; though it would have been difficult to find a reason for so awkward a form of describing an authority to legislate in all possible cases. A power to destroy the freedom of the press, the trial by jury; or even to regulate the course of descents, or the forms of conveyances, must be very singularly expressed by the terms "to raise money for the general welfare." But what color can the objection have, when a specification of the objects alluded to by these general terms immediately follows, and is not even separated by a longer pause than a semicolon? If the different parts of the same instrument ought to be so expounded, as to give meaning to every part which will bear it, shall one part of the same sentence be excluded altogether from a share in the meaning; and shall the more doubtful and indefinite terms be retained in their full extent, and the clear and precise expressions be denied by signification whatsoever? For what purpose could the enumeration of particular powers be inserted, if these and all others were meant to be included in the preceding general power? Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars. But the idea of an enumeration of particulars which neither explain nor qualify the general meaning, and can have no other effect than to confound and mislead, is an absurdity, which, as we are reduced to the dilemma of charging either on the authors of the objection or on the authors of the Constitution, we must take the liberty of supposing, had not its origin with the latter.

In other words, "promote the general welfare" is not a mandate for Congress to do whatever it likes, it's a general statement of policy, nothing more. As Madison says, if what you (and the contemporary objectors) claim is true, there is not only no need for paragraph after paragraph of limitations on Congressional power, there is no need for anything else in the Constitution. If the Congress were intended to have plenary, sovereign powers like the King of England (which by the way the Founders had just tossed out of the country on his ass) then the Constitution would say something like, "The Congress is empowered to provide for the general welfare of the People," which would be an unlimited power, something that was never intended and was explicitly denied by the people who wrote the document.

Your argument has been debunked for some 238 years.

In short, a degree of freedom with no utility and heaping lots of downside, vs simple common sense.

It's none of your or anybody else's fucking business how a person spends his money on health care.

It is, even in your ideology, when he's a fucking member of my healthcare insurance fucking pool and my fucking money's involved.

No, it's not. You joined the insurance pool knowing what the terms of the contract were, and just as you have to put up with his using whatever resources he chooses to use, he has to put up with your use of resources. The allocation of those resources in a contractual risk pool relationship is delegated to the managers of the risk pool. If you don't like the way the pool is set up, then get out of the pool.

My insurance company has teams of lawyers working diligently to root the fuck out fraud and waste. They're trying to keep their fucking jobs after careers of rooting out preexisting conditions to deny claims, and removing long time policyholders before they're likely to file claims and cost fucking money.

That's what you contracted with them to do.

They'll have to work for the fucking government to feed their fucking kids if they can't earn their fucking keep in private contract law, so they're hustling motherfuckers. Why the fuck do you fucking think that is? Because it IS my fucking business how you spend my fucking money. Fuck.

But we're not talking about your health insurance company, we're talking about an individual who has a vested entitlement to lifetime medical care created by the government. When the government says "we'll take care of you" then that's a contract, and a binding one. Governments however usually do everything BUT take care of us, as the VA scandal proves. The sole reason they get away with shit like that is because it's the government, which can simply tell objectors to fuck off and die and there's no way to hold anyone accountable.

Which is exactly why the government must not be allowed to have anything at all to do with health care. Period.

You were forced by ideology to choose the former, of course. Your ideology has in fact limited your freedom to exercise common sense. You sensed this, so you imagined up a lump sum disbursement to make it look like you weren't so ideologically hidebound and blinkered.

I based that on the stated presumption that the taxpayers had approved some sort of social welfare/health care system that offered government-provided health care. That would not exist under Libertarianism at all for the aforesaid reasons.

Why wouldn't it? Would the Dictator not approve even if the taxpayers agreed?



I said it was a thought experiment. It was only two sentences. You took it on. [/quote]

It was a strawman and we are discussing it. What's your beef?

[piscator]

tl;dr

[Seth]

tl;dr

Translation: "Fuck, he's right and I don't have any rational or irrational rebuttal I can make without sounding like an idiotic asshole."

[tattuchu]

tl;dr

Translation: "Fuck, he's right and I don't have any rational or irrational rebuttal I can make without sounding like an idiotic asshole."

Sometimes tl;dr is just a tl;dr. Though sometimes it really is a phallus

[piscator]

Really getting bored with this bullshit, Seth. Here's the parts of the Wiki you didn't cherry pick in typical Libertarian bad faith for trivial onanistic reasons:

The historical controversy over the U.S. General Welfare Clause arises from two distinct disagreements. The first concerns whether the General Welfare Clause grants an independent spending power or is a restriction upon the taxing power. The second disagreement pertains to what exactly is meant by the phrase "general welfare."

The two primary authors of the The Federalist essays set forth two separate, conflicting interpretations:

James Madison explained his "narrow" construction of the clause in The Federalist Papers, No. 41: "Some, who have not denied the necessity of the power of taxation, have grounded a very fierce attack against the Constitution, on the language in which it is defined. It has been urged and echoed, that the power “to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts, and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States,’’ amounts to an unlimited commission to exercise every power which may be alleged to be necessary for the common defense or general welfare. No stronger proof could be given of the distress under which these writers labor for objections, than their stooping to such a misconstruction. Had no other enumeration or definition of the powers of the Congress been found in the Constitution, than the general expressions just cited, the authors of the objection might have had some color for it; though it would have been difficult to find a reason for so awkward a form of describing an authority to legislate in all possible cases."

Madison also advocated for the ratification of the Constitution at the Virginia ratifying convention with this narrow construction of the clause, asserting that spending must be at least tangentially tied to one of the other specifically enumerated powers, such as regulating interstate or foreign commerce, or providing for the military, as the General Welfare Clause is not a specific grant of power, but a statement of purpose qualifying the power to tax.[16][17]

Alexander Hamilton, only after the Constitution had been ratified,[18] argued for a broad interpretation which viewed spending as an enumerated power Congress could exercise independently to benefit the general welfare, such as to assist national needs in agriculture or education, provided that the spending is general in nature and does not favor any specific section of the country over any other.[19]

While Hamilton's view prevailed during the administrations of Presidents Washington and Adams, historians argue that his view of the General Welfare Clause was repudiated in the election of 1800, and helped establish the primacy of the Democratic-Republican Party for the subsequent 24 years.[20]

Prior to 1936, the United States Supreme Court had imposed a narrow interpretation on the Clause, as demonstrated by the holding in Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Co.,[21] in which a tax on child labor was an impermissible attempt to regulate commerce beyond that Court's equally narrow interpretation of the Commerce Clause. This narrow view was later overturned in United States v. Butler. There, the Court agreed with Associate Justice Joseph Story's construction in Story's 1833 Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States. Story had concluded that the General Welfare Clause was not a general grant of legislative power, but also dismissed Madison's narrow construction requiring its use be dependent upon the other enumerated powers. Consequently, the Supreme Court held the power to tax and spend is an independent power and that the General Welfare Clause gives Congress power it might not derive anywhere else. However, the Court did limit the power to spending for matters affecting only the national welfare.

Shortly after Butler, in Helvering v. Davis,[22] the Supreme Court interpreted the clause even more expansively, disavowing almost entirely any role for judicial review of Congressional spending policies, thereby conferring upon Congress a plenary power to impose taxes and to spend money for the general welfare subject almost entirely to Congress's own discretion. Even more recently, in South Dakota v. Dole[23] the Court held Congress possessed power to indirectly influence the states into adopting national standards by withholding, to a limited extent, federal funds. To date, the Hamiltonian view of the General Welfare Clause predominates in case law.

[Seth]

Really getting bored with this bullshit, Seth. Here's the parts of the Wiki you didn't cherry pick in typical Libertarian bad faith for trivial onanistic reasons:

Liberal revisionist twaddle. Madison was quite clear and his logic is unassailable. If the Founders wished to establish an Imperial State where Congress is entirely unconstrained and may do anything it deems desirable toward the public welfare, they would not have constructed the Constitution as a charter of negative liberties full of explicit constraints on what Congress is authorized to do.

Whether a more expansive interpretation by the Progressives (including the Progressive Supreme Court of the time) is valid insofar as Congress' spending is concerned has absolutely nothing whatever to do with whether or not the clause endows Congress with plenary authority to do whatever it pleases with respect to enunciated fundamental rights of the People.

It doesn't.

And I don't use Wiki for this sort of thing, I go directly to the source, the Federalist Papers.

[piscator]

Really getting bored with this bullshit, Seth. Here's the parts of the Wiki you didn't cherry pick in typical Libertarian bad faith for trivial onanistic reasons:

Liberal revisionist twaddle. Madison was quite clear and his logic is unassailable. If the Founders wished to establish an Imperial State where Congress is entirely unconstrained and may do anything it deems desirable toward the public welfare, they would not have constructed the Constitution as a charter of negative liberties full of explicit constraints on what Congress is authorized to do.

Whether a more expansive interpretation by the Progressives (including the Progressive Supreme Court of the time) is valid insofar as Congress' spending is concerned has absolutely nothing whatever to do with whether or not the clause endows Congress with plenary authority to do whatever it pleases with respect to enunciated fundamental rights of the People.

It doesn't.

And I don't use Wiki for this sort of thing, I go directly to the source, the Federalist Papers.

I'm not here to do hierographology. The Court has laid Adam-God Madison's interpretation to rest. There're only a few inbred fundy sects still gunning each other down over it, like Mormons down in Mexico.