How can anyone be against universal health care?

[Ooberman]

It may cost some extra money, but when was money more important than health?

[Darias]

[Replying to post 189 by Goat]

1)

Goat, the market during the industrial revolution was hardly free. I've already established why child labor was the norm prior to industrialization. Did you know that those kids in that photo most likely belonged to the state, and that the factory owners used them because they could not enslave the children who had parents?

Hideous images immediately come to mind when children and the Industrial Revolution are mentioned in the same sentence: a five-year-old being lowered by a rope into a coal mine, skeletal children working at unsafe textile mills, Dickens's Oliver proffering a wooden bowl as he asks for another scoop of gruel. These images are used to condemn the free market and the Industrial Revolution; sometimes they are used to praise the humanitarian politicians who passed child-labor laws to curb the cruelty. This analysis draws powerfully upon the understandable horror that decent people feel at the exploitation of any children. But it is seriously flawed.

One of its flaws: it misses a key distinction. Early-19th-century Britain had two forms of child labor: free children; and, parish or "pauper" children, who came under government auspices. Historians J.L. and Barbara Hammond, whose work on the British Industrial Revolution and child labor is considered definitive, recognized this distinction. The free-market economist Lawrence W. Reed, in his essay "Child Labor and the British Industrial Revolution," went one step further in stressing the importance of the distinction. He wrote, "Free-labor children lived with their parents or guardians and worked during the day at wages agreeable to those adults. But parents often refused to send their children into unusually harsh or dangerous work situations." Reed notes, "Private factory owners could not forcibly subjugate 'free labour' children; they could not compel them to work in conditions their parents found unacceptable."

By contrast, parish children were under the direct authority of government officials. Parish workhouses had existed for centuries, but sympathy for the downtrodden was also lessened by the fact that taxes for poor relief in 1832 were over five times higher than they had been in 1760. (Gertrude Himmelfarb's book The Idea of Poverty chronicles this shift in attitude toward the poor from compassion to condemnation.) In 1832, partly at the behest of labor-hungry manufacturers, the Royal Poor Law Commission began an inquiry into the "the practical operation of the laws for the relief of the poor." Its report divided the poor into two basic categories: lazy paupers who received governmental aid; and the industrious working poor who were self-supporting. The result was the Poor Law of 1834, which statesman Benjamin Disraeli called an announcement that "poverty is a crime."

The Poor Law replaced outdoor relief (subsidies and handouts) with "poor houses" in which pauper children were virtually imprisoned. There, the conditions were made purposely harsh to discourage people from applying. Nearly every parish in Britain had a "stockpile" of abandoned workhouse children who were virtually bought and sold to factories; they experienced the deepest horrors of child labor.

Consider the wretched position of "scavenger" in textile factories. Typically, scavengers were young children — about six years old — who salvaged loose cotton from under the machinery. Because the machinery was running, the job was dangerous and terrible injuries were commonplace. "Fortunately" for businessmen willing to use the state to their advantage, government had no qualms about sending parish children to work under running machines. Most of the parish children had no alternative to such work other than starvation or a life of crime.

It is no coincidence that the first industrial novel published in Britain was Michael Armstrong: Factory Boy by Frances Trollope. Michael was apprenticed to an agency for pauper children. Nor is it coincidence that Oliver Twist was not abused by his parents or a private shopkeeper, but by brutal workhouse officials in comparison to whom Fagin was humanitarian. Remember that, at the age of twelve, with his family in debtor's prison, Dickens himself was a pauper child who slaved at a factory. Reed observes, the "first Act in Britain that applied to factory children was passed to protect these very parish apprentices, not 'free labor' children." The Act was explicit in doing so.

Thus, in advocating the regulation of child labor, social reformers asked government to remedy abuses for which government itself was largely responsible. Once more, government was a disease masquerading as its own cure.

The state leads to slave labor, not the free market. The state enslaved these children and the state enslaved people from other continents quite literally.



2)

You can keep chanting "fantasy, utopia" over and over again but that's not actually debating. You might be able to convince the like-minded with fallacies, songs, and one liners, but that's really not going to work on me.



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[nayrbsnilloc]

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None of that has to do with health care which is the issue here, because health care is a good/service that must be paid for.

I do understand that it must be paid for, but I do not understand why you want to pay so much more for it than other countries with better and more equitable systems.

Because my desire to pay less for health care does not outweigh the principle of protected personal property. I do not choose this viewpoint based on price or any other economic reasons.

And an interesting part of that graph is that the US already spends as much if not more than almost any other country on health care with public funds. Why do you think making everything paid with public funds would lower the price/spending?
All that this graph shows is that the average US citizen spends more on health care than any other country, the reason why is unexplained and should not be assumed. It could be that people go to the doctor for more minor ailments, general pharmaceutical supplies and doctor services just cost more in this market, or any of a number of other reasons. Do not assume.

[Ooberman]

Because my desire to pay less for health care does not outweigh the principle of protected personal property..

Interesting comment.

1. Why do you think this violates protected personal property?
2. Why would you arbitrarily choose personal property as the higher principle than protecting life/health?

This seems to be a principled stand "just because".

[Darias]

[Replying to post 192 by Ooberman]

First of all, if it weren't for the state getting involved in the healthcare industry in the first place, you wouldn't have to choose between paying more for private service or being robbed for the benefit of public programs. You could get healthcare for dirt cheap prices and also not be robbed by the state, which means more money and more healthcare for everyone.

Secondly, respect for property rights is pretty much the foundation of human civilization. Once you start breaking down respect for property (which includes the person's body), and once you start making arbitrary exceptions for some rights here and there based on race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, etc. -- well then, that's when you have chaos -- "anarchy" in the colloquial sense of the word. This is what the Nazis did to the Jews -- rounded them up and killed them all, and then redistributed their possessions for the "greater good."

This idea that the ends justifies the means (that the means don't matter), when you follow it through to its natural conclusion, well it's barbaric. Gang bangers rob and kill so they can feed their kids and sate their drug habits. But no one says the end results make that behavior okay.

Dressing up thievery as charity, a moral good, or a duty is no different fundamentally than an ancient Mayan painting human sacrifice as a necessary good -- maybe a little less bloody but that's just the aesthetics of the crime.

[nayrbsnilloc]

Because my desire to pay less for health care does not outweigh the principle of protected personal property..

Interesting comment.

1. Why do you think this violates protected personal property?
2. Why would you arbitrarily choose personal property as the higher principle than protecting life/health?

This seems to be a principled stand "just because".

Darias made a pretty good case just there but I would also like to respond personally as well.

1. Taking someone else's money (involuntarily) to pay for something for someone else necessarily violates personal property rights. Redistribution of wealth is theft disguised as charity, albeit poorly.

2. Quite to the contrary of what you are suggesting, I am placing neither above the other. As basic rights and principles they should stand firm and separate from each other. The right to keep your property does not affect the protection of life/health. it does not help it either, and that is an important distinction.

By protecting personal property you are not restricting anybody's health/life in any manner, but you are also not helping it. What you are confusing as the right to protect life/health is actually the belief of the necessity to improve life/health.

You are placing the life/health of individuals above all other values. This idea taken to its logical conclusion, results in any and all resources being spent on health care and what little is left over would fall where it may. If it isn't treated this way, where is the line drawn? Who decides where that line is drawn? What do we do about opposing ideas of where that line is drawn?

[Goat]

Because my desire to pay less for health care does not outweigh the principle of protected personal property..

Interesting comment.

1. Why do you think this violates protected personal property?
2. Why would you arbitrarily choose personal property as the higher principle than protecting life/health?

This seems to be a principled stand "just because".

Darias made a pretty good case just there but I would also like to respond personally as well.

1. Taking someone else's money (involuntarily) to pay for something for someone else necessarily violates personal property rights. Redistribution of wealth is theft disguised as charity, albeit poorly.

Why?? Do you not use the roads?? Did you use the public schools when you grew up? Does your area have firemen and policemen ? How is this any different?

2. Quite to the contrary of what you are suggesting, I am placing neither above the other. As basic rights and principles they should stand firm and separate from each other. The right to keep your property does not affect the protection of life/health. it does not help it either, and that is an important distinction.

That is your claim. Care to back that up? One of the provisions in the Affordable health care act was making sure that insurance companies do not put caps on the cost for a medication for a year. My sister had a cap put on a year of 3 months supply of a medicine that keeps her arthritis under control. That cap was taken away, and is allowing her to walk. So, from my PERSONAL experience, you are wrong.

By protecting personal property you are not restricting anybody's health/life in any manner, but you are also not helping it. What you are confusing as the right to protect life/health is actually the belief of the necessity to improve life/health.

You are placing the life/health of individuals above all other values. This idea taken to its logical conclusion, results in any and all resources being spent on health care and what little is left over would fall where it may. If it isn't treated this way, where is the line drawn? Who decides where that line is drawn? What do we do about opposing ideas of where that line is drawn?

Yet, you use the public roads, you use the public safety measures (police and fireman). This is no different than that.

Gosh, it seems from the arguments that I am getting her for , Christopher Hitchens was right when he said

“I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.�

[nayrbsnilloc]

Why?? Do you not use the roads?? Did you use the public schools when you grew up? Does your area have firemen and policemen ? How is this any different?

1. This is a poor analogy because those are services which I would be receiving for my payment. Paying for someone else's healthcare through my taxes would gain me nothing. Getting use of roads, education, or public safety services is receiving something in return for payment.
2. No, I did not go to public school at any point in my life. In fact, I did not grow up in America for a large portion of it.
3. I think infrastructure and education can be privatized. Public safety services like firemen and policemen I think are good public services and should be taxed for. It falls under the government's jurisdiction of protection of its citizens and to pay its employees, it should charge the people receiving the service. This is what I think taxes should be, an effectual charge for services ACTUALLY rendered to its citizens. It would no longer operate like a tax but instead like a business transaction.

2. Quite to the contrary of what you are suggesting, I am placing neither above the other. As basic rights and principles they should stand firm and separate from each other. The right to keep your property does not affect the protection of life/health. it does not help it either, and that is an important distinction.

That is your claim. Care to back that up? One of the provisions in the Affordable health care act was making sure that insurance companies do not put caps on the cost for a medication for a year. My sister had a cap put on a year of 3 months supply of a medicine that keeps her arthritis under control. That cap was taken away, and is allowing her to walk. So, from my PERSONAL experience, you are wrong.

Not only does your response have nothing to do with my comment, but again you are confusing health care with health insurance. Health insurance is a business and it should be treated as such. No one has the right to free health insurance. If you pay for the services of a health insurance company, you get in return the service which you agreed upon paying. This does not include blanket payment of all health care services.

By protecting personal property you are not restricting anybody's health/life in any manner, but you are also not helping it. What you are confusing as the right to protect life/health is actually the belief of the necessity to improve life/health.

You are placing the life/health of individuals above all other values. This idea taken to its logical conclusion, results in any and all resources being spent on health care and what little is left over would fall where it may. If it isn't treated this way, where is the line drawn? Who decides where that line is drawn? What do we do about opposing ideas of where that line is drawn?

Yet, you use the public roads, you use the public safety measures (police and fireman). This is no different than that.

Like I stated above, there is a major difference between paying taxes in return for services and taxes taken to pay for services received by others. I approve of taxes that are effectively the same as business transactions.

Quite the contrary to the common accusation of selfishness, this system would promote selflessness. Now hear me out.

Forced selflessness defeats the purpose, as selfless acts are by definition a voluntary action. Giving money for something without a choice in the matter is not selfless. Through this system, there would be no more forced selfless actions. People would still have the ability to give what they wanted to charity as they saw fit, and that would be truly selfless.

[Goat]

Why?? Do you not use the roads?? Did you use the public schools when you grew up? Does your area have firemen and policemen ? How is this any different?

1. This is a poor analogy because those are services which I would be receiving for my payment. Paying for someone else's healthcare through my taxes would gain me nothing. Getting use of roads, education, or public safety services is receiving something in return for payment.

except.. you don't understand, now do you.. It's the exact same thing. There are 1000's of roads out there that you don't use. They are they if you need it. Health care IS a matter of public safety.

2. No, I did not go to public school at any point in my life. In fact, I did not grow up in America for a large portion of it.

Yet, if you have children, unless you want to pay extra, the school system is there.

3. I think infrastructure and education can be privatized. Public safety services like firemen and policemen I think are good public services and should be taxed for. It falls under the government's jurisdiction of protection of its citizens and to pay its employees, it should charge the people receiving the service. This is what I think taxes should be, an effectual charge for services ACTUALLY rendered to its citizens. It would no longer operate like a tax but instead like a business transaction

.

2. Quite to the contrary of what you are suggesting, I am placing neither above the other. As basic rights and principles they should stand firm and separate from each other. The right to keep your property does not affect the protection of life/health. it does not help it either, and that is an important distinction.

That is your claim. Care to back that up? One of the provisions in the Affordable health care act was making sure that insurance companies do not put caps on the cost for a medication for a year. My sister had a cap put on a year of 3 months supply of a medicine that keeps her arthritis under control. That cap was taken away, and is allowing her to walk. So, from my PERSONAL experience, you are wrong.

Not only does your response have nothing to do with my comment, but again you are confusing health care with health insurance. Health insurance is a business and it should be treated as such. No one has the right to free health insurance. If you pay for the services of a health insurance company, you get in return the service which you agreed upon paying. This does not include blanket payment of all health care services.

By protecting personal property you are not restricting anybody's health/life in any manner, but you are also not helping it. What you are confusing as the right to protect life/health is actually the belief of the necessity to improve life/health.

You are placing the life/health of individuals above all other values. This idea taken to its logical conclusion, results in any and all resources being spent on health care and what little is left over would fall where it may. If it isn't treated this way, where is the line drawn? Who decides where that line is drawn? What do we do about opposing ideas of where that line is drawn?

Yet, you use the public roads, you use the public safety measures (police and fireman). This is no different than that

Like I stated above, there is a major difference between paying taxes in return for services and taxes taken to pay for services received by others. I approve of taxes that are effectively the same as business transactions.

Quite the contrary to the common accusation of selfishness, this system would promote selflessness. Now hear me out.

Not from what I see. I see the ultimate selfishness. I heard you,.. but you have not shown your claims to be TRUE.

Forced selflessness defeats the purpose, as selfless acts are by definition a voluntary action. Giving money for something without a choice in the matter is not selfless. Through this system, there would be no more forced selfless actions. People would still have the ability to give what they wanted to charity as they saw fit, and that would be truly selfless.[/quote]

I see claiims, I don't see evidence for those claims.

Can you provide samples how that actually works in the real world?? You know, so a society based on those principles that actually works?? Please show evidence it actually works, and is not just wishful thinking .

[Darias]

Why?? Do you not use the roads?? Did you use the public schools when you grew up? Does your area have firemen and policemen ? How is this any different?

So because the state monopolizes certain industries to the point where private alternatives are limited, prohibited, or unavailable, that means no one can protest the status quo?

This is like telling a slave, "You eat the crumbs from beneath the master's table don't ya? You got a roof over your head thanks to the master's barn n' generous hospitality n' all. You sure do have a lot of nerve to be complainin', boy! If you don't like it, you can git out! See how you like livin' up there with the Polar Bears!"

No one seriously thinks that the slave does not want to have food, safety, and shelter, just as no one wants to go without roads, education, and insurance. In both cases, it's the how that matters. I keep forgetting that this does not matter to those who are too focused on the goal to see the consequences of the now, much like a driver fixated on his GPS, as runs over everyone like it's Grand Theft Auto V. No one would say, "At least he got where he needed to go, that's what's most important."

That is your claim. Care to back that up? One of the provisions in the Affordable health care act was making sure that insurance companies do not put caps on the cost for a medication for a year. My sister had a cap put on a year of 3 months supply of a medicine that keeps her arthritis under control. That cap was taken away, and is allowing her to walk. So, from my PERSONAL experience, you are wrong.

Not to disrespect your family's situation, but in a debate setting, arguing from personal experience is not a valid argument; it's hearsay at best.

But in any case, yes my health would be greatly benefited if I could go give Bill Gates the shakedown and get enough money to pay back my student loan. I'd be worry free really with all that money. I guess that justifies it then.

Gosh, it seems from the arguments that I am getting her for , Christopher Hitchens was right when he said

“I have always found it quaint and rather touching that there is a movement [Libertarians] in the US that thinks Americans are not yet selfish enough.�

⇨ Straw man

It is truly Orwellian to believe that the desire to protect oneself and his property from injury is "selfish," whereas, it is "altruistic" to want to enjoy everything from food, to education, to healthcare, to security "for free," knowing full well that your livelihood comes from the plunder of others -- most of whom are not rich, and whose lives are greatly affected by paying taxes.

Freedom is "Slavery"
Ignorance is "Strength"
War is "Intervention"
Taxation is "Charity"
Libertarianism is "Selfish"
Self interest is "Greed"



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[nayrbsnilloc]

[Replying to post 197 by Goat]

You must have missed the part where i suggested the privatization of roads, so ill give you a pass on the roads quip for now.

My argument about selflessness comes from the definitions of the words/acts and the logic that follows. A selfless act must be voluntary.

Somebody giving someone money is not is not selfless if it is because they are held at gunpoint. In fact, it would be selfish. They chose to give them money to prevent pain caused upon them, so that they would not get shot.

You say wishful thinking like it is a bad thing. All policies start as wishful thinking. Then it becomes implemented policy, and that is when results can be observed.

I cannot show you an example where this policy has worked because it has not been implemented. I can show you where autonomous government control has failed though.

Marxism started as "wishful thinking". Then, communism was implemented and the result was observed as a failure.

Commusnism implemented correctly would eventually result in a utopia for mankind. However, it is very difficult to implement correctly as it requires likemindedness and cooperation from every citizen. In the end, the flaws of human nature are why it fails.

The system i am promoting accounts for these flaws and attempts to counteract them.

You say for us to stop promoting these utopias of "wishful thinking". The idea of successful government control is also wishful thinking in this regard.