Brigid has posted a most excellent screed on Sharing the Pie
Go read it, it's well written, and well said indeed.
I read Atlas Shrugged in college. To this day I buy up used copies at book stores and give them away. This is not an altruistic act, it is entirely self-serving. If you don't understand, then you need to read some Ayn Rand.
Socialists see the world as a zero-sum game. If a socialist wants a bigger piece of the pie, he needs to steal it from someone else. It would never occur to him to bake his own, or to do some other useful labor in trade.
Capitalists understand that when two people voluntarily exchange goods, both win, and the pie gets bigger. If both sides did not come out ahead, the exchange would not occur.
Thus when Michelle Obama says, "someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more." She is a socialist. And socialism my friends is Evil with a capital E.
It is evil because it devalues human endeavor.
It is evil because it devalues basic human rights.
It is evil because it stands in stark opposition to the human right to property, from which all other rights derive.
It stands against privacy, and ,as needs must, against the right to life itself.
As soon as someone says that someone else is more worthy of the fruits of your labor than you are, Then you know where they stand:
They would take your property. They would take your privacy (for how else would they know what to take). They would take your right to self defense (for after all you might resist). Indeed they would take your life itself should you stand against them.
And that, my friends, is why they are Evil.
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2 comments:
See, I'm not sure that it is possible to convince me that universal, socialized medical care is worse than what we have now, or worse than what an unregulated free market can create.
We pay hundreds of dollars a month for insurance coverage. The insurance company pays a fraction of what an uninsured person would pay for catastrophic emergency care.
For example, D got into a hit-and-run accident on his motor bike last winter. The total hospital bill was something like $25,000, and he was't even badly hurt. No CT scans, just xrays and some lab work. The insurance company pays about $2000. (This doesn't even get into the radiation treatment for the tumors, or the surgery down at Stanford, which literally would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars - more money than we could ever afford).
The sheer volume of paperwork generated by the game of "who has to pay for this" accounts for huge amounts of markup in the medical industry. Single payer universal coverage would eliminate much of that, without forcing anyone to ever have to choose between a life saving medical treatment and a dizzying debt.
I doubt I would pay more in increased taxes than I currently do in insurance premiums, simply because there would be no defaulted bills and no games of "preexisiting conditions/double insurance coverage/partial coverage for out-of-network providers."
A truly capitalistic free market economy would take advantage of the fact that a person will pay any price for that life saving medical procedure, and that just isn't right.
The biggest problem with a single payer system is that it causes health care to be rationed.
Talk to a Canadian sometime who has been told "Sorry, your kidney dialysis is scheduled for two weeks after you die"
Or here is a better example, talk to someone who relies on the VA for their health care. Perfect example of what happens when you let the US Government run a health care system.
And I agree, we have serious issues with health care. I pay hundreds each month and don't see very much benefit. They manage to weasel out of most payments.
More government is not the solution, to this problem or almost any other problem though.
I don't think we will ever solve our issues with health care until we have serious tort reform. I known several doctors, good folks who are professional top notch caregivers. What they have to pay for malpractice insurance would make your brain bleed.
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