World News Thread (Politics,whatever)


Status
Not open for further replies.
it seems your vision of healthcare (that those who can't afford to pay don't deserve to live) is already close enough to what we have in the states.

If you'd like to know my 'vision' it would be a free market in health services and products, without the hundreds of thousands of pages of cost-exploding procedural interference currently dictated by the government. That, to my mind, also includes eliminating the interference by patent regulation.

The current interventionist model of health care - in which routine procedures are handled by insurance - has engendered a service system which is completely dissociated from downward cost pressures by the market. Does anyone shop-around to find which hospital offer the best price on baby-delivery? They won't even quote you a price!

In a free health care market, the base cost of getting an appendectomy would be on the order of a muffler change. A skilled nurse could set and brace a simple broken bone for the cost of a video game.

There would be nothing preventing charitable people from donating to subsidized or free clinics serving the poor, and they would be able to deliver orders of magnitude more care per dollar spent.

https://mises.org/library/four-step-healthcare-solution
https://mises.org/library/bob-murphy-government-medicine-killing-us
https://mises.org/wire/did-obamacare-really-save-lives
https://tomwoods.com/ep-541-just-ho...r-doctor-explains-and-tells-us-how-to-fix-it/
https://tomwoods.com/ep-651-austrian-school-physician-on-whats-wrong-with-health-care/

If you'd like the rest of your claims refuted, contact me for discount pricing.
 
Last edited:
@klapse I am glad that you are actually making an argument (well... several really), and very detailed at that. I'd have liked to hear some actual arguments from JDTAY but I guess that's never going to happen unless someone else posts it for him. "Bonuspoints" if he were to explain his initial "feminism is the reason why I won't get a pension and why we all don't reproduce enough" statement.

Hierarchy in voluntary associations (unlike hierarchy under the coercive State) is nothing but the result of specialisation
Ofcourse I am not anti-specialisation and your organ example explains perfectly why. I should have used another wording and "absence of coerced hierarchies" would have been clearer. Anarcho-syndicalism won't work without structured organizations, either and how could it?

But where does coercion begin? I believe that any form of capitalism implicitly requires coercion or better leads to coercion, because of many factors. If we continue to divide between owners of property (meaning production facilities, laborforce, patents, education, knowledge... not talking about personal possessions) and poor people, this will never go away.

Saying "they got there on their own, now they have to deal with it", just isn't going to cut it for me. A person who has never had a proper education and cannot read or write will also not have any chance to earn enough money in a free market society, to get out of that. What is the incentive for an organization that is build upon the free-market to also take care of someone who is not economically worth anything (like most of the so called poor, the uneducated, the sick)? Is there any kind of moral regulatory instance? no, there is only the free market that magically balances everything and self-regulates.

what about someone who is addicted to a substance? All substances would be legal, and the free-market theory tells us, that only the purest and safest product would survive, because consumers would only choose the best product. I am pretty sure heroine addiction does not work like that... as far as I understood, the stance on such an issue would be "well that person willingly and knowingly got addicted, so they chose this life and noone is responsible to help, thus they may aswell die".

What about a child that is born into this? Maybe being addicted from birth.

What about people with mental illnesses? Or people with disabilities? They would need a community of people that help out and contribute. Why should a community do that if it would hurt them economically?

There would be nothing preventing charitable people from donating to subsidized or free clinics serving the poor
... and there would be no reason why they would. Why should people be more charitable then they are now?

and the question noone has answered: How does patiotism fit in with this? This is where I think the right-wing libertarians entangle themselves. With no government, there is no point to being patriotic or nationalistic. national anarchism requires separation of people by race/ethnicity. This in itself is coercion. Why can people not chose wherever they want to live or travel or whom they love and fuck with in a world where economically it should not make a difference?

the same goes for feminism and gender equality: why shouldn't everyone have the right to be treated as equals?
 
and the question noone has answered: How does patiotism fit in with this? This is where I think the right-wing libertarians entangle themselves. With no government, there is no point to being patriotic or nationalistic. national anarchism requires separation of people by race/ethnicity. This in itself is coercion. Why can people not chose wherever they want to live or travel or whom they love and fuck with in a world where economically it should not make a difference?

the same goes for feminism and gender equality: why shouldn't everyone have the right to be treated as equals?

Where did I ever mention patriotism? I'm a voluntaryist, not a nationalist. And I haven't even heard of this nationalist anarchism you keep speaking of.

As for treating people equally, that implies coercion again. It's all right if you want to treat people equally, but don't shoot the people who don't.
 
  • Like
Reactions: ___
@Caine no you're not the only one. I think so too.
@JDTAY okay, I understand that and I didn't want to assume you were a nationalist. but I was adressing you about why you were siding with patriots and other right wing conservatives and why you were attacking feminism and you never even tried to answer that. i don't want to shoot anybody and certainly not people who merely think differently. But at the same time I think it is not okay to tolerate that others do.
 
So you're saying it's okay for us to pick on you and call you names?
I did not hear him say that. He says it should not be forbidden (by law) to do so. That does not mean that there will not be a reaction to it, people will think you are an ass and treat you differently because of it.

[edit]Or at least, that is how I interpret the principle. @JDTAY may have a different opinion.[/edit]
 
But that is the same principle even in anarcho-communism, syndicalism and what else have you. There must be a general consensus with the people to abide by the social compromise, that living together means sustaining each other for the better good; which means that you do not coerce someone else to do something. No laws by some sort of state, but the consensus, that you want to be respected yourself and thusly you will respect others. If your community wants to survive, it needs to support other communities as well and so on. In the capitalist sense, if you want your product to "sell" and sustain your operation, you need to respect labor conditions so your workers will not ditch you and respect consumers because they will otherwise drop your product and "buy/trade/etc" somewhere else.

This is much more a question of revolutionary or reformist, I guess. How do you get there, to the point where everyone sees each other as equals. And I agree wholeheartedly, that laws, political correctness hysteria and witch hunting is not the way it's going to happen.

But it's also not a solution to blurt out anti-feminist BS that leaves everything open to interpretation and then not elaborate when asked wtf? so please, I would still like to understand what the hell JDTAY was talking about, and until something has come out of him that makes some coherent sense regarding this initial post, I am going to have to assume that he is trolling. @JDTAY sorry, you baited me
 
About the anti-feminism stuff, it's like with liberals and global warming. If some people are driving the human race into extinction, don't you get mad at them? I mean, feminists have accomplished what conservatives never could; they've gotten people, young people in particular, to stop having sex. This phenomenon has been identified and named in Japan, but still goes mostly ignored everywhere else.

It's scarier than global warming, in my opinion, because humans have survived plenty of ice ages, but no species survives an inadequate fertility rate.
 
I wish that were true. If everyone stopped having sex (they haven't) the population would be decreasing (it isn't). @JDTAY your arguments are causing the opposite of what you want.
 
The fertility rate has indeed fallen too low, and the effects will be seen within a human lifetime, per math. In fact, I have reason to believe that current population data is inflated, since it is mostly estimates done by people with a vested interest in keeping people afraid of overpopulation. I want to see hard census data, which is still about two years away.
 
The fertility rate has indeed fallen too low, and the effects will be seen within a human lifetime, per math. In fact, I have reason to believe that current population data is inflated, since it is mostly estimates done by people with a vested interest in keeping people afraid of overpopulation. I want to see hard census data, which is still about two years away.
It sounds like you're just talking about Europeans, some countries like France and Germany have had negative birthrates for a while now, so does Japan.
Africa and the middle east produce a bloody lot of children, more than they can feed, so I can't quite follow your reasoning.

No idea about the American birthrates, but they can't be that low.
 
please provide evidence.

I actually have a minirant about "evidence".

Anyone can put anything on a webpage. That doesn't make it true. It's always weird to me to see people citing webpages as evidence. Evidence exists in reality, not online. It's like in the saying, "Don't believe anything you hear, and only half of what you see." I can only go by what I observe myself.
 
Evidence exists in reality, not online.
That would be reportative evidentiality. It is not the strongest evidence, but consistent reports from different sources increase the likelihood of truth.
I can only go by what I observe myself.
Not only through observation. You can also infer truth by e.g. reasoning and/or derivation. Your direct observation of reality is an abstraction anyway (e.g. your vision abstracts away infrared and ultraviolet light).
 
I'd like to talk about my religious beliefs for a bit, as they sort of play into everything I've been saying.

We are all so intertwined that any harm inflicted upon anyone else is essentially harm inflicted upon everyone, even harm in the name of justice. This is why justice is essentially useless.

The best way to respond to a crime against yourself is to cover up the evidence and refuse to testify, taking an obstruction of justice charge if you have to. All seeking justice will do is increase the amount of harm to everyone.

When everyone stops seeking justice, we will have achieved world peace.

To err is human, to forgive is divine.
 
Thanks for the reply, xnop. You brought up lots of interesting things.

But first please know this: I'm not a defender of the status-quo. For a variety of reasons, there are many wealthy people who got that way by means of coercion and fraud (or by working for organizations that did). Property or controlling interests attained by those means are nothing else but stolen goods, and thus forfeitable (ethically at least, if not practically).

@klapseBut where does coercion begin? I believe that any form of capitalism implicitly requires coercion or better leads to coercion, because of many factors. If we continue to divide between owners of property (meaning production facilities, laborforce, patents, education, knowledge... not talking about personal possessions) and poor people, this will never go away.
I accept that you still believe it requires coercion and I'm curious to see your reasoning as to why it does. (Before you think about it, please note that the definition of "coercion" http://www.dictionary.com/browse/coercion is pretty clear, so I won't accept you expanding it to include things like "imbalances in relative negotiating power".)

If you are considering shifting the goalposts to "exploitation" I'll save you the trouble: Marx's theory of capitalist exploitation was proven false in 1884 by Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. https://fee.org/articles/austrian-exploitation-theory/
H.H. Hoppe also touches on it in "What Marx Gets Right" (A comparison of Marxist and Austrian class analysis.)
https://mises.org/system/tdf/9_2_5_0.pdf?file=1&type=document
https://mises.org/library/hans-hermann-hoppe-what-marx-gets-right


Saying "they got there on their own, now they have to deal with it", just isn't going to cut it for me. A person who has never had a proper education and cannot read or write will also not have any chance to earn enough money in a free market society, to get out of that.
I agree with you that the community - motivated by moral, ethical and utilitarian interests - should organize cheap and free education services for the poor. (Of course enterpreneurs are just as much a part of the community as anyone else and should be free to compete and innovate to offer educational service at varying price points.) Churches and monestaries, scholarships and stipends have provided cheap and free education for centuries and today we are seeing a boom in extremely cheap private schools in poverty-stricken places like poor areas of India.

By contrast, a coercive State education system is nothing less than a crime against the people. It centralizes policy and procedural decisions and dictates what the next generation will be taught and what opinions to have of things in this world. Most important to the State's survival and growth: teaching all the little children that State intervention in all aspects of daily life is essential, good, right and just.

If State-run schools were offering anywhere near the value per dollar as private and parochial schools, they would not fight tooth and claw against school voucher legislation. Think about it: if they really knew better how to educate kids they'd have nothing to fear from competing on a fair playing field with private and parochial schools.

The New York State public school system costs $14000-140,000 per pupil (per year!) and employs thousands of administrators versus the twenty-some people who manage the NY Catholic School system (iirc about 1/8th the student body size). The abysmal performance of the US public school system has resulted in colleges and universities accepting students who haven't learned the difference between "your and you're", people who haven't learned basic algebra and so on. This isn't a 'so what' thing; this is evidence that we are seeing the lowest standards of admission to higher education the history of the west.

What is the incentive for an organization that is build upon the free-market to also take care of someone who is not economically worth anything (like most of the so called poor, the uneducated, the sick)? Is there any kind of moral regulatory instance? no, there is only the free market that magically balances everything and self-regulates.
Since the work of Böhm-Bawerk and Menger, we know that value is a subjective property of the individual human mind. https://mises.org/library/subjective-value-theory "To be worth something" requires an evaluator: there is no 'objective value' of different things in this world. To be valuable a person or thing must be valued. For you to be valued, therefore, you must serve your fellow human, and/or have personal bonds to other people who value you.

By being a good family member, neighbor or friend, those people you form bonds with will support you when some accident befalls you, you lose your home etc. We all have been there before and without that kind of helping each other, we lose our humanity. And whenever the state provides this 'aid' after first taking the resources from us, we have less incentive and opportunity to personally display that humanity by choosing to sacrifice. Worse yet, the expanding abrogation of our moral duties by the State incentivizes us to teach and nurture them less and less with each generation.

But we also serve each other when we trade goods or services. When we trade things, we're not exchanging things of equal value, as Plato and others thought. If we did there'd be no benefit to the exchange. Instead we trade goods or services because both parties expect to be better off afterwards. Because both profit, at least in the ex-ante sense, both are serving each other! This is mutual cooperation. This is the free market.

The moral regulatory instance for us is religion, philosophy and secular ethics. (In some societies religion is also the legal regulatory instance.) I suspect there is an increasing number of people who are not regulated by morals at all, but I wont expound on that here.

What is the incentive for companies to engage in charitable works? Well corporate image is the big one. Companies are also made up of people who make sacrifices of company resources for moral reasons. I recall the story of Wal-Mart, which shipped water and ice to hurricane stricken areas only to get it blocked by FEMA and other govt agencies. The current level of donations to charitable causes is ~400 billion dollars per year in the US alone, with about 30% from corporate donors. And the State-crowds-out private charity by taking the money for its own 'charity. What would that 400 billion $ become if people had 4 times the disposable income remaining after taxes?

what about someone who is addicted to a substance? All substances would be legal, and the free-market theory tells us, that only the purest and safest product would survive, because consumers would only choose the best product. I am pretty sure heroine addiction does not work like that... as far as I understood, the stance on such an issue would be "well that person willingly and knowingly got addicted, so they chose this life and noone is responsible to help, thus they may aswell die".
I have to contradict you here. The free market theory doesn't tell us that only the purest and safest product will survive and no economist claims it does. The market offers a wide range of products with varying quality and safety (among other qualities) at varying price points.

The libertarian stance on the issue of addiction is that it is just a special case of "helping other people in need". People who want to help others in need should help others in need instead of pointing guns at other people and telling them to pay for a third person (crony friend) to provide the 'service' of 'helping'.

and the question noone has answered: How does patiotism fit in with this? This is where I think the right-wing libertarians entangle themselves. With no government, there is no point to being patriotic or nationalistic. national anarchism requires separation of people by race/ethnicity. This in itself is coercion. Why can people not chose wherever they want to live or travel or whom they love and fuck with in a world where economically it should not make a difference?
I feel this has gotten quite long already and suggest we leave those things for some other day.
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top