I tried to stick to the specific thesis proposed by @albill, but of course I had to drag in some framework, and leave out a lot of strongly related stuff. I’m glad I didn’t butcher it entirely!
Mmmmmhh… maybe. That’s very hard to prove & I’m a pragmatic empiricist.
[quote=“albill, post:303, topic:68567, full:true”]I’m not sure how any of this intellectualization turns into a day to day way of living when going about your day, eating your breakfast, working your job, paying your bills, etc. It comes across sometimes as wankery for its own sake and not practical in the slightest.
Knowing that things are labels? Yes and? I know things are labels too. How does that effect my coffee?[/quote]
Compared to popobawa’s posts, this is very difficult for me to parse and I don’t understand what you’re trying to communicate. Obviously, we’ve got a disconnect; but it seems like you’re talking about a subjective, personal experience (how you have chosen to experience coffee, for example) in reply to talk of shared experience (what labels like “coffee” represent in a consensus reality shared by you and popbawa and how that maps to empirically guided actions we may take). Phenomena that are highly subjective and utterly personal to you are kind of airy-fairy intellectualism from where I’m sitting, whereas what popobawa’s talking about has direct application to every moment of my life. Your post turns that objective/subjective pseudoduality on its head, seemingly accusing others of not restricting themselves to things you already know better than we ever can… which makes you harder to comprehend than popobawa, for me! It seems unlikely that I understand your posts at all.
I’m going to be off-grid for a while now, so I probably won’t have any further chances to reply before this topic closes. Hopefully I made my point… Apologies to everyone for the thread derail!
I do think there’s an important distinction though, between that insurers and the rest of them, and that’s that the insurers are entirely expendable. The system will work without them. Drugs and devices need to be manufactured, and hospital services need to be provided, but insurance is an interloper. Of course, it’s a bit of a hair-split, as we still need someone to pay for all the health care, so if you define insurers as simply “the payer” a replacement in kind is needed. In the same way you could argue that not-for profit and grant-funded drug makers could replace profit-driven drug makers, and thus the problems are roughly analogous, but for-profit insurers mangle the system of payment and delivery in a categoricaly different way, it seems.
No! That’s the view of our political leadership but it’s not what Adam Smith was talking about! He directly addresses this in The Wealth of Nations. Any economic system that can possibly work must address the reality of the existence of greed and function in the presence of greed which is the goal of a well regulated capitalism… it does not in any way require greed and still works the same if everyone is 100% altruistic.
No, that’s self-serving plutocrat propaganda pushed by the GOP. The market works better without greed, as I shall demonstrate and then I must go. But the market, in order to function, must tolerate greed (regulation helps here) because greed can’t be eliminated.
Proof: I buy expensive fair-trade shade-grown coffee and I drink it with locally produced raw milk and no sugar. I have purposely trained my palate to enjoy the complex and subtle flavors not out of greed but from altruism. This non-greedy decision pushes more working capital in the hands of more people - thus strenghtening the market - while buying the status brands would concentrate more wealth in the top 1%, which weakens the market by reducing participation. No greed and the system works fine!
Yes, capitalism does assume greed. But it also assumes checks and balances, aka supply and demand.
Capitalism “works” (as in functions) when the system is balanced enough between all the factors making up supply and demand. When you lift a restriction or limitation on any part of that system, it goes haywire.
In health care there is no limitation to demand. Demand implies consumer say in matters. Without a practical limitation on demand, consumers essentially have no say. So, when consumers have no say, they can be made to pay any amount for the thing they need. It would be like putting a price on air. If air had to be paid for, people could be made to pay any amount to get it because without it, we die. Health care is similar.
Compare it to groceries. Without food, we die too. But you can get groceries lots of different ways. That’s the difference. Demand is in the equation. You could take demand for groceries out of the equation easily: restrict people’s ability to get them to only very few sources and forbid growing your own. Then groceries would become just like health care: ever upward-spiraling costs and consumers have no say.
Yes, this is why I’m saying capitalism the system is not to blame, directly. Take insurers out of the current system and as you said they have to be replaced by something. Say, government. Say medicare gets expanded to all ages and we do away with state medicaid programs. Medicare now pays for everything and insurers have been mothballed. Now it’s a so-called socialist system because government is now the single payer. But we made no other alterations to the system.
What happens? The same thing happens as what we have now, because we did not address the root cause: the greed driving it all.
The profit motive has to be removed. You could have a profit motive under a fascist system, like the bomb factories in Schindler’s List. You could have a profit motive under a communist system, where the state has different factions all vying for regional supremacy. Still greed. You could have a purely socialist health care system, but if any one of those parts within that system is allowed free exercise of the profit motive, then it’s the same as what we have now.
The only way, and I fucking hate it when politicians say “the only way”, the only way to have a health care system that is efficient, reasonable and works for the good of all is to remove the profit motive. Remove greed. We have to or we’re fucked and we fucked ourselves, like we’re doing with the environment.
LOL, all that “Hope and Change” has left the majority of Americans worse off than 10 years ago… testament to what a crap job Democrats continually do …
It depends how desperate they get. But I have the feeling in the UK at least that the Tory debate around the shrinking of the state and lower taxes plays upon depriving everybody in order to deprive the ‘scroungers’. People seem in part willing to punish themselves in order to punish the others.
Independent ? He’s a life long socialist he should try not to hide behind some simple facade like “Independent” , An independent or nonpartisan politician is an individual politician not affiliated to any political party. Bernie is affiliated with he Socialist Party ( http://socialistparty-usa.net )
I feel the exact opposite. His thought as described by you and expressed by him is just some hand-wavy intellectualism that has no impact on my life (from my point of view). It’s just talk talk talk with no real impact.
Isn’t that basically true of any social ideas which you don’t actually act upon? This is precisely my point. People who leave politics to others are idealists who are satisfied with the illusion of participation. You have not explained why/how direct participation in society equals “intellectualism”, but you have asserted this to be the case quite a few times.
Some talk is necessary, because there can’t be much of a society without communication. In a blog like this, nearly all of the interaction is “talk”. I am not clear how this works as a criticism of what I put forth, especially,
I’ve done some searches and found nothing in the last 40 years. Can you show me primary evidence that he is? Use archive.org if you think something has been removed.
By the way, the Socialist Party USA are moderates compared with what I want.
You haven’t explained how any of your ideas and discussion thereof constitute “direct participation in society.” They seem just like a lot of talking, really, on the Internet. I realize you acknowledge it in the way but I don’t see how it is anything but talk.
