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Republicans: still conservatives or just theo-fascists?

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anarkhos
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07 Mar 2012, 12:58 pm

enrico_dandolo wrote:
Proctetionism != monopoly. You said in another thread to be careful about terminology, but I would return you the warning. Protectionism is opposed to free trade as a tariff policy, but that is all its scope.


From the austrian school of thought, monopoly is barrier of entry. There is no quantity which defines monopoly in economic terms.



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07 Mar 2012, 1:27 pm

jojobean wrote:
Nazi's aside....I dont think the GOP is totally like the Nazi's but yes there are similarities, But the whole thing on the audience applauding that ppl without private health insurance should die is very frightening to me.
Most civilized decent societies have a system to help the poor.
I known people who commit crimes to get into jail so they can get healthcare because even though they work 60hours a week, they cant afford health insurance and their 3 employers dont offer it to them because they work 2-3 part time jobs.


Jojo


Emergency Rooms are a lot less unpleasant than prisons. Every state in the union has laws prohibiting Emergency Rooms from turning away patients for lack of funds.

Of course, the Emergency Room is the most expensive and least efficient way of delivering medical services. From a purely cost point of view single payer health care is more cost effective than Emergency Rooms. However, once Single Payer takes root, be assured that rationing of services will follow as surely as sunset follows noon.

ruveyn

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07 Mar 2012, 2:10 pm

ruveyn wrote:
jojobean wrote:
Nazi's aside....I dont think the GOP is totally like the Nazi's but yes there are similarities, But the whole thing on the audience applauding that ppl without private health insurance should die is very frightening to me.
Most civilized decent societies have a system to help the poor.
I known people who commit crimes to get into jail so they can get healthcare because even though they work 60hours a week, they cant afford health insurance and their 3 employers dont offer it to them because they work 2-3 part time jobs.


Jojo


Emergency Rooms are a lot less unpleasant than prisons. Every state in the union has laws prohibiting Emergency Rooms from turning away patients for lack of funds.

Of course, the Emergency Room is the most expensive and least efficient way of delivering medical services. From a purely cost point of view single payer health care is more cost effective than Emergency Rooms. However, once Single Payer takes root, be assured that rationing of services will follow as surely as sunset follows noon.

ruveyn

ruveyn


Well if it is not a medical emergency, which many cases are not, they can turn away a person without insurance.
Not all single payer health care is like that New Zealand and Australia have some of the best care in the world, however in the US, there is a total lack of quality control in government...so a single payer system would probably become corrupted.

The real solution, I think is creating laws that make all types insurance accessible to all, but not mandatory.

I dont think our county's problems are all that difficult to solve if there is an actual want to solve them.

It is amazing how well dems and repubs work together to create and pass a law striping people's rights, but when it comes to bills that actually help people...it is an all out brawl. Go figure :roll:
The desire to solve the problems plaguing the common people in the US is totally lacking at government levels.

Jojo


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anarkhos
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07 Mar 2012, 2:34 pm

jojobean wrote:
Well if it is not a medical emergency, which many cases are not, they can turn away a person without insurance.
Not all single payer health care is like that New Zealand and Australia have some of the best care in the world, however in the US, there is a total lack of quality control in government...so a single payer system would probably become corrupted.

The real solution, I think is creating laws that make all types insurance accessible to all, but not mandatory.

I dont think our county's problems are all that difficult to solve if there is an actual want to solve them.

It is amazing how well dems and repubs work together to create and pass a law striping people's rights, but when it comes to bills that actually help people...it is an all out brawl. Go figure :roll:
The desire to solve the problems plaguing the common people in the US is totally lacking at government levels.

Jojo


They come together to mandate people give money to the insurance companies, and have the gall to say this will control costs!

Most people in this country aren't complaining about insurance or access, but prices. The high prices are a consequence of intervention. It started when employers were given a benefit to provide insurance at the end of ww2, which makes about as much sense as getting car insurance from your employer. The less choice you have in how to pay for health care, the more prices will increase.

Insurance isn't even insurance in this country; it's pre-paid health care. Insurance companies want a steady income so this is how they set it up. You use it or lose it, so people go to the hospital for stupid s**t like colds and tie up resources.

The best answer IMO is to remove government completely from health care and help the needy through other avenues. This is the only way to keep prices down without stifling innovation.



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07 Mar 2012, 3:01 pm

ruveyn wrote:
jojobean wrote:
Nazi's aside....I dont think the GOP is totally like the Nazi's but yes there are similarities, But the whole thing on the audience applauding that ppl without private health insurance should die is very frightening to me.
Most civilized decent societies have a system to help the poor.
I known people who commit crimes to get into jail so they can get healthcare because even though they work 60hours a week, they cant afford health insurance and their 3 employers dont offer it to them because they work 2-3 part time jobs.


Jojo


Emergency Rooms are a lot less unpleasant than prisons. Every state in the union has laws prohibiting Emergency Rooms from turning away patients for lack of funds.

Of course, the Emergency Room is the most expensive and least efficient way of delivering medical services. From a purely cost point of view single payer health care is more cost effective than Emergency Rooms. However, once Single Payer takes root, be assured that rationing of services will follow as surely as sunset follows noon.

ruveyn

ruveyn

Oh read a bit of history. There is far better access to health care in Canada than in the USA. It might be slower sometimes, but if you need help right away the service will not be "rationed." That is after more than 40 years of universal health care.



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07 Mar 2012, 4:07 pm

anarkhos wrote:
There is no quantity which defines monopoly in economic terms.

Well there is that mono- prefix -- as in "one".



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07 Mar 2012, 4:22 pm

enrico_dandolo wrote:
anarkhos wrote:
There is no quantity which defines monopoly in economic terms.

Well there is that mono- prefix -- as in "one".


Yes, as in one trade union or one click. In the words of Turgot, speaking of the prevailing mercantilist regulations:

"innumerable statutes, dictated by the spirit of monopoly, the whole purpose of which were [sic] to discourage industry, to concentrate trade within the hands of few people by multiplying formalities and charges, by subjecting industry to apprenticeships and journeymanships of ten years in some trades which can be learned in ten days, by excluding those who were not sons of masters, or those born outside a certain class, and by prohibiting the employment of women in the manufacture of cloth."

If you strictly define monopoly as one firm with one ownership then I really don't have a problem with monopoly per-se, but I do have a problem with barriers to competition.

For a more nuanced understanding:

http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Monopoly



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07 Mar 2012, 4:26 pm

Also, Turgot:

"I believe, indeed, that iron masters, who know only about their own iron, imagine that they would earn more if they had fewer competitors. There is no merchant who would not like to be the sole seller of his commodity. There is no branch of trade in which those who are engaged in it do not seek to ward off competition, and do not find some sophisms to make people believe that it is in the State's interest to prevent at least the competition from abroad, which they most easily represent as the enemy of the national commerce. If we listen to them, and we have listened to them too often, all branches of commerce will be infected by this kind of monopoly. These fools do not see that this same monopoly which they practice, not, as they would have the government believe, against foreigners but against their own fellow-citizens, consumers of the commodity, is returned to them by these fellow citizens, who are sellers in their turn, in all the other branches of commerce where the first in their turn become buyers."

So yes, I mean it in this context. That of effective monopoly, not some useless taxonomical physical description.



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07 Mar 2012, 4:37 pm

I believe terms should not be multiplied, and that barrier of entry is entirely enough for my satisfaction. And, indeed, they are generally not good, even though Turgot's description of guilds is not very balanced.

However, I think I understand what you mean.



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07 Mar 2012, 4:57 pm

anarkhos wrote:
Kraichgauer wrote:
The American federal government, on the other hand, has been the defender of civil liberties.


Say what


Okay, okay, I know I need to qualify what I wrote. I had to hurry out the door to get my six year old on the school bus, and so I had to end my post abruptly.
The federal government had been the champion of civil rights in the sixties, and is now combating the voter ID laws, which is just a means of weeding out liberal voters in the guise of combating (almost non-existent) voter fraud.
But, I am the first to concede that the "War on Terror" has proven to potentially be a war on civil rights, which is a betrayal of everything the federal government had previously fought for. And in the more distant past, the federal government had proven to be the enemy of the rights of racial minorities, workers, women, etc.
I imagine I could write more, but I think you can get the gist of what I'm saying.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer



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07 Mar 2012, 5:06 pm

jojobean wrote:

It is amazing how well dems and repubs work together to create and pass a law striping people's rights, but when it comes to bills that actually help people...it is an all out brawl. Go figure :roll:
The desire to solve the problems plaguing the common people in the US is totally lacking at government levels.

Jojo


When it comes to passing laws that strip people of their rights, of course the parties can work together, because, despite all the high-sounding rhetoric, despite the reverence that we're all supposed to have for "the Constitution", there really isn't much political support for civil liberty in the U.S.A. Put to a vote, it loses every time. (Unless, of course, the issue in question involves guns.)

When it comes to solving problems plaguing the common people, well, common people don't make campaign donations. As everyone knows, it's all about the money, about doing whatever it takes to stay in office, serving one's benefactors.

I've been saying for a long time, to anyone who is willing to listen, that the United States has an authoritarian future. We'll still have our Constitution, still launch wars in the name of "freedom" & "democracy", still call ourselves "the freest country in the world", but in real terms we won't have much in the way of actual liberties & rights. It's been happening for a long while now - one law, one court desision at a time. War on drugs . . .Patriot Act . . . Guantanamo & extraordinary rendition . . . "free speech zones" . . . civil commitment . . . the inexorably growing surveillance state, just to name a few.



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07 Mar 2012, 5:19 pm

Billybones wrote:

I've been saying for a long time, to anyone who is willing to listen, that the United States has an authoritarian future. We'll still have our Constitution, still launch wars in the name of "freedom" & "democracy", still call ourselves "the freest country in the world", but in real terms we won't have much in the way of actual liberties & rights. It's been happening for a long while now - one law, one court desision at a time. War on drugs . . .Patriot Act . . . Guantanamo & extraordinary rendition . . . "free speech zones" . . . civil commitment . . . the inexorably growing surveillance state, just to name a few.


Go back further. Go back to the beginning of the "Progressive Movement" at the end of the 19th century. This movement spawned Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson who was a full-bore fascist.

ruveyn



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07 Mar 2012, 5:33 pm

ruveyn wrote:
Billybones wrote:

I've been saying for a long time, to anyone who is willing to listen, that the United States has an authoritarian future. We'll still have our Constitution, still launch wars in the name of "freedom" & "democracy", still call ourselves "the freest country in the world", but in real terms we won't have much in the way of actual liberties & rights. It's been happening for a long while now - one law, one court desision at a time. War on drugs . . .Patriot Act . . . Guantanamo & extraordinary rendition . . . "free speech zones" . . . civil commitment . . . the inexorably growing surveillance state, just to name a few.


Go back further. Go back to the beginning of the "Progressive Movement" at the end of the 19th century. This movement spawned Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson who was a full-bore fascist.

ruveyn


I'm liable to be critical of Wilson, but maybe not for the same reasons you do. His war time domestic policy had stripped away civil rights from American of German extraction, organized labor (in particular, the IWW), socialists, and eventually blacks and Jews, when people got the idea that they had to have had Pro-German, and later, pro-communist sympathies. Oh, not all these attacks on civil rights came directly down from Wilson, but he had set a tone questioning the loyalty of these groups that local governments, and even just mob mentality did grave injustice to these American citizens. Many of these unpopular citizens faced both violence and even death, along with the attacks on their rights. It was this very domestic policy that had led to the so called "Return to Normalcy," which was actually a hard right turn in post war America, which saw the rebirth of the KKK, the First Red Scare, and out of control big business, which had led to the Great Depression.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer



Last edited by Kraichgauer on 07 Mar 2012, 5:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

anarkhos
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07 Mar 2012, 5:34 pm

Kraichgauer wrote:
I imagine I could write more, but I think you can get the gist of what I'm saying.


Not really.

The government has been the primary abrogator of civil rights, even in the example you give. For all the talk about how the federal government had to force the south to change its ways, in most respects it didn't change a thing except federal prosecutions of private businesses. To this day people in real estate will often check with neighbors before they sell a house to a non-white in the south. The process took a generation, and the federally-imposed civil rights did more to destroy our freedom of association than it did to integrate society. The latter required the long road, walked by every non-racist in the south.

What isn't often talked about is how government involvement created the incentive for racism in the first place. Even neglecting the long history of how poor whites were drafted into maintaining the slavery system and the true motives and outcomes of the civil war, whenever you have a one-for-all system imposed, there is a struggle as to who controls that system. Integration would have been less of an issue were there not, for example, state-run schools. Whether or not a school is 'integrated' became the hot issue because nobody but the rich could opt out.

Ultimately, the views of the common southerner didn't improve because some yankee carpet-baggers came over with force of arms to change their school policy. That required integrating the community at large which is still a work in progress.



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07 Mar 2012, 5:38 pm

anarkhos wrote:
Kraichgauer wrote:
I imagine I could write more, but I think you can get the gist of what I'm saying.


Not really.

The government has been the primary abrogator of civil rights, even in the example you give. For all the talk about how the federal government had to force the south to change its ways, in most respects it didn't change a thing except federal prosecutions of private businesses. To this day people in real estate will often check with neighbors before they sell a house to a non-white in the south. The process took a generation, and the federally-imposed civil rights did more to destroy our freedom of association than it did to integrate society. The latter required the long road, walked by every non-racist in the south.

What isn't often talked about is how government involvement created the incentive for racism in the first place. Even neglecting the long history of how poor whites were drafted into maintaining the slavery system and the true motives and outcomes of the civil war, whenever you have a one-for-all system imposed, there is a struggle as to who controls that system. Integration would have been less of an issue were there not, for example, state-run schools. Whether or not a school is 'integrated' became the hot issue because nobody but the rich could opt out.

Ultimately, the views of the common southerner didn't improve because some yankee carpet-baggers came over with force of arms to change their school policy. That required integrating the community at large which is still a work in progress.


It was hardly perfect in the results, but I'm sorry, you can't tell me things aren't better for blacks due to civil rights legislation.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer



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07 Mar 2012, 5:41 pm

Kraichgauer wrote:
I'm liable to be critical of Wilson, but maybe not for the same reasons you do. His war time domestic policy had stripped away civil rights from American of German extraction, organized labor (in particular, the IWW), socialists, and eventually blacks and Jews, when people got the idea that they had to have had Pro-German, and later, pro-communist sympathies. Oh, not all these attacks on civil rights came directly down from Wilson, but he had set a tone questioning the loyalty of these groups that local governments, and even just mob mentality did grave injustice to these American citizens. Many of these unpopular citizens faced both violence and even death, along with the attacks on their rights. It was this very domestic policy that had led to the so called "Return to Normalcy," which was actually a hard right turn in post war America, which saw the rebirth of the KKK, the First Red Scare, and out of control big business, which had led to the Great Depression.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer


Wilson's legacy is far worse than that. He passed the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 transforming a free country into a plantation.