While I see where you're coming from, I have a few issues with what you're saying:

1. The organization you're referring to is staffed, has offices and overheads. Assuming it isn't corrupt and skimming and holding multi-million-dollar appreciation nights and galas (and we probably shouldn't assume that it isn't), the money you're giving this organization still gets portioned off quite a bit. Your point about helping on the systemic level is quite valid (provided you are channelling your concern into actually doing so), but I'd look more into local community health centres or the nonprofit down the street, and still, that money isn't guaranteed to reach the person in front of you. Much as a social worker can help him connect to essential services, advocate for fair and affordable housing, counsel him on trauma, etc, he will still need money for a lot of basic needs.

2. You are vastly oversimplifying the needs and situation of every person on the street. That person may actually depend on money from strangers to make rent (being that welfare barely puts a dent in even the lowest affordable housing costs), feed kids, buy food that isn't McDonald's or canned food, get a haircut, or a million other things that everyone needs money for.

3. Even if that person intends to spend some of your money on oxy or crack, it is not in your right to judge that. While addiction can very generally be called "bad", this person may suffer from chronic pain, trauma, mental illnesses, or some combination and short of governments finally realizing that housing and caring for the poor is cheaper than incarcerating them and treating emergency health conditions, self-medicating is the only reasonable way they can continue functioning for another day. This isn't even an unlikely scenario; think how easily someone can go from your (or my) comfy life to homeless, poor and desperate. It isn't always "bad decisions"; you could be a contractor that falls and gets a serious injury, hit by a car, stricken with a mental illness you have no control over, traumatized earlier in life, born into a high-risk environment or social strata, or anything else, and then start sliding from there. You develop an addiction, your income comes to a screeching halt, your loved ones can't or get too tired to support you, bills that were routine become suffocating, and there you are on the street, pain exploding relentlessly in your body/mind, on the other side of the decision, seeing chins turned up and eyes turned away from you and hearing people mutter "Don't give anything to him; he's just gonna use it to get high," to each other.

4. Not a single person in the video (and really, in just about every situation you see on whatever street you're on) speaks to or even looks at the guy.

While I wouldn't expect that everyone gives money to folks on the street (I myself have only done it a few times), it frustrates me to hear people insist that nobody should. "He's just going to use it for drugs/booze" is a presumptuous and ignorant statement and mindset.

One more thing: if you really care about urban poverty and those suffering from it, the biggest thing (IMO) you can do is vote for politicians/parties who openly and strongly support social services and welfare, then hold them to their promises. I don't make a ton of money, but I am happy to pay higher taxes and lose some luxuries if it means people who need help just to get by get it.

@enoch, thanks for your comments. I thought it better to respond directly to your profile than on the video, about which we're no longer discussing directly. Sorry for the length of this reply, but for such a complex topic as this one, a thorough and plainly-stated response is needed.

You wrote: "the REAL question is "what is the purpose of a health care system"? NOT "which market system should we implement for health care"?"

The free market works best for any and all goods and services, regardless of their aim or purpose. Healthcare is no different from any other good or service in this respect.

(And besides, tell me why there's no money in preventative care? Do nutritionists, physical trainers/therapists, psychologists, herbalists, homeopaths, and any other manner of non-allopathic doctors not get paid and make profit in the marketplace? Would not a longer life not lead to a longer-term 'consumer' anyway? And would preventative medicine obliterate the need for all manner of medical treatment, or would there not still remain a need to diagnose, treat, and cure diseases, even in the presence of a robust preventative medical market?)

I realize that my argument is not the "popular" one (and there are certainly many reasons for this, up to and including a lot of disinformation about what constitutes a "free market" health care system). But the way to approach such things is not heuristically, but rationally, as one would approach any other economic issue.

You write "see where i am going with this? It's not so easy to answer and impose your model of the "free market" at the same time."

Yes, as a matter of fact, it is. The purpose of the healthcare system is to provide the most advanced medical service and care possible in the most efficient and affordable way possible. Only a free competitive market can do this with the necessary economic calculations in place to support its progress. No matter how you slice it, a socialized approach to healthcare invariably distorts the market (with its IP fees, undue regulations, and a lack of any accurate metrics on both the supply-side and on the demand-side which helps to determine availability, efficacy, and cost).

"you cannot have "for-profit" and "health-care" work in conjunction with any REAL health care."

Sorry, but this is just absurd. What else can I say?

"but if we use your "free market" model against a more "socialized model".which model would better serve the public?"

The free market model.

"if we take your "free market" model,which would be under the auspices of capitalism."

Redundant: "free market under the auspices of free market."

"disease is where the money is at,THAT is where the profit lies,not in preventive medicine."

Only Krugman-style Keynesians would say that illness is more profitable than health (or war more profitable than peace, or that alien invasions and broken windows are good for the economy). They, like you, aren't taking into account the One Lesson in Economics: look at how it affects every group, not just one group; look at the long term effects, not just short term ones. You're just seeing that, in the short-run, health will be less profitable for medical practitioners (or some pharmaceuticals) that are currently working in the treatment of illness. But look at every group outside that small group and at the long run and you can see that health is more profitable than illness overall. The market that profits more from illness will have to adapt, in ways that only the market knows for sure.

Do you realize that the money you put into socialized medicine (Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, etc.) is money you deplete from prevention entrepreneurship?

(As an aside, I wonder, why do so many people assume that the socialized central planners have some kind of special knowledge or wisdom that entrepreneurs do not? And why is there the belief that unlike entrepreneurs, socialist central planners are not selfishly motivated but always act in the interest of the "common good?" Could this be part of the propagandized and indoctrinated fear that's implicit in living in a socialized environment? Why do serfs (and I'm sure that, at some level, people know that's what they are) love the socialist central planners more than they love themselves? Complex questions about self-esteem and captive minds.)

If fewer people get sick, the market will then demand more practitioners to move from treating illness into other areas like prevention, being a prevention doctor or whatever. You're actually making the argument for free market here, not against it. Socialized bureaucratically dictated medicine will not adapt to the changing needs as efficiently or rapidly as a free market can and would. If more people are getting sick, then we'll need more doctors to treat them. If fewer people are getting sick because preventive medicine takes off, then we'll have more of that type of service. If a socialized healthcare is mandated, then we will invariably have a glut of allopathic doctors, with little need for their services (and we then have the kinds of problems we see amongst doctors who are coerced -- by the threat of losing their license -- to take medicaid and then lie on their reports in order to recoup their costs, e.g., see the article linked here.)

Meanwhile, there has been and will remain huge profits to be made in prevention, as the vitamin, supplements, alternative medicine, naturopathy, exercise and many other industries attest to. What are you talking about, that there's no profit in preventing illness? (In a manner of speaking, that's actually my bread and butter!) If you have a way to prevent illness, you will have more than enough people buying from you, people who don't want to get sick. (And other services for the people who do.) Open a gym. Become a naturopath. Teach stress management, meditation, yoga, zumba, whatever! And there are always those who need treatment, who are sick, and the free market will then have an accurate measure of how to allocate the right resources and number of such practitioners. This is something that the central planners (under socialized services) simply cannot possibly do (except, of course, for the omniscient ones that socialists insist exist).

You wrote "cancer,anxiety,obesity,drug addiction.
all are huge profit generators and all could be dealt with so much more productively and successfully with preventive care,diet and exercise and early diagnosis."

But they won't as long as you have centrally planned (socialized) medicine. The free market forces practitioners to respond to the market's demands. Socialized medicine does not. Entrepreneurs will (as they already have) exploit openings for profit in prevention (without the advantage of regulations which distort the markets) and take the business away from treatment doctors. If anything, doctors prevent preventative medicine from getting more widespread by using government regulations to limit what the preventive practitioners do. In fact, preventive medicine is so profitable that it has many in the medical profession lobbying to curtail it. They are losing much business to alternative/preventive practitioners. They lobby to, for example, prevent herb providers from stating the medical/preventive benefits of their herbs. They even prevent strawberry farmers to tout the health benefits of strawberries! It is the state that is slowing down preventive medicine, not the free market! In Puerto Rico, for example, once the Medical Association lost a bit to prohibit naturopathy, they effectively outlawed acupuncture by successfully getting a law passed that requires all acupuncturists to be medical doctors. Insanity.

If you think there is no profit in preventative care or exercise, think GNC and Richard Simmons, and Pilates, and bodywork, and my own practice of psychotherapy. Many of the successful corporations (I'm thinking of Google and Pixar and SalesForce and Oracle, etc.) see the profit and value in preventative care, which is why they have these "stay healthy" programs for their employees. There's more money in health than illness. No doubt.

Or how about the health food/nutrition business? Or organic farming, or whole foods! The free market could maybe call for fewer oncologists and for more Whole Foods or even better natural food stores. Of course, we don't know the specifics, but that's actually the point. Only the free market knows (and the omniscient socialist central planners) what needs to happen and how.

Imagination! We need to get people to use it more.

You wrote: "but when we consider that the 4th and 5th largest lobbyists are the health insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry is it any wonder that america has the most fucked up,backwards health care system on the planet."

You're actually making my point here. In a free market, pharmaceutical companies cannot monopolize what "drugs" people can or cannot take, sell or not sell, and cannot prevent natural alternatives from being promoted. Only with state intervention (by way of IP regulations, and so forth) can they do so.

Free market is not corporatism. Free market is not crony capitalism. (More disinformation that needs to be lifted.)

So you're not countering my free market position, you're countering the crony capitalist position. This is a straw man argument, even if in this case you might not have understood my position in the first place. You, like so many others, equate "capitalism" with cronyism or corporatism. Many cannot conceive of a free market that is free from regulation. So folks then argue against their own interests, either for or against "fascist" vs. "socialist" medicine. The free market is, in fact, outside these two positions.

You wrote: "IF we made medicare available to ALL american citizens we would see a shift from latter stage care to a more aggressive preventive care and early diagnosis. the savings in money (and lives) would be staggering."

I won't go into medicare right now (It is a disaster, and so is the current non-free-market insurance industry. See the article linked in my comment above.)

You wrote "this would create a huge paradigm shift here in america and we would see results almost instantly but more so in the coming decades."

I don't want to be a naysayer but, socialism is nothing new. It has been tried (and failed) many times before. The USSR had socialized medicine. So does Cuba (but then you may believe the Michael Moore fairytale about medicine in Cuba). It's probably better to go see in person how Cubans live and how they have no access to the places that Moore visited.

You wrote: "i feel very strongly that health should be a communal effort.a civilized society should take care of each other."

Really, then why try to force me (or anyone) into your idea of "good" medicine? The free market is a communal effort. In fact, it is nothing else (and nothing else is as communal as the free market). Central planning, socialized, top-down decision-making, is not. Never has been. Never will be.

Voluntary interactions is "taking care of each other." Coercion is not. Socialism is coercion. It cannot "work" any other way. A free market is voluntary cooperation.

Economic calculation is necessary to avoid chaos, whatever the purpose of a service. This is economic law. Unless the purpose is to create chaos, you need real prices and efficiency that only the free market can provide.

I hope this helps to clarify (and not confuse) what I wrote on @eric3579's profile.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

America doesn't exist in a vacuum, there are examples of other countries doing things differently that can serve as a model. Here in Australia we tax the fuck out of big earners like mining companies. The wealth is used for social services and education. This engenders a wide, well-educated middle class.

The government may not have my best interests at heart, but in a democracy, it serves its people. Something that Libertarian-Americans are increasingly forgetting.

@hpqp
I am not at all ashamed of my verbose, self-indulgent dross, so here we go!

Something has to be extra-physical, as least based on our current model. I can fully accept that a brain by itself can receive sensory input, process it against memory, and thus act in a completely human way indistinguishable from a conscious human, but on its own can literally be no more "conscious" than a river flowing down a mountain. Our current view of the physical universe does not tolerate any rational physical explanation of consciousness. Any given moment of human experience - the unified sensory experience and stream of consciousness - does not exist in a single place at a single instant. To suggest that the atoms\molecules\proteins\cells of the brain experience themselves in a unified manner based on their proximity to or electrochemical interaction with each other is magical thinking. Atoms don't do that, and that's all that's there, physically.
I disagree that consciousness is subordinate to cognition in terms of value. Cognition is what makes us who we are and behave as we do, but consciousness is what makes us different from the rest of the jiggling matter in the universe.

A couple of posts back, you challenged my statement about abstinence education as demonstrating a lack of pragmatism. I didn't really address it in my reply, but I'd prefaced it with the understanding that it's not a magical incantation. I know people are still going to have sex, but I suggested that has to be a part of education. People have to know that you can still get pregnant even if you're using the contraceptives that are available. They have to at least know the possibility exists. It's one more thing for them to consider. People are still going to drive recklessly even if you tell them they can crash and kill themselves despite their airbags, seatbelts, and crumple zones, but that doesn't mean it's not worth it to educate them about the possibility. I fail to see how that's not pragmatic.

I didn't reply to your comment about adoption vs abortion because I'm not sure there's anything else to add on either side. As I've said, my beliefs on this are such that even a grossly flawed adoption\orphan care system is preferable to the alternative, even if it means that approximately 10 times the number of children would enter the system than have traditionally been adopted each year. (1.4M abortions annually in the US, ~140K adoptions, but there are several assumptions in that math that wouldn't hold up to scrutiny.) Many right and just things have unpleasant consequences that must be managed. (The typical counter here is that Pro-Lifers tend to also be fiscal\social conservatives and won't fund social services to care for these new individuals they've "protected" into existence. That's just another issue of taking responsibility for the consequences of choices. If they get what they want, they need to be held to account, but it's a separate issue. A related issue, but a separate issue.)

Criminalizing\prohibiting almost any activity results in some degree of risky\dangerous\destructive behavior. Acts must be criminalized because there are individuals who would desire to perform those acts which have been determined to be an unnecessary imposition on the rights of another. Criminalization does not eliminate the desire, but it adds a new factor to consideration. Some will decide the criminalization\prohibition of the act is not sufficient deterrent, but in proceeding, are likely to do so in a different manner than otherwise. The broad consideration is whether the benefits of criminalization\prohibition outweigh the risks posed to\by the percentage who will proceed anyway. Prohibition of alcohol failed the test, I expect the prohibition of certain drugs will be shown to have failed the test..eventually. Incest is illegal, and the "unintended" consequence is freaks locking their families in sheds and basements in horrific conditions, but I think most of us would agree the benefits outweigh the detriment there.

Is putting all would-have-been-aborteds up for adoption abhorrent or absurd? The hump we'll never get over is asking "is it more abhorrent than aborting all of them", because we have different viewpoints on the relative values in play. But is it even a valid question? They won't all be put up for adoption. Some percentage (possibly 5-10 percent) will spontaneously miscarry\abort anyway and some percentage would be raised by a birth parent or by the extended family after all. An initially unwanted pregnancy does not necessarily equate to an unwanted child, for a number of reasons. I do not have statistics on what proportion could be expected to be put up for adoption. Would you happen to? It seems like that would be difficult to extrapolate.

The "'potential' shtick" carries weight in my view because of the uniqueness of the situation. There is no consensus on the "best" way to define when elective abortion is "acceptable". Sagan puts weight on cognition as indicative of personhood. As he states, the Supreme Court set its date based on independent "viability". (More specifically, I feel it should be noted, "potential" viability.) These milestones coincide only by coincidence.
Why is it so easy for us, as you say, to retroproject? And why is this any different from assigning personhood to each of a million individual sperm? For me, it's because of those statistics on miscarriage linked above. The retroprojected "potential" is represented by "percentages". At 3-6 weeks, without deliberate intervention 90% of those masses of cells will go on to become a human being. At 6-12 it's 95%. This is more than strictly "potential", it's nearly guaranteed.

I expect your response will be uncomfortable for both of us, but I wish you would expound on why my "It Gets Better" comparison struck you as inappropriate. Crude, certainly - I'll admit to phrasing it indelicately, even insensitively. I do not think it poorly considered, however. The point of "It Gets Better" is to let LGBT youth know that life does not remain oppressive, negative, and confusing, and that happiness and fulfillment lie ahead if they will only persevere.
It's necessary because as humans, we aren't very good at imagining we'll ever be happy again when surrounded by uncertainty and despair, or especially recognizing the good already around us. We can only see torment, and may not see the point in perpetuating a seemingly-unending chain of suffering when release is so close at hand, though violence against self (or others).
This directly parallels the "quality of life" arguments posed from the pro-choice perspective. They take an isolated slice of life from a theoretical unplanned child and their mother and suggest that this is their lot and that we've increased suffering in the universe, as if no abused child will ever know a greater love, or no poor child will ever laugh and play, and that no mother of an unwanted pregnancy will ever enjoy life again, burdened and poverty-stricken as she is.
As you said, we're expecting a woman to reflect "on what would her and the eventual child’s quality of life be like", but we're so bad at that.
And all that quality-of-life discussion is assuming we've even nailed the demographic on who is seeking abortions in the U.S.
Getting statistics from the Guttmacher Institute, we find that 77% were at or above the federal poverty level and 60% already had at least one child.

On a moral level, absolutely, eugenics is very different debate.
On a practical level, the eugenics angle is relevant because it's indistinguishable from any other elective abortion. Someone who is terminating a pregnancy because their child would be a girl, or gay, or developmentally disabled can very easily say "I'm just not ready for motherhood." And who's to say that's not the mother's prerogative as much as any other elective abortion, if she's considering the future quality of life for herself and the child? "It sucks for girls\gays\downs in today's society and I don't think I can personally handle putting them through that," or more likely "My family and I could never love a child like that, so they would be unloved and I would be miserable for it. This is better for both of us."
Can we write that off as hopefully being yet another edge case? (Keep in mind possibly 65% of individuals seeking abortion declare as Protestant or Catholic, though other statistics show how unreliable "reported religious affiliation" is with regard to actual belief and practice.)

_{"Argumentation"? I have learned a new word today, thanks to hpqp. High five!}

I'm calling social services.

so because taxing the rich doesn't solve the deficit problem by itself

that's the reason not to increase taxes on them at all?

lol

its arguing against something by implying reasoning behind something is something different than it actually is

yes, by itself, increasing taxes on the rich doesn't solve the deficit
but it works toward it
the fact that it doesn't do it WHOLLY on its own is inconsequential... that was never the argument in the first place

cuts will have to be made

defense would be the logical area to look at

or would spending 5,10,15x as opposed to 17x the current defense expenditure of the rest of the world combined be out of the question? lol

the cuts to social services/health care/actual government are a drop in the bucket you could get from defense spending cuts

the cuts as proposed have no possibility of fixing the debt/deficit problems... but they do a good job of making the rich richer, and transferring the financial BURDEN (re: opposite of wealth) to the poor and middle class

>> ^cosmovitelli:

I read your stuff Yogi!
FWIW Involving the US in Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan is all about money and power. Oil, minerals, rate earth shit etc etc.
In Iran they got rid of a benevolent democratically elected progressive who tried to return the oil wealth of the country to its people and replaced him with a foreign sponsored greedy foolish puppet.
When it swung back the other way the clerics took over. Doh!
They used Afghanistan as a proxy war with the soviets, training the mujahideen / aka Taliban fighters in improvised explosives, insurgency warfare and basically how to fuck up a mechanised invading army. Then they invaded. Doh!
In Iraq they supported Saddam despite his demented paranoid savagery until the Iraqi oilfields became too tasty to ignore.
Duck Cheney said it couldn't be done:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BEsZMvrq-I&sns=em
But they upped his end via massive Haliburton projects and installed a puppet moron to keep blaming Iraq for the Saudi attacks on 9/11.
Then they invaded, killing thousands of civilians, and dismantled the police and social services while fucking up the food and water supply. Just for good measure they disbanded the army and sent 375,000 heavily armed young men off to find food for their own families. Doh!
Never mind about panama, chile, Vietnam, Cuba, Russia, Pakistan etc etc.


I'd pretty much agree with your facts. I'm a little less sure on your point.

America helped train and support the Islamic fighter in Afghanistan to chase out the Soviets. America supported Saddam while he was using chemical weapons against Iran and even Iraqi Kurds. America propped up a strong man of their choosing in Iran which backfired and led to the current theocracy.

You needn't look far or very hard to find examples where almost any and every nation has selfishly done very bad things, or things with terrible consequences. America, Russia and China being such large nations, the examples for them are much bigger and numerous. It makes for great propaganda, and all 3 continually make heavy use of it to tarnish each other. America is characterized by the genocide of native americans and Vietnam, Russia by Stalin and China by Mao. It's great propaganda, but it's not insightful or helpful analysis.

Pretend you get be President when Bush Jr. was president. America's narrow self interests are being threatened by terrorism. Bin Laden has extremely close ties with Islamists not only in Afghanistan, but throughout nuclear armed Pakistan. AQ Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, is going around selling nuclear secrets and equipment to the highest bidder. That's an uncomfortably short path from Pakistan's nuclear arsenal to the hands of a very credible terrorist network. Do you demand Pakistan break it's ties with the Taliban, or just let it slide? Do you demand the Afghan Taliban break ties with Al Qaeda, or just let it slide? I think selfish American interest DID dictate making those two demands, and being willing to launch a war if they were refused.

I think that is a strong argument that the Afghan war was indeed a good thing from the perspective of America's narrow self-interest.

What about the Afghan people though? Their self interest depends on what the end game is, and nobody can predict that. What we DO know is that the formerly ruling Taliban hated women's rights, and we fought against them. What we DO know is that the formerly ruling Taliban burnt off more of Afghanistan's vineyards than even the Russians had, because making wine was anathema to their cult. What we DO know is that the Taliban was one of the most brutal, backwards and hateful organizations around.

I can not say that the Afghan war ensured a better future for Afghanistan's people. What I CAN say is that leaving the Taliban in power in Afghanistan ensured a dark, bleak and miserable future for Afghanistan's people. I would modestly propose that a chance at something better was a good thing.

I read your stuff Yogi!

FWIW Involving the US in Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan is all about money and power. Oil, minerals, rate earth shit etc etc.

In Iran they got rid of a benevolent democratically elected progressive who tried to return the oil wealth of the country to its people and replaced him with a foreign sponsored greedy foolish puppet.
When it swung back the other way the clerics took over. Doh!

They used Afghanistan as a proxy war with the soviets, training the mujahideen / aka Taliban fighters in improvised explosives, insurgency warfare and basically how to fuck up a mechanised invading army. Then they invaded. Doh!

In Iraq they supported Saddam despite his demented paranoid savagery until the Iraqi oilfields became too tasty to ignore.

Duck Cheney said it couldn't be done:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BEsZMvrq-I&sns=em

But they upped his end via massive Haliburton projects and installed a puppet moron to keep blaming Iraq for the Saudi attacks on 9/11.
Then they invaded, killing thousands of civilians, and dismantled the police and social services while fucking up the food and water supply. Just for good measure they disbanded the army and sent 375,000 heavily armed young men off to find food for their own families. Doh!

Never mind about panama, chile, Vietnam, Cuba, Russia, Pakistan etc etc.

Good luck on the revolution front. Not only do we need a new foundation on how we deal with corporations, police, military, science, religion/state, prisons, health-care, lawmaking, politics, policy foreign/domestic, executive functions state or country, emergency response systems, logistics roads/bridges/railroad, infrastructure, welfare and societal needs, energy, money/goods, trade, etc...

Like he said, we need a new foundation on our psychology. What we teach our children is bunk, it will make the majority of them happy for a few fleeting moments and unhappy the rest of their lives. We need to find a new foundation to help find happiness for everyone for the majority of their entire life--without resorting to competition and instead combining our strengths and creating a great community.

I'd wager the closest you'll get is to literally do education completely different than what we do now. Start at an early age and give the children a glimpse of ALL trades to be used and learned in the world. Over time find what they excel at and LIKE doing and help them achieve their goal in that field. Then continually narrow the field as they get older so they can truly become a master at something, like a chemical engineer. Education would, graphically, look more like a giant plinko board that students slowly make their way down and filter themselves into the field THEY want. If we supported students all the way PASS college to the point they were job ready (and in fact you could perhaps harmonize corporations into the mix, so that when you get your degree not only have you most likely interned/researched at the place you will work gaining practical knowledge you are ready day one out of school to start a job you LOVE and excel at.

I know you'll get clumps and pools of people in places you may not have uses for them, but if we truly put our minds to it I bet we could find a way to still get the method to work (I know corporations won't necessarily do what I said except in--most likely-- the science fields, but having just a few large companies do it would help). Then if we lived a slower paced life, with more time off to OURSELVES than in slavery to someone else you might see a change in the overall attitude of our community and maybe civilization. Help people pay for modest houses and maybe even some furniture. Cover healthcare needs for each other, maybe even other social services as well. Tone the military down to a defensive one, one that can defend us, but can only truly become a real war machine like what happened in WWII.

Granted, there would be a lot to work out, but I highly doubt it's impossible to create a GREAT life here on this planet if we all work together to make it happen. Hell, we walked on the fucking moon! I know most of this will require not only leaps in science and with those leaps, hopefully ,soon, some of those bring about leaps in the psychology fields helping us to genetically weed out sociopaths, psychopaths, unipolar, bipolar, borderline, Asperger's, sever depression/anxiety, OCDs, addictions, etc... Plus with expanded bio-engineering, especially in genetics, if we could make sure people atleast have an IQ of say 120 (hell if you truly find the master switch--just turn it up), get rid of all genetic diseases and birth imperfections, rid us of deafness, blindness, baldness, etc... Then add in the advancements in bio-engineering on the mechanical, nanotechnological, electronics, and computers and we'll have one hell of a ride (of course if we haven't solved the psychological issues by then, we will almost certainly kill ourselves off). But, that stuff is 50 years away with some probably 150-200 years away. If we can help stabilize our humanity, through engineering and perfecting our psychology, I really believe we'll have a chance one day to see some sort of Utopian society.

Everything he talked about most likely leads to something that MIGHT be better than what we had. But, it won't be here in the U.S. and I doubt it'll even be in Asia (China, South Korea, and Japan). Europe, excluding the U.K. has a chance, with northern Europe having a better chance. You never quite know who history will choose next to bring the next big leap in progress to the human civilization.

/I didn't think I'd write something so long about that. Oh well, I just felt like sharing a little more optimistic view on what could happen to we humans.

That list of American crimes in the video is just the beginning, America's assassination of the democratically elected Prime Minister of Congo in 1960 and subsequent installation of a dictator (Mobutu) has led to countless millions of deaths. Just in the decade between 1998-2008 there were 5.4 million deaths from Malaria, diarrhea, pneumonia and malnutrition.

"Most of the deaths are due to easily treatable and preventable diseases through the collapse of health systems and the disruption of livelihoods,"

from http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/01/22/us-congo-democratic-death-idUSL2280201220080122

These figures also don't shed light on the fact that the Congo is the rape capital of the world, and the absolute greed of Mobutu (when he was alive) - "Besides what Mobutu siphoned off and stole, he paid himself generously. His personal salary was 17% of the state budget. By 1989, he officially received $100 million a year to spend as he wished, more than the government spent on education, health and social services combined."

http://articles.latimes.com/1997/sep/08/news/mn-30058

Here is a list of some other regime changes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_U.S._regime_change_actions

The question I'm annoyed they didn't pursue in sufficient depth was the one alluded to on a baseline of social services. I think it's all well and good to argue that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector. Certainly, especially if you're talking about easily traversable state lines in a country like the US, that there is migration to lower tax levels may say nothing more than that states overall benefit from the government spending (say R&D) around them and thereby there is an incentive to mooch off the collective spending and yet employ a lower tax rate in your own state to enable more jobs to be created.

The crux of the argument when you start talking about replacing social security solely with a mandatory super scheme (which by itself as an addition is good policy, we have it here in Australia at 9%, soon to go up to 12%) is not which one generates more income in the long run, it's whether you are fine with entirely replacing it and facing the prospect that someone down on their luck, perhaps mentally or physically handicapped in some way, stuck in a place of low social mobility is allowed by society as a whole to die because there is no scheme in place to assist them. At that point I think you expose the morally callous argument that he's making.

9/11 Motivated Excessive Fiscal Spending

The wars are a tiny portion of the debt.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/02/osama-bin-laden-dead-war-on-terror-costs_n_856390.html

"If Congress also approves the president’s FY2012 war-funding request, the cumulative cost of post-9/11 operations would reach $1.415 trillion"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt

"As of October 22, 2011, the gross debt was $14.94 trillion."

This is not even addressing the point that the Iraq war had nothing to do with 9/11. You're going to have to explain your lack of conservative bona fides when Bush was in power another way.

Banks should have been allowed to fail

Not bailing out the banks would have trashed the economy. When banks fail, financing dries up, businesses can't meet their short term cash flow requirements and they default. The economy collapses. The end. It doesn't matter how you're ideologically attuned to government assistance in times of crisis, that this would have happened is simply a fact.

Better yet follow it through further. When banks collapse, without federal deposit insurance, individuals lose their personal savings. How far would you follow through your rigid and impractical ideological principles? Would you say free markets dictate they lose their savings for the bad judgement of those in the financial services industry.

Keynesian Fiscal Policy Works

Every other major economy is doing it. Take a look at how much China spent and how it's barely sputtered in growth. Every economist worth a damn is saying the US is not spending enough to prop up the economy. That whatever you're reading is drawing a comparison FDR rather than you know, something in the last 50 years should tell you they're full of the BS.

If you go back and read forecasts for unemployment before Obama was inaugurated, none of them expected to fall significantly or quickly in a short period of it. The prolonged European debt crisis has exacerbated that. Unemployment falling marginally is not evidence that stimulus spending does not work.

Look, what is it about fiscal spending that you don't understand? Economic uncertainty in Europe. Businesses don't know what demand will be like, so they sit on their money instead of investing or hiring more workers. Countries face that risk that as they wait, short term unemployed become long term unemployed because they've been out of the workforce and skills atrophy. So they spend in the short term to keep people employed or incentive through deductions for companies to hire. Tax cuts improve returns marginally. Spending to keep people employed reduces the cost of social services in the long-long term from people being shunned out of the workforce. You spend but you make your money back over time.

It's simple. And it makes perfect logical sense.

How is it that hard to understand?

The rest

I'll be honest, your writing manner makes you look stupid when you're trying to make factual arguments. Have you seen a newspaper article or dissertation written like this? No. Exactly.

FYI, I live in Australia. We have free hospital visits, virtually no government debt, almost record low unemployment and we never went into a recession. Funnily enough Keynesian fiscal policy works over here, must be an anomaly though.

>> ^quantumushroom:

The question that can't be answered is whether Bush would've spent like the amateur liberal he is without 9-11. There was plenty of criticism leveled at Bush by the right during his tenure. The left was so focused on ensuring America lost in Iraq it didn't have time to thank Bush for rubber stamping all of their usual failed social "programs".
The failouts and scamulus sealed Bush 43's legacy as a failure. Everyone should've been "allowed" to fail.
Now enter His Earness. Questionable background, no experience, gets shunted through by obeisant media fawns. Tries the same Keynesian BS that FDR did with predictable results. As FDR's antics prolonged the Depression by a decade, so His Earness has spent and spent with nothing to show for it but enormous new debt (and no WW2 to save his bacon). Now this regime's media says with a straight face that the scamuli "prevented even worse unemployment". Hippie PLEASE.
We've now had six years of Taxocrats running Congress...what's better now than before?
You are going to have to defend the indefensible next year. Be sure to vote November 3rd.




>> ^RedSky:
@quantumushroom
QM, my problem with your point of view is throughout Bush's term, you didn't appear to have any issues with his profligacy as he (and the Republican congress at the time) pushed through bill after a bill that took the country massively into debt. Now your concerns are presumably that in the worst economic crisis in 60 years, the Democrat government is spending too much to prop up the economy and prevent the skills of the short term unemployment stagnating and turning into the long term unemployed dependent on social benefits.
Where are your standards here?
Or your consistency?

>> ^rougy:

@bcglorf,
The problem I have with your point of view mainly rests on the presumption that the people who were defrauded "got what they deserved." I just don't see it that way. It's sort of justifying the bankers actions.
When somebody who is in a position of power and respect, as are most bankers and investors I would say, you can't blame John & Jane Doe for trusting in their advice.
The bankers and investors should have known better, and the vast majority of them did, but that didn't stop them from spreading the lies and conning people into signing their lives away.
P.S. - I hope Greece defaults. Something is rotten in Denmark when entire countries must go bust in order to satisfy Wall Street.


The people I figure were defrauded were the ones investing in the companies that were carrying terrible bad mortgages but calling themselves grade A safe investments. Those investors were defrauded and have very serious cause for concern as they were outright lied to by people wanting to profit off them.

As for the people buying homes at inflated prices, I would say they hold some blame and some plain old bad luck. The ones that took on mortgages they could only afford if the home increased in price I do blame pretty readily. They took a big risk, and risk were they were informed. They knew that they were betting on housing prices increasing. They knew the terms they were betting under and what it would mean if they won or lost the bet. They lost and should take the loss. The banks encouraging and focusing on those bets lost as many times over as they had customers lured in. The difference is the banks were pocketing more profit and got tax payer assistance to cushion their loss while the customers were left to deal on their own. I'd prefer both were left to deal with the consequences.

As for Greece, I've only scratched beneath the surface still, but it is looking like their debt problems run much deeper than just social services spending. I'm very curious were the real turning/tipping point in this was. If anyone has any good advice aside from the lead Rougy already threw out that'd be great. My current trail is the 40% of the Greek economy that was purely public sector jobs. That makes for a house of cards that's very vulnerable to government cut backs. My province(Manitoba) is in that very same boat and it is federal transfer funds from the federal government alone that is keeping us afloat.

>> ^rougy:

>> ^bcglorf:
Can someone explain the Greek riots to me? I've only followed far enough to have picked up that they are in opposition to the austerity measures being enacted by government? What I've heard sounds like the government spent so much on social services that it went bankrupt, and the protesters are angry that the government is now attempting to cut back it's social services.
I'm not of strong opinion on this like I am in many other situations, but the balance of what I've heard sounds like the anti-austerity protests are so much whining that everyone wants their free money and maybe if we shoot the messenger the economy will recover.

The brunt of it is that Greece is in trouble, and the majority of people who will have to pay for it, or endure "austerity" as the fatcats like to say, had nothing, zero, to do with the trouble.
I've been trying to find out what went wrong there, but I see a lot of smoke and few specifics.
Naturally, any time the blame can be laid on social programs, then that narrative will be most promoted among America's mainstream media.
Frankly I think it was a combination of things, and some of it may have been related to the same CDO swindle that bankrupted Iceland.
But I'm sure you'll agree that if Greece went nuclear, all of their problems would be solved...just like Japan's....

EDIT:
Two words: Goldman Sachs.
Goldman was criticized for its involvement in the 2010 European sovereign debt crisis. Goldman Sachs is reported to have systematically helped the Greek government mask the true facts concerning its national debt between the years 1998 and 2009.[76] In September 2009, Goldman Sachs, among others, created a special credit default swap (CDS) index to cover of high risk of Greece's national debt.[77] The interest-rates of Greek national bonds have soared to a very high level, leading the Greek economy very close to bankruptcy in March and May 2010 and again in June 2011.
(Wikipedia)


Thanks Rougy, that's the kind of starting point I was looking for. I was hoping getting the opinions of few folks on here who'd already researched the matter was a faster place to start than wading through the sea of information out there blindly.

Still sounds as though Sachs role in this was to help the Greek government irresponsibly spend itself into oblivion. I'm still curious, and will have to dig, what that money was spent on. I know even in my country(Canada) our social services are scaled well back from Greece's, and ours are already at the breaking point of what our tax revenues can bear. Added into that is our taxes are generally higher than those in Greece and it seems that Sachs helped them postpone the inevitable, and made it worse. None the less, it also sounds like the population were the recipients or targets of the majority of the money and are now more angry at the slowing of the spending than at the debt load.

Again I'll have to look at it further. As one poster tried to call me out, I am not strongly convicted and convinced my opinion on this is correct or accurate, I have merely expressed without hedging or hiding what I hold to based on what I admit as my limited information and am asking to be proven wrong to speed my process of correcting my opinion should it be based on wrong assumptions. Rougy's pointed a big path I wasn't aware of. Anyone else have some more? Particularly around where Greece's government revenues come from and were they are spent? My perception that most of it is going right back to public services is pretty central to my opinion and I'd love to know if I'm wrong on it.