(note to self: besides the "Honey Wrestling," Lithuania is looking more and more appealing...)

I do not have faith that a competitive free market is a workable scenario for ALL services and/or products, even. Fact of the matter remains that, for many services offered under a competitive free market, the efficiency is actually quite low.

Yaroslavvb - you mentioned health care...do you realize that, for many URGENT procedures, here in the U.S.(cancer treatment, for one), in many cases there's no real "waiting list," but many patients often die waiting for their insurance companies to negotiate the terms of the treatment with the hospitals?

Cancer treatment is, of course, only an example - many other examples can be found with a simple craigslist ad, as often the most urgent cases do not reach the hospital until all of the details between insurance companies and service providers get resolved.

In my opinion, the insurance system is an incredible fraud. It exists to minimize risk, essentially, which allows many conspicuously expensive lawsuits to occur simply because, when it comes to court, it ends up being one person and his lawyer versus somebody else's insurance company. The risk to be minimized is often not explained, and falls on the "common person" to pay the penalties of, as the insurance companies often do not explain the technicalities of the risks they cover(nor do "common people" expect their language to be convoluted in such a way as to deny them service on a technicality).

It is also another opinion of mine to have noticed that the risk that is often to be minimized by such fraudulent insurance companies is often the risk of loss of stability - a stability which never existed in the first place, and still does not exist, no matter how much insurance a person has.

No - I think that the answer to American health care problems can not be solved by private industry. To me, the entire system that we are upholding, in such a way, makes an excellent analogy to Isaac Asimov's conception of Trantor in his "Foundation" series of books - that the United States is, in essence, a country mostly devoid of manufacturing and production capabilities(except for many insignificant, and essentially useless products like movies and music), and exists only to attempt to serve as a bureaucratic "glue" for what may some day become a global empire.

There's just one catch - the "common person" can not see beyond the forest for the trees, so a "global empire," to them, is quite nonexistent - even if those humans that do not represent the "common person" perceive it any differently. For this reason, a system to minimize risk, to attempt to hold onto "stability" as desperately as it can, can not exist for long.

Please note that "common people" represent 99.x% of the population of this planet. When it comes time that they are truly fed up, they tend to act with swift, and often painful, consequences.

One could generalize and say that they are not "civilized," but I ask you - what benefits have we gained from subscribing to this wonderful invention known as "civilization?"

Sorry, but I don't think I'll base my belief system on what Pen & Teller or Isaac Asimov say.

“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.”

- Isaac Asimov

Great post. How sad is it that we can send a man to the moon.. and gigabits of information as bits of light, yet the world still follows leaders (ours included) who abuse religion for power?

“I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow, it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally, I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.”
-- Isaac Asimov