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Who What Now posted:Fixed that for you. Either way Unicron eats Libertopia so I suppose how he's humiliated is irrelevant.
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Jan 18, 2016 02:22
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Hey jrodefeld, was it your mother who raised you to be a cowardly little baby who runs from anything he can't address and/or refuse to acknowledge that it exists? Is she the one we should blame for your refusal to own up to your actions, or should that blame also be passed to your grandparents for lending you a hand by paying for "medical bills" (which might have been completely unnecessary, see: your dentist bills) when the free market proved that you were too incompetent to manage your own finances?
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Jan 18, 2016 02:33
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jrodefeld posted:Nope, it's you who has misunderstood my views. I fully understand the reality of demand elasticity but that doesn't explain what you think it does vis a vis the healthcare economy. Yes, you are not going to demand more heart transplants if the price is lower nor will you likely demand fewer if they are higher, until that point where you absolutely cannot find a way to get the money needed for the surgery and resign yourself to death. But much of medicine is elective and demand is very elastic depending on the cost. If the cost is free, or at least hidden for you and outsourced to another third party, you will have the incentive to have routine check-ups more frequently, have excess and unnecessary diagnostic tests like x-rays and MRIs, see chiropractors or message therapists, and many other health treatments. Literally "untreated nagging health issues are a good thing that needs to be protected". Literally too loving dumb to understand that a cornucopia of ailments do not present themselves as no symptoms/needs immediate intensive surgery and days in the ICU afterwards. Literally too loving stupid to understand that getting treatment for a ton of ailments when they're at the "just a little nagging pain that doesn't need a doctor's appointment" before they blow up into life threatening pocket busting catastrophes is why UHC is always so much cheaper per capita compared to the free market thunderdome grab garbage bag of parlor tricks presented in the US as a frankenstein's menagerie of health insurance debacles.
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Jan 18, 2016 02:38
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The Mattybee posted:Hey jrodefeld, was it your mother who raised you to be a cowardly little baby who runs from anything he can't address and/or refuse to acknowledge that it exists? Is she the one we should blame for your refusal to own up to your actions, or should that blame also be passed to your grandparents for lending you a hand by paying for "medical bills" (which might have been completely unnecessary, see: your dentist bills) when the free market proved that you were too incompetent to manage your own finances? Yes. He denies it when you say it so bluntly but he absolutely is a libertarian is because his mommy was and said so at the beginning of his posting career.
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Jan 18, 2016 02:39
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I am pressed for time, but despite my better judgement I am going to address you instead of just using progressively font increased profanities. Assuming I have more time tomorrow I will give a more in depth breakdown.jrodefeld posted:Hi y’all. gently caress you. Just wanted to get this out of the way because you can't start with this and then vomit out the despicable poo poo that follows you ratfucker. quote:Hope everyone had a good holiday season. Personally, I was quite busy and family obligations kept me away from things I otherwise would have been doing. The reason I sometimes post sporadically on here is that I have an active social and professional life and, as much as I might want to, posting on internet forums merely to satisfy my desire for intellectually stimulating debate simply has to be sacrificed when more pressing matters are at hand. I work twelve hours a day six days a week and still make time to hang out with friends three days a week. Cut your stupid bullshit 'I have a real life so I can't come and talk all the time' bullshit. quote:With that said, let me reiterate my desire to have a written debate with one of you, one on one, where hopefully a more fully fleshed out discussion can take place. I have to find the time to dedicate to the exercise because I don’t want to short-change my positions. I can accept one poster at a time, with a clear topic and a defined time limit, which as I proposed, should be about three days. I think Caros had first dibs on a debate with me. I still don't really understand the point of a written debate over using a microphone since it'll be like arguing with the wind, but if you remain too much of a coward to manage to find a one to two hour block of free time at any point in your life then it cannot be helped. And don't plead poverty either because your pirate Blu-Ray failures aside I will still buy you a microphone. quote:In the meantime, however, I’d like to continue with a discussion I was having with Caros the last time I posted here. I was again pushing back against him for the narrative that he told whereby he abandoned libertarian ideas after the death of his friend due to her inability to pay for the healthcare that presumably would have cured the disease and allowed her to live a normal lifespan or at least many more years. This is a personal tragedy that I empathize with and I think that every well-meaning person wants a reasonable standard of medical care to be available to all people so premature deaths due to an inability to receive a medical intervention are either eliminated or reduced to the greatest possible degree. The narrative? Please go and stab yourself in the eyesocket with a rusty screwdriver. This isn't a narrative it is an objective fact. It is -32 degrees out where I live and I stopped being a libertarian because premature deaths due to inability to pay is loving abhorrent. quote:Where I sharply disagree is the baseless insinuation that the inability of the United States medical care system to adequately provide options for people like Caros’s friend implicates a rebuttal of libertarian ideology. This means one of two things. Either Caros never really understood libertarian ideology, or at least didn’t during the time when he identified as a libertarian, or the emotional trauma of losing a close friend was so great that a logical re-evaluation of his positions was not possible. Or, and just bear with me here, I am able to extrapolate. The US healthcare system is more free than the Canadian one by any metric. If what liberarianism suggests was true then the US system would by definition have to be more efficient and have better outcomes for people. But it doesn't. Despite being the strongest example of a market based healthcare system in the world, the US healthcare system has some of the words efficacy and usability of any modern healthcare system on the face of the planet. What you are arguing is essentially 'no true freemarket' at its finest. You claim that because the US system has some government intervention (and it does have substantial I will grant) that we can't use it as an example of a market based system. But its competitors are in most cases not at all market based systems, and yet those systems routinely beat the ever loving poo poo out of the US. We are about two years into this argument at this point and I have still yet to hear you explain why the US fails by almost every metric despite being objectively more market based than its competition. Does the market only work when it is absolutely 100% free? quote:I’m not saying that there are no good reasons for abandoning libertarianism. However, the reasons that Caros has thus far provided as to his initial abandonment of the ideology are absurd. Even a cursory examination of the literature would reveal that libertarian thinkers have been harshly critical of the United States healthcare system for decades. What do you think are good reasons for abandoning libertarianism? I'm genuinely curious. Also gently caress you. The fact that your thinkers don't like the US system does not discount the basic problem with it. I don't like the Canadian system, I think the british NHS is far superior and that we should be following their model far more significantly than we do, but that doesn't somehow mean that I am going to argue that the Canadian system is not an example of socialized healthcare when it clearly is. quote:The United States has not had anything resembling a free market in medical care (with a few notable exceptions) for at least fifty to sixty years. Health care is one of the most heavily regulated and distorted markets in the US economy, with massive amounts of State expropriated and redistributed tax dollars flooding into subsidies, welfare programs, research projects, and crony capitalist coffers (pharmaceutical and insurance companies). It doesn't matter if it is closer to the Canadian systems. It matters that it is more market based and thus a better example of your system unless you are arguing that the free market system cannot work unless it is 100% free. Which is absurd and also a useless metric because we do not have a 100% free market in anything on the face of the world. quote:I want to now state my understanding of the situation with Caros’s friend, why I believe she was unable to acquire the needed healthcare services at an affordable price, and why I am convinced that she would have been far better off with an actual libertarian free-market medical care system. She was in her early twenties. She had health insurance but the concept of health insurance pre-PPACA was a loving joke in the US and her insurance wouldn't begin to cover the cost of her treatment. The illness was brain cancer. Had she and her parents been able to pay every cent they had (and then some incidentally) they could have paid for her treatment which had a 95% five year survival rate. You know the kind of cancer you get better from? That was the kind she had. Treatment for her first round of illness would have run about $40,000 and to be fully in remission she expected it would be about $120,000 or more. You could have found all of this by searching my post history in the other thread you know. quote:Now, to my mind, your friend died due to the lack of a free market in medical care not because we don’t have total healthcare socialism. The problems with the American medical care system have to do with a century of State interventions, artificial price inflation, regulatory restrictions that reduce the number and variety of medical care services on the market, patent laws on pharmaceutical drugs coupled with prohibitions on the free importation of drugs manufactured in other countries, a systematic crackdown on mutual aid societies and charity hospitals and a near-elimination on price competition that is inevitable when you have a third party payer system such that patients and doctors don’t negotiate on price and most doctors don’t have to compete with other doctors on price to entice consumers. Your mind is wrong. As I have explained multiple times I know precisely how her treatment would have gone in Canada because I have personally been lobbying on this issue for years at this point. The maximum wait time for her exact type of cancer in Canada's socialized system, from diagnosis to first day is nine work days. Typical wait times have her into treatment in under a week. This is not wishful thinking or what we'd ideally like, this is objective fact based on cancer treatment rates in Canada. By contrast in the US she still would have been unable to recieve treatment because poor people don't receive medical treatment when medical treatment is rationed by price. You fucker. quote:For you, Caros, to believe that this extent of State intervention and distortion in the healthcare sector of the economy constitutes an approximation of libertarian policies can only mean that you don’t know much of anything about libertarianism. You’ve demonstrated that you know the names of major libertarian thinkers and have shown some familiarity with their work, yet perhaps you’ve been too busy trying to “out the racists” and find ways to classify libertarians as bigots, sexists, homophobes, or whatever than in comprehending the economic arguments on their own merits. For you Jrod, to still be making this argument despite the fact that I have debunked it probably at least a dozen times in the past is frankly insulting. I am fully aware that libertarians decry the US as not being an example of free-market healthcare, but as a logical person I am also capable of acknowledging history and established fact. The US is still the most market based example of healthcare in the developed world and it is also the most dysfunctional. These two things are connected on every single level and every single good thing in the US healthcare system can be traced to the aspects of it that are socialized. Medicare, the VA, medical research, all of this comes off the government teat, while the disgusting and failtastic parts are all the result of profit seeking off basic human misery. quote:Let me run down a few reasons why your friend would have been much better off in a libertarian society than in either a fascistic corporatist State-distorted healthcare system like in the United States or in a left-socialist healthcare system like in Canada. Your argument here is based on nothing but faith. You argue that medical prices will magically drop like a rock based on nothing more than 'hurrrr supply and demand hurrrrr'. That said I don't have time to address this further right now as I'm already running late in my social engagements. Look at one of the other seventy something posts for a better debunk. quote:This is actually not just an abstract and speculative discussion. We have actual examples of areas of medicine that are still relatively free market. Lasik eye surgery is one example. Prices continue to decline while the effectiveness of the procedure continues to advance and improve. You can now cure many kinds of vision problems for under $2000. Cosmetic surgery is another example. Technology has similarly advanced in cosmetic surgery yet prices have fallen which is in stark contrast to much of insurance-covered, State-regulated and subsidized healthcare. These are elective surgeries. Do you not understand the difference between the want and a need? If I 'want' fake tits I can go and shop around for them, get the best deals etc. If I 'need' heart surgery because I collapsed clutching my chest I am going to go to the nearest hospital. Do you really not understand after all this time how there is a difference between elective and necessary treatment. Get hosed. quote:There are even areas in medicine where maverick doctors have found ways to get out from the burden of insurance and State regulations to deal in a purely free market. I’ve mentioned it before, but the Oklahoma Surgery Center is a very good example of how many common surgical procedures could be made available to people as affordable, out-of-pocket expenditures in a free market. The cost savings in comparison to third party payer based hospitals are dramatic. I debunked your OSC bullshit in the last thread and you ignored me and talked about racism. When I get home I will look up the post and drop it for you here. The short version is that the OSC is a clinic that does elective outpatient surgery on a mostly cash only basis. They go around the idea of insurers which drops their overhead (and thus their prices) drastically. They do not have to take in emergency patients or anyone else who are unable to pay. Their services increase to the national average price the moment insurance gets involved and the only reason their business model is able to function is because they handle a very specific subset of things that are profitable. This is not a model that shows that all healthcare can be cheaper. It is in essence exactly like your Hong Kong arguments, something that looks good on paper, but ignores the fact that it is largely a one off that only works within very confined conditions. Let me ask you a simple question. If the OSC can provide services so cheaply and is an example of the libertarian model that you espouse being so great, why is it essentially a one off? Why aren't clinics like this popping up all over the country? The answer is because it is a model that only works under very specific and precarious circumstances. It is like when Rush Limbaugh had his heart attack. He got rushed in and saw a heart surgeon that day. Best medical care in the world, if you can pay out of pocket. quote:If your friend had access to a free-market surgical center that provided procedures for cancer (tumor excision for one example) and the cost was less than $10,000 I feel fairly confident that she would have been able to get the money needed for such treatment even without access to insurance. No, she probably wouldn't have been able to without undue financial burden because she was still a 20 something living paycheck to paycheck with an insurer who dropped her like a sack of poo poo when it came time to actually pay out what she was paying in for. Also gently caress you. quote:I already know what your response will be. Without actually reading this book or learning a bit about the history of such fraternal orders, you will nevertheless argue that such societies could never cover the needs of everyone in society and, thus, the welfare State is needed. Leaving aside the obvious fact that such a counter-factual history is hard to prove (what would have happened if social welfare programs had not crowded out private charity efforts during the progressive era and instead the mutual aid model had been allowed to expand and proliferate as the economy grew?), the indisputable fact is that fraternal orders were very successful for those that had access to them and such mutual aid societies are no longer with us. If this model were allowed to exist in contemporary America by eliminating licensing requirements, regulations, and other State restrictions, mutual aid societies could again be available and would, at the very least, alleviate SOME of the problem by providing needed social services to those who still could not afford the drastically lower free market prices that would certainly exist as the examples of the Oklahoma Surgery Center and Dr Umbehr’s family practice prove. Other posters have already brought this up, but just to reiterate, mutual aid societies and fraternal orders are essentially insurance with very low capital. These programs are great when things are good and collapse completely when they are actually needed the most. Social security didn't spring up fully formed out of nowhere, it came as a result of the failure of programs like these, when people realized that the systems they were using to manage risk were utter failures. Why do you think mutual aid societies went away Jrodefeld? Seriously, that is one thing I've never really seen you address. Do you think they are 'no longer with us' because of the big scary government? Or could it be because communities had these exact models only to watch them collapse when the groups that were running them fell on bad times? I specifically ask because there are modern analogs to these programs. Just like there were unlicensed insurance (which was also really bigotted by the way, because it omitted people of color, women etc) there are still places today that run unregulated banks. In spain they had what were called cajas that controlled up to half of spain's financial system. Do you know what happened? They were run by people who had basically no idea what they were doing, and when they did pop they imploded the spanish financial system. Unregulated doesn't mean good, particularly when it comes to finance and medicine. quote:So Caros, I’d ask you to now, in light of the overwhelming evidence that the healthcare system in the United States over the past fifty years has nothing to do with any proposed libertarian solution, to either admit to making a gross error in thinking that it did when you rejecting your previous libertarian beliefs. Or you are free to elaborate on your reasons for rejecting it but the experience with losing your friend, as emotionally distressing as that no doubt was, provides absolutely no argument against libertarianism whatsoever. Your concession to this fact would mean we are at least making progress. You and I have very different definitions of overwhelming. You have provided nothing but hot air as you state over and over again that this isn't 'real' libertarianism because it doesn't meet your perfect standards even though it is the closest modern example.
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Jan 18, 2016 02:42
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Who What Now posted:If anyone wants a TL;DR of Jrodimus' post: VERY misleading. They're pirated Blu Rays.
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Jan 18, 2016 02:45
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Jared Fogel with a copy of Human Action stuffed in your gullet, you're a sniveling pig and coward and you won't address a word of this post because it demolishes whatever vomits been poured in your brain cave.quote:Fraternal organizations, long before running into the clutch plague, were facing an uphill demographic issue regarding aging members and flat payment systems despite playing a rousing game of adverse selection (people over 45 were rarely permited to join) coupled with competitive pricing against the more regulated traditional insurance market by holding down reserves. The problem of fraternal organizations lacking reserves compelled fraternal organizations to create the Fraternal National Congress in 1887 with a major point of concern being reserves and forthright actuarial tables. Fraternal orders were going bust long before the 1920s, long before the AMA started passing legislation, long before private insurance and welfare existed, and managed to only hobble along as long as they did because of federal and state intervention regarding their behavior, miserable offensive monster. President Kucinich fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Jan 18, 2016 |
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Jan 18, 2016 02:46
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Karia posted:VERY misleading. I know, but I have a feeling Jrod lies and they're actually plain DVDs because it gives lower overhead.
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Jan 18, 2016 02:56
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Where'd this pirate DVD thing come from, I feel there is forum history I have missed
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Jan 18, 2016 03:11
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Nessus posted:Where'd this pirate DVD thing come from, I feel there is forum history I have missed Somebody mentioned it the other day over in the libertarian/jrod thread, but said they didn't want to doxx him by going into details.
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Jan 18, 2016 03:13
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Nessus posted:Where'd this pirate DVD thing come from, I feel there is forum history I have missed Jrode, like many libertarians, is really loose on protecting intellectual property rights, because he's never created any worthwhile intellectual property.
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Jan 18, 2016 03:14
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Nessus posted:Where'd this pirate DVD thing come from, I feel there is forum history I have missed http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3636681&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=340#post454982854
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Jan 18, 2016 03:14
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Nessus posted:Where'd this pirate DVD thing come from, I feel there is forum history I have missed It was logically deduced from first principles.
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Jan 18, 2016 03:18
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paragon1 posted:http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3636681&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=340#post454982854  Jrod, did you ever answer /u/beertastic's question? How did you get the rights to sell Hard Boiled on Blue-ray?
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Jan 18, 2016 03:18
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^^^^^^^^^ That's definitely his horrid writing style, all right. Nessus posted:Where'd this pirate DVD thing come from, I feel there is forum history I have missed Googling "Jrodefeld" leads to a Reddit user profile of the same name, where all the posts are shilling for a Favebook group selling "rescued" Hong Kong movies burned onto Blurays. This has led to the obvious conclusion jrod's job is selling bootleg pirated movies. I'm reasonably certain he's even alluded here on the forums that he runs his own online business, so it checks out. But yeah, I'm not digging deeper because I don't want to doxx Jrod, even if he is a fucker.
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Jan 18, 2016 03:21
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Are those films public domain or what Also, what is the most libertarian kung fu movie, JRode? Can you tell us which ones feature the master charging the student for the value of his teaching and training him in the Sovereign Citizen Fist?
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Jan 18, 2016 03:25
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Nessus posted:Are those films public domain or what Jrod had gone on record saying he doesn't believe in or respect intellectual property rights, soooooo...
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Jan 18, 2016 03:29
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He would also write screeds on comcast help forums about how them throttling him for multiple terabytes of usage per month (which he claimed was easily achieved through casual music and video streaming... definitely NOT torrents!) was ruining his life. Jrod is a liar and likely a petty criminal who uses Libertarianism as post hoc justification for basically being an awful human being.
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Jan 18, 2016 03:34
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Nessus posted:Are those films public domain or what To be fair, many of them are not properly copyright registered for the US, and yes some of them are completely in the public domain as far as the US is concerned. It's not all copyright violations!
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Jan 18, 2016 03:38
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Honestly I asked Jrod because I was curious if he did the homework here and found that there was no copyright registration for some of those films. Supercop and Hard Boiled I'm guessing no since Supercop got a US release and Hard Boiled got a DVD release by Dragon Dynasty which normally only releases films the Weinstein Company has the rights to, but Drunken Master I have no idea and could believe is actually public domain because it was never registered right.
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Jan 18, 2016 03:47
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jrodefeld posted:Since we're trading insults over who actually lacks economic literacy, I have to also point out that many of you don't believe that having a primarily third party payer system drives up the cost of medical care higher than it would otherwise be in a free market. Well now that all depends. Everyone recognizes that having insurance companies as a big behemoth middle-man drives up costs. Health insurance infrastructure was not built up to reduce cost, it was built up to ensure that as many people as possible are able to get health care without having to totally compromise capitalist values. Coincidentally, the inefficient beast known as health insurance is a product of your free market. But I think that we all agree that US Healthcare is lovely in that it costs way too much for no reason. Where you disagree with everyone else in the thread is on the best way to reform it. You believe that we should go laissez-faire and let the free market sort everyone out, but that means dooming many even in the best case, with a perfectly operating free market. It also means higher costs in general, because healthcare is often cheaper overall if you do preventative things that a lot of people choose to skip due to cost (because people are not perfect logical actors). quote:Similarly, I was met with great resistance when I noted that State subsidies and student loans for college have artificially inflated the cost of tuition. Completely unrelated but also not even close to the whole story. If it was as simple as that then universities in every other country on Earth (where college is free) would be exorbitantly expensive to run, but this is simply not the case. State subsidies aren't the problem here, a "free market" education system is the problem.
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Jan 18, 2016 03:48
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DrProsek posted:Honestly I asked Jrod because I was curious if he did the homework here and found that there was no copyright registration for some of those films. Supercop and Hard Boiled I'm guessing no since Supercop got a US release and Hard Boiled got a DVD release by Dragon Dynasty which normally only releases films the Weinstein Company has the rights to, but Drunken Master I have no idea and could believe is actually public domain because it was never registered right. Public domain because you didn't register your copyright ended sometime in the 70s for the US, no idea when it ended in Hing Kong law.
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Jan 18, 2016 03:52
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jrodefeld posted:I don't see where you have demonstrated that I have claimed that Beito has made any claims in his book that he hasn't. I can't parse this, I don't know what this is supposed to mean. quote:I'm glad you liked the book overall as it shows an open mind. The book's argument is really in two parts. One is a necessary corrective to the usual representation of mutual aid societies in history which is basically as a sort of quaint transitional stage before the advent of the welfare state. In reality they were a huge deal and in fact a model for state welfare systems like the Bismarck-era social insurance programs in Germany--that is, states were partly trying to mandate a refined, improved, and reinforced version of what benefit societies did, using the enormous resources and coercive powers available to government. That's what is necessary to make it work. The other part is that Beito tries to advance the idea that benefit societies were in some ways preferable to the welfare state. That's quite a reach. If anybody has JSTOR access they can check out reviews from economic and business historians for more information on the errors he makes on his way there. quote:All I've claimed is that if we were to popularize the mutual aid society method of providing charity and social welfare, it would be a significant and substantial contribution to replacing the State-run welfare system that would be phased out in a libertarian society. Ok. The source you cited doesn't support that argument. What is your basis for this claim? quote:As I noted, prices for vital services such as healthcare would fall drastically, taxation would be non-existent and the economy would be much healthier overall so the number of people who would need such charitable services would doubtless fall far below the number currently reliant on government welfare. This is a fantasist position, it has no relationship to history or observed reality.
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Jan 18, 2016 04:06
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I remember L. Neil Smith once said that if we had zero taxes, everyone would have twice as much money. But everyone they'd trade with would also have twice as much money. So we'd be able to trade twice as much! So 2x2x2 = 8; we'd all be eight times richer if we had no taxes! What do you think, jrod?
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Jan 18, 2016 04:09
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What always weirds me out about libertarians is their starry-eyed love of the workings of capitalism. I think they view it as this bedazzling machine that is constantly improving itself, getting better, like the AIs that singularitarians fantasize about. Wowee, look at those prices fall! Look at all those inefficient costs being cut! And then they look over at the government and it just squats there, hardly changing its ways. And they think of socialism and think of people living drab, grey lives in soviet Russia. The choice is so obvious to them. But what they don't see is that all the self-improvement going on in capitalism comes at a price. They're so focused on these numbers going down and these other ones going up that they lose sight of what actually happens to people to make those numbers change. The cost goes down because of new labor-saving machinery, people lose their jobs. Productivity goes up because workers' breaks are cut in half. Costs are reduced by reducing employee salaries. Productivity is increased by requiring that all employees live in strictly-monitored on-site barracks. Productivity goes up by running machines at unsafe speeds for workers. Productivity is increased by performing psychological tests on potential hires to weed out undesirable personalities, and by constantly monitoring employees' internet presence for undesirable behaviors. Without government interfering we could go back to the good old days when your employer could physically abuse you. It's this tendency of capitalism that is ignored, this tendency to try to get more and more while giving less and less. It happens with workers, it happens with the environment. Some people argue that this isn't a problem with capitalism itself, it's just due to people being short-sighted, that in the long run it's in business owners' best interest to not pay workers too little or to destroy the environment too badly. This might be so, but what's to stop business owners from being short-sighted? In what we have now, there is regulation. In libertopia, there is nothing. This tendency is why people around the world have supported unions, minimum wages, welfare, universal healthcare, all the stuff jrod hates, yet all this is why capitalism can even still exist today because without it it would have eaten itself up until people snapped and did something. Basically you're an idiot, jrod.
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Jan 18, 2016 04:20
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PICTURED: The real reason Jrod was "too busy" to reply for so long
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Jan 18, 2016 05:12
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Yo jrod, why is it that despite your firm conviction that limited liability corporations are the illegitimate creations of State power to shield crony capitalists from the consequences of their actions and your obvious ideological and personal disrespect for intellectual property, you upheld Steve Jobs of Apple Inc. as an example of the kind of enlightened despot capitalist needed to make businesses actually work?
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Jan 18, 2016 16:49
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drat, sorry to hear what happened to your friend, Caros.  I feel like you mentioned it in the other Jrod thread, but I didn't recall what the circumstances were.Jrod, I have one question (well, actually several, but for now, just this one). How would a person in your perfect libertarian world deal with an expensive medical procedure for a life threatening disease? Should this person still be able to get treatment even if they can't afford it somehow, or does everyone just go "UH OH SPAGHETTIOS" and offer a get well card instead?
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Jan 18, 2016 17:12
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jrodefeld posted:Hi y’all. 阿! jrodefeld 豬頭! 您好. 你好嗎? So you made a big post where you're using someone's dead girlfriend against him in an argument. You certainly have very little, if any, sense of couth, jchodefeld. I was going to fill in a long post about my mom dealing with osteopenia because thanks to the lovely health care system and my step-dad being unemployed she couldn't have caught this poo poo before hand, but you using Caros' dead girlfriend just takes the loving cake. I will say this, in a bit of self admitted selfishness, I don't want to be forced into financial ruin because some Libertarian rear end in a top hat like yourself decided to pull a SMIDSY when I'm out riding. quote:If you believe that, I’ve got some beach front property in North Dakota I’d like to sell you. Shows what the gently caress you know about NoDak: https://www.google.com.tw/maps/place/Beach,+ND+58621,+USA/@47.1384865,-97.5656204,10z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x5325c95bed94449f:0xc871f021601d702c gently caress, it's after midnight here. 晚安, jchode.
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Jan 18, 2016 17:39
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When I was growing up, I had a case of severe asthma. Would get constant attacks, and found myself going to the hospital quite frequently. We were also very poor, but thankfully I was able to get on medi-CAL (California's version of medicaid). I don't know if it's fair to say that I'd probably be dead without it, but I know we'd either be bankrupt, or I'd be suffering quite a bit more than I did. Both of which I'm sure would be fine with Jrod.
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Jan 18, 2016 18:07
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jrod, how much money does your bootleg business bring in?
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Jan 18, 2016 18:16
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YF19pilot posted:阿! jrodefeld 豬頭! 您好. 你好嗎? Not actually my girlfriend, just a female friend I was very close to at the time despite the distance. Childhood friend. And to be fair it is perfectly alright for him to argue the points that I brought up in regards to health care. He asked why I wasn't a libertarian and I explained why, so it is perfectly alright for him to debate the merits of my argument, I only take umbrage with him thinking he can re-libertarian me or that it is really a good idea to try and argue with me about basic unassailable facts such as how she would be alive if she lived in Canada.
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Jan 18, 2016 18:42
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GunnerJ posted:Hey. Hey! You are arguing for instituting rationing in medical care. It's called "pricing" and it has the signature insane disadvantage of limiting access not on the basis of need but on the basis of one's ability to pay. In a sane and civilized society - that is, the opposite of the feudal hellscape you fantasize about - personal ability to pay is irrelevant and need is everything. That is why universal healthcare is superior. If you take this logic to its natural conclusion, you'd have to accept a total command-economy form of totalitarian socialist central planning. Everything in the market economy is limited to ones "ability to pay". If you can't afford a tv or a cell phone, you don't buy them. But who doesn't have access to a cell phone or a television in the United States. Literally no one. The tendency of the market is to provide affordable products and services to all socioeconomic groups. Furthermore, the profit and loss system provides incentives for entrepreneurs to enter under-served markets so the supply is generally sufficient to meet demand. On the other hand, in socialist economies, the lack of a profit and loss system means that resources are not allocated as effectively as they might otherwise be, and the demand generally greatly outpaces supply. Arguing that medical care must be provided by Marxist principles ("to each according to his need") rather than through the market simply because medical care is very important unlike "frivolous" consumer goods doesn't hold any water either. I would argue that it is much more important that the most vital of human needs be provided by the market. Think of all the urgent human needs that are effectively provided through the market economy all the time. Isn't food more urgent even than medical care? Why should the prospect of whether or not a person starves or is severely malnourished be determined by his "ability to pay" for a ham sandwich at the local corner deli? What if he doesn't have the $5 it costs for the sandwich? Should he just starve? Why don't we take the delivery of all food products out of the hands of private farmers, grocery stores, deli and restaurant owners and nationalize all food production? All farms and grocery stores should now be run by the State. Food will now be declared a "human right" that every person is entitled to regardless of his or her ability to pay. We can have government officials handing out a standardized, regimented supply of groceries to each citizen at your local "DMV for food". Wouldn't that be wonderful? I hope you realize the problem with this scenario. Predictably, the supply and variability of food products available would shrink, shortages in available food would soon come into being (see the bread lines in the Soviet Union) and you would NOT end up improving the nutrition of the citizens. Wouldn't you concede that access to a reasonable level of nutrition is AT LEAST as vital to human well-being as access to medical care? Just observing the world, we can see that the more capitalistic and free market oriented countries have the least problems with starvation and hunger. The nations foolish enough to object to a "for profit" food production and sale model have suffered starvation, malnutrition and other horrific consequences. But hey, at least you had the abstract "right" to bread in the Soviet Union regardless of your ability to pay! To take another example, would you agree that in today's economy, not having access to a cell phone and the internet puts you at a massive disadvantage compared to the rest of the population? You could therefore argue that having a smartphone and a computer connected to the internet is absolutely essential for a human being to compete. Yet, the free market with its limitation and rationing based on "ability to pay" has provided cell phones and computers to literally every single person in the United States. I don't think there is even a single person who could not get a cell phone or computer if he wanted one in the United States today. If the price becomes low enough and the supply vast enough, the barrier to entry falls so far that there is no meaningful rationing based on ability to pay. So if a medical procedure costs $500 or it cost $50,000, in either case there is technically "rationing based on ability to pay". Yet, the former price means that nearly everyone will be able to pay and the few that can't are far more likely to be able to get someone else to pay for them through charity. The latter would be hard for nearly everyone to find a way to pay. What is needed for cheap and affordable medical care is greater productivity of medical equipment, less cost overhead through State-imposed regulations and licensing requirements so that a greater abundance of medical goods are available on the market and the cost of producing them is less. This is the ONLY way the price can come down. Having the State pay for medical care doesn't create more supply of doctors and medical goods. The cost is still there and it is passed onto the consumers in one way or another. There is no "free" when it comes to the allocation of scarce resources. If we get to a place where medical goods, hospitals, MRI machines, X-ray machines, dentist offices, and so forth are available in greater and greater abundance, then the price will fall closer and closer to $0 without ever getting there obviously since scarcity can never be conquered entirely. It is my understanding that most of you are conceding that central planning in medical care necessitates arbitrary rationing based on edicts and guidelines from State officials. The trade-off in your mind is that forcing people who have non-life threatening medical conditions to wait longer for treatment or heaping a greater burden of the cost on the "rich", artificially limiting the supply of medical goods deemed "less urgent" is deemed fair as long as you can ensure that the poorer people who have a life-threatening condition are able to afford treatment regardless of their ability to pay. But consider the moral principle at work here. If I want something, some product or service, it is my responsibility to find a way to get it. The fact that I have a "need" doesn't mean I have the right to lay claim on other people's property. I must go out and purchase medical services, or health insurance, or whatever else on the market. Or I must ask (pay attention to the word "ASK" which implies voluntary interaction and not aggression) for charitable help if I have fallen on hard times and I cannot pay for something that I truly need. The problem in our contemporary economy is that decades of State intervention has artificially inflated healthcare prices such that all kinds of voluntary transactions on the market, where free human beings are quite capable of solving these social problems, are prohibited by threat of aggression by the State. This is not a natural state of affairs. So you are saying that even though a market economy would have vastly lower prices for most medical care services, there STILL would be a small percentage of people who cannot, for whatever reason, afford a treatment they might need. I want the most number of people possible to have access to the greatest abundance and quality of healthcare services. But that doesn't mean that those that don't have any money have the right to lay claim to others property as a so-called "right" that they are entitled to. They are entitled to work, keep what they earn, and negotiate with other market players for the goods and services they want. And they are entitled to ask for charity if they fall on hard times. But that is it. Playing the "compassion" card and claiming that I am the one who is uncaring because I don't fall for your socialism falls apart very quickly when we look at the actual history of central planning and it's long term effects on human poverty and well being.
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Jan 18, 2016 19:51
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jrodefeld posted:If you take this logic to its natural conclusion, you'd have to accept a total command-economy form of totalitarian socialist central planning. Correct, good. No problem. Bring it in.
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Jan 18, 2016 19:58
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jrodefeld posted:The tendency of the market is to provide affordable products and services to all socioeconomic groups. Redlining is a major factor in the historical record that is neither a State/socialist regulation and is explicitly counter to your assumption. Do better.
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Jan 18, 2016 20:01
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jrodefeld posted:Playing the "compassion" card and claiming that I am the one who is uncaring because I don't fall for your socialism falls apart very quickly when we look at the actual history of central planning and it's long term effects on human poverty and well being. It's not the compassion card if you actually have compassion you prattling oval office.
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Jan 18, 2016 20:02
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jrodefeld posted:If you take this logic to its natural conclusion, you'd have to accept a total command-economy form of totalitarian socialist central planning. Fortunately, however, we aren't limited to following abstract chains of logical deduction. We can appeal to observable reality where UHC rationed by triage beats the poo poo out of private/market provision of medical care rationed by personal ability to pay, regardless of how "central planning" works for providing something completely different (like, say, food, a good consumed daily, unlike medical care, a service consumed less regularly and frequently).
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Jan 18, 2016 20:05
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You have just been shot and also you very hungry. You can only afford to go to either: 1. The hospital 2.McDonald's Which do you choose?
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Jan 18, 2016 20:07
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Mr Interweb posted:When I was growing up, I had a case of severe asthma. Would get constant attacks, and found myself going to the hospital quite frequently. We were also very poor, but thankfully I was able to get on medi-CAL (California's version of medicaid). I don't know if it's fair to say that I'd probably be dead without it, but I know we'd either be bankrupt, or I'd be suffering quite a bit more than I did. Both of which I'm sure would be fine with Jrod. This is just one of those things that Jrod will never actually acknowledge, I'm afraid. Jrod is repeating libertarian screed that he read somewhere else about how healthcare would be soooo much cheaper if we just got rid of all regulations and all taxes. But these ramblings do one of two things when it comes to people who still wouldn't be able to afford care in this magical libertarian society: 1) ignore that they exist or 2) accuse them of being leeches on society who aren't worth treating anyway. Whatever essay he's currently cribbing from probably did the former, so jrod has decided to talk about lower cost without bothering to address the horrible implications of a society that stomps on the poor.
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Jan 18, 2016 20:10
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jrod do you know what a monopsony is? I'm assuming you must if you're accusing others of "economy illiteracy" but then again, you're convinced that a single-payer system must raise prices. Do you know what the root words of "monopsony" are, at least? The answer might surprise you!
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Jan 18, 2016 20:17
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