An Open Challenge to Shanglan and all Marxists...

[amicus]

Shanglan…

Been through your last post several times, each time dwelling on a potential course of reply, trying to find the briefest manner by which to do that.

I also surfed the other threads and ran across you again, one in which you proudly proclaimed your Marxist foundations and stating that you were interested in how an advocate of the free market might logically and rational defend that position.

Permit me to suggest that I enjoy that same pursuit, attempting to comprehend the Socialist mentality and method of operating.

While I grant you the benefit of the doubt in terms of the sincerity of your assertions, I must admit some doubt creeps into my consciousness as I consider the past four years on this forum and my continuing efforts to explain the workings of the market place.

Even in this thread I was prepared to continue by offering a vision of how the free market might deal with health care needs. I was then going to address your contention that the abstract, ‘peace and happiness’ such things as the air we all share, the water we all drink, the environment in general, that you assert cannot be protected by the market and must be managed by government.

Time after time I make the effort, issue by issue, to provide a continuing and contiguous explanation of the market place. Be it the Ozone layer or the Global Warming issue, the EPA and the environmentalists. When I do make a lucid defense that cannot logically be assailed, the conversation usually ceases and all of the protagonists just fade away until the next issue begins and we start all over again.

It is quite the same, except that I usually hang around, from the opposite point of view.

Let’s take National Healthcare, Socialized Medicine as a prime example. To many, managed care funded by government seems to offer many solutions to the problem.

It becomes more urgent with the recognition that populations all over the world are aging and fewer children are being born in almost all western modern civilizations. Our own ‘baby boomer’ generation here is the US is approaching retirement age and an increased need for medical services.

When I point out and document that national health care in every nation that has incorporated it, has serious and I suggest fatal, flaws. In other words it doesn’t work and keeps failing in more and more ways.

The rebuttal usually is, and you used it yourself, that it is better than nothing and can be fixed.

Providing, ‘peace and happiness’, including air and water quality, for an entire population, is fraught with difficulties when viewed from a Marxist concept.

Everyone’s vision of what will bring them peace and happiness is quite different. There are those who enjoy the hustle and fast paced city life and those who enjoy just the opposite, a secluded country meadow and a small town atmosphere.

You insist that these needs and desires can be met and satisfied with Marxism, I say by a free market.

I don’t mind going through each issue and explaining how the market can meet those needs, I have done it for years and it is never boring to provide illustration of human freedom in action.

I am going to turn the table on you here and attempt to embarrass you into compliance.

Since you openly claim Marxism as your bedrock, which few have the courage to do, I task you with defending it.

One issue after issue, you and others criticize the laissez-faire approach to solving human problems. I would ask you to present your case for a command economy and a socialist state.

I do have a rather large caveat that I insist you address; that of individual human freedom and liberty.

You see, I am limited by my acknowledgment of those freedoms.

I cannot, for example, support a plan that would limit your choices to benefit me or the greater good. I cannot forbid you from having more than one child, I cannot insist you work at a certain job and tithe me on a regular basis. I do not have the moral authority to force you to educate your children to suit my desires. I do not have the moral authority to limit your rights of acquire and use real or intellectual property.

I fully understand that a command economy by definition, owns all the means of production and that individual human rights are subjugated to the greater good.

I am curious as to how you will approach the various subjects, or if you will at all..

I remain…


Amicus…

 

[Penelope Street]

*yawn* Even an unintentional comedian needs new material.

 

[amicus]

*yawn* Even an unintentional comedian needs new material.

~~~

Imagine my surprise.

Ami

 

[amicus]

As you can probably figure out, the post was intended as an answer to a post of Shanglan's, it was an after thought to begin a new thread.

It does not surprise me that no one is taking the challenge, only a stifled yawn and, no doubt the opinion that it is the same old thing yet again.

Since I do not think that socialism can be defended on any level, the absence of response rather emphasizes that conclusion.

Amicus

 

[BlackShanglan]

I also surfed the other threads and ran across you again, one in which you proudly proclaimed your Marxist foundations and stating that you were interested in how an advocate of the free market might logically and rational defend that position.

I think I should start by clarifying, because I may not have been using the term in the way you're thinking of it. I think Marx's solutions are extremely silly things; the point at which he flatly states "the solution is to change human nature" is the point at which I snort derisively and turn the page. I don't actually believe that communism is a workable system in the normal run of things. It only works if pretty much everyone in the system takes it as (or in addition to) a religion, and that's not the way the world at large works.

The Marxist roots that I refer to are the habit of looking at class, social behavior, art, and the rest of human endeavour - what Marx called the superstructure - as being intrinsically tied to the economic base. In short, the ways in which we labor and exchange commodities shape everything else around us.

Ultimately, this element of his reasoning doesn't strike me as being incompatible with capitalism. When, for instance, we suggest that people will show more creativity and independent initiative when operating in a free market, or that the assumption of government intervention can actually stifle their tendency to attempt to solve problems, we're saying that the economic base affects the superstructure.

That much of Marx I think quite sensible.

Even in this thread I was prepared to continue by offering a vision of how the free market might deal with health care needs. I was then going to address your contention that the abstract, ‘peace and happiness’ such things as the air we all share, the water we all drink, the environment in general, that you assert cannot be protected by the market and must be managed by government.

That's not actually what I was saying, but then I took an awfully long time saying it, didn't I? I said that the market might very well be capable of managing them if they were priced. The problem I see in applying capitalism to peace and happiness is that right now, under some circumstances, there is no price attached to them. They function artificially in the marketplace because despite them being valuable property, people can destroy them without paying for them. It's as if there was no price attached to bananas. Who could be bothered to make sure that there was a supply of them?

The only difference is the difficulty of attaching a price to property that can't be assigned to a single individual, or that is more abstract in nature. That's where the government comes in. Not to manage the commodity in the sense of saying who makes it or who can buy it or how much we have to produce, but in the sense of requiring people to pay the price attached to it, since no one person has the authority to collect that price.

Time after time I make the effort, issue by issue, to provide a continuing and contiguous explanation of the market place. Be it the Ozone layer or the Global Warming issue, the EPA and the environmentalists. When I do make a lucid defense that cannot logically be assailed, the conversation usually ceases and all of the protagonists just fade away until the next issue begins and we start all over again.

I understand your frustration, but please - do look back above. I am honestly suggesting that the free market might be able to address those problems if we made them an actual part of the market. So long as they cost nothing to destroy, however, they're not in the market. Perhaps if they were, they would work better.

The rebuttal usually is, and you used it yourself, that it is better than nothing and can be fixed.

Be fair to me - I said it was better than nothing until a better solution was devised. I don't actually think that further socialization is a great answer.

Providing, ‘peace and happiness’, including air and water quality, for an entire population, is fraught with difficulties when viewed from a Marxist concept.

Everyone’s vision of what will bring them peace and happiness is quite different. There are those who enjoy the hustle and fast paced city life and those who enjoy just the opposite, a secluded country meadow and a small town atmosphere.

You insist that these needs and desires can be met and satisfied with Marxism, I say by a free market.

No, no! I'm willing to agree on this, or at least think it a worthwhile experiment, if you can show me a way to make them fully part of the market.

It's true that different things make different people happy, and that's the sort of situation in which a free market typically works well. However, it's also true that some things destroy happiness for nearly everyone, and that's what I'm suggesting needs to get brought into the marketplace if a free market is going to really work. If it's free to destroy houses, there will be fewer houses; if it's free to destroy happiness, isn't it logical that there will be less happiness?

Since you openly claim Marxism as your bedrock, which few have the courage to do, I task you with defending it.

One issue after issue, you and others criticize the laissez-faire approach to solving human problems. I would ask you to present your case for a command economy and a socialist state.

I do have a rather large caveat that I insist you address; that of individual human freedom and liberty.

I hate to seem ingracious, but I really must decline. I don't support those things. Truly. I think that Marx identified a number of serious problems that require care and thought, but his solutions are wretched things.

I cannot, for example, support a plan that would limit your choices to benefit me or the greater good. I cannot forbid you from having more than one child, I cannot insist you work at a certain job and tithe me on a regular basis. I do not have the moral authority to force you to educate your children to suit my desires. I do not have the moral authority to limit your rights of acquire and use real or intellectual property.

I fully understand that a command economy by definition, owns all the means of production and that individual human rights are subjugated to the greater good.

I am curious as to how you will approach the various subjects, or if you will at all..

I remain…


Amicus…

Of the lot, the only thing I would quibble with here is education, and that's because I feel that ignorance makes a mockery of liberty. I don't feel that I'm maximizing a person's liberty by allowing him to bail out of school at an age when he's too young to know the demands of the adult world. The more industrialized and knowledge-based our society becomes, the more crippling it becomes to enter the workforce without a basic education; the long term result is slavery, not liberty. I don't mind diverse paths to education; there are some excellent programs being created to work with vocation-based training. But something need to be there, or we're destroying liberty rather than building it.

Now, I know that that isn't quite the answer you were looking for, but perhaps it's something of a relief? I shan't defend a socialist state; I'll only say that I think Marx right in saying that pretty much everything has an economic dimension, and I'll argue that the free market might very well work if only we recognized this fact by pricing that which we consume.

 

[amicus]

I think I should start by clarifying, because I may not have been using the term in the way you're thinking of it. I think Marx's solutions are extremely silly things; the point at which he flatly states "the solution is to change human nature" is the point at which I snort derisively and turn the page. I don't actually believe that communism is a workable system in the normal run of things. It only works if pretty much everyone in the system takes it as (or in addition to) a religion, and that's not the way the world at large works.

The Marxist roots that I refer to are the habit of looking at class, social behavior, art, and the rest of human endeavour - what Marx called the superstructure - as being intrinsically tied to the economic base. In short, the ways in which we labor and exchange commodities shape everything else around us.

Ultimately, this element of his reasoning doesn't strike me as being incompatible with capitalism. When, for instance, we suggest that people will show more creativity and independent initiative when operating in a free market, or that the assumption of government intervention can actually stifle their tendency to attempt to solve problems, we're saying that the economic base affects the superstructure.

That much of Marx I think quite sensible.



That's not actually what I was saying, but then I took an awfully long time saying it, didn't I? I said that the market might very well be capable of managing them if they were priced. The problem I see in applying capitalism to peace and happiness is that right now, under some circumstances, there is no price attached to them. They function artificially in the marketplace because despite them being valuable property, people can destroy them without paying for them. It's as if there was no price attached to bananas. Who could be bothered to make sure that there was a supply of them?

The only difference is the difficulty of attaching a price to property that can't be assigned to a single individual, or that is more abstract in nature. That's where the government comes in. Not to manage the commodity in the sense of saying who makes it or who can buy it or how much we have to produce, but in the sense of requiring people to pay the price attached to it, since no one person has the authority to collect that price.



I understand your frustration, but please - do look back above. I am honestly suggesting that the free market might be able to address those problems if we made them an actual part of the market. So long as they cost nothing to destroy, however, they're not in the market. Perhaps if they were, they would work better.



Be fair to me - I said it was better than nothing until a better solution was devised. I don't actually think that further socialization is a great answer.



No, no! I'm willing to agree on this, or at least think it a worthwhile experiment, if you can show me a way to make them fully part of the market.

It's true that different things make different people happy, and that's the sort of situation in which a free market typically works well. However, it's also true that some things destroy happiness for nearly everyone, and that's what I'm suggesting needs to get brought into the marketplace if a free market is going to really work. If it's free to destroy houses, there will be fewer houses; if it's free to destroy happiness, isn't it logical that there will be less happiness?



I hate to seem ingracious, but I really must decline. I don't support those things. Truly. I think that Marx identified a number of serious problems that require care and thought, but his solutions are wretched things.



Of the lot, the only thing I would quibble with here is education, and that's because I feel that ignorance makes a mockery of liberty. I don't feel that I'm maximizing a person's liberty by allowing him to bail out of school at an age when he's too young to know the demands of the adult world. The more industrialized and knowledge-based our society becomes, the more crippling it becomes to enter the workforce without a basic education; the long term result is slavery, not liberty. I don't mind diverse paths to education; there are some excellent programs being created to work with vocation-based training. But something need to be there, or we're destroying liberty rather than building it.

Now, I know that that isn't quite the answer you were looking for, but perhaps it's something of a relief? I shan't defend a socialist state; I'll only say that I think Marx right in saying that pretty much everything has an economic dimension, and I'll argue that the free market might very well work if only we recognized this fact by pricing that which we consume.

~~~

Oh, my. I think it necessary to re-light my lantern and continue the search for a single socialist to defend the faith.

Well said, Shanglan and a pleasure yet again that you share your thoughts.

I have never quite understood the distinction that Marx attributed to 'economy'. It seems self evident to me that most of the lives of early man was spent in acquiring food, shelter and clothing, those basics of any economic system.

Quite so the division of labor and specialization as different individuals enjoy different things and gain skills when they narrow the focus. As everyone on this forum knows, I also emphasize gender related skills that, I feel, also developed naturally as mankind evolved.

It is quite reassuring to have you confirm that socialist theory leaves much to be desired. I admire and respect your thoughts and did not look forward to seeing you attempt to justify and rationalize a command society.

I confess I am a little bit of a loss to comprehend your concern with the 'pricing' of the intangible values of society.

My blanket answer to that is to restate that government should own no land; that all land and the minerals underneath and the forests, lakes, rivers, should all be privately owned. Even the land that government must occupy to carry out its constitutional obligations, should be private land leased to government agencies.

Concurrent with that is a strict and well defined understanding of property rights and a strict, non political protection of those rights and easy and affordable access to the courts and stringent enforcement of those who violate rights, be it business, corporation or government itself.

Only then can the market satisfy the wide diversity of choice that individuals will make in pursuit of the happiness and dreams that make up those abstract values that you are concerned about.

I understand your reluctance to include 'education' in that market place. I can see the social and individual value of education available to all.

Mandatory tax funded public education is perhaps the easiest of all the evils of government to assault and it seems everybody does.

I try to imagine in my mind what the state of mass education would be if private enterprise were allowed the opportunity to satisfy the demand for education.

From reading your posts, I know that at the very least, you would still require a 'safety net' of sorts, as you do for health care, for those who cannot avail themselves of services in the market place.

Remaining the absolutist that I must be, I reject your safety net concept as it will only be expanded as is the wont of government to do.

On the wide spectrum of intelligence quotient measurements, there are many children who are uneducable in almost every sense of the word. The world, society in general, can find a place for those as well.

Well, I just read back through what I wrote and what you wrote and I think I will just leave it there.

regards...


amicus...

 

[BlackShanglan]

I confess I am a little bit of a loss to comprehend your concern with the 'pricing' of the intangible values of society.

My blanket answer to that is to restate that government should own no land; that all land and the minerals underneath and the forests, lakes, rivers, should all be privately owned. Even the land that government must occupy to carry out its constitutional obligations, should be private land leased to government agencies.

Concurrent with that is a strict and well defined understanding of property rights and a strict, non political protection of those rights and easy and affordable access to the courts and stringent enforcement of those who violate rights, be it business, corporation or government itself.

Only then can the market satisfy the wide diversity of choice that individuals will make in pursuit of the happiness and dreams that make up those abstract values that you are concerned about.

Right. All of this I'm OK with, if you can show me how the market can assign ownership and/or price to all commodities of value. That's my point with the abstract and / or difficult to quantify things. Unless they have owners capable of setting a price on them, they aren't part of the marketplace.

You feel that a strict protection of property rights is essential to a functioning market, and I agree. That's bedrock foundation for capitalist theory. The marketplace functions because people are permitted to freely exchange goods at the price they set on them. They are also - and this is a key point - permitted to decline to exchange those goods. If I'm especially attached to my pet dog, then I can refuse to sell her to you at any price.

The problem is, not everything we value currently works on a property-ownership model, either because we haven't assigned it owners or because we haven't allowed the owners to set a price for use of the commodity. The free market is unable to fully function on two types of valued commodities: those which cannot be clearly assigned to any individual person, and those which exist in abstract forms rather than as physical objects. Both types of objects can have value; if you offered people money in order to have them drink sewage-laced water, most of them would charge you a pretty stiff price per glass, and if you offered them cash to have someone expose himself to their children, I think you'd have more problems than negotiating the price. Therefore, we can see that they do have value. What they don't have, in some cases, is full support for the property rights of the owners.

If, for instance, we look at the commodity of my house, I have fully supported property rights. No one is permitted to take it, buy it, sell it, use it, paint it, alter it, or destroy it without the permission of the owner; if they want to do those things, they have to persuade me by offering a price that I think is fair. If they do things I don't like without my permission, they can be fined and jailed. My ownership of that property is secure.

Now, take my right to happiness. In some senses it is protected. If people want me to give up lounging about the house sipping sherry and posting to Lit, they have to negotiate a price with me. If they want to stand outside of my house blasting air horns at me, I can choose not to accept any price for that loss of happiness and instead summon the police to remove them. However, there are other aspects of my right to happiness that are not supported; my commodity, my happiness, can be taken away from me without payment. My example earlier was the person who chooses not to plan for any health care. Watching him die would make me very unhappy, but it's his actions that caused that to happen. He's robbed me of a valued commodity - my happiness - and he hasn't paid for it.

The same thing is true of clean air and water. So long as it's impossible to assign ownership of those things to any one person, they can't be protected by property law. There is no price for destroying them. And, like anything that's free in a free marketplace, there will be less of it, because it costs nothing to consume the commodity.

In short, property rights can only protect everything if everything is clearly some specific person's or entity's property, if a price can be set for the use of it, and if the owner can choose not to sell the property. I think you need to price the trickier things because it's the only way the market can actually work with them.

 

[BlackShanglan]

From reading your posts, I know that at the very least, you would still require a 'safety net' of sorts, as you do for health care, for those who cannot avail themselves of services in the market place.

Remaining the absolutist that I must be, I reject your safety net concept as it will only be expanded as is the wont of government to do.

I've got to fight you on that one.

The only thing absolutism is really good at is being clear. It saves us from having to set foot in gray areas. But when it prevents us from achieving desirable goals in harmony with our fundamental beliefs, it's worthless. What's the use of clarity at the cost of liberty itself? To certainly condemn many to the slavery of ignorance out of fear that a few might lose the liberty of choosing it is to place too great a value upon simplicity and the desire not to have to wrangle out the awkward details.

Yes, it will always be difficult to balance the needs of individual liberty with the provision of necessary education. But sometimes difficult work needs to be done. That it's easier to retreat to absolutism is undoubtedly true; that it is better, liberty itself denies.

 

[Handprints]

I hope you don't mind an uninvited comment or two...

I am heavy user of healthcare services who rarely lives in the same country for more than a year at a time (seriously disabled, regular flare-ups). As a consequence, I have much wider experience of being on the receiving end of both privately and publicly funded primary care systems than anyone ought to.

(Full disclosure: I'm ridiculously well-insured, so my comments will likely be influenced by the fact that I have only experienced the extreme top end of the private market. Also, because of my medical history, I'm always treated like a potential emergency, which means I'm never put on a waiting list for anything.)

Top five for speed/quality of emergency care:
1. French public
2. US private
3. Chinese private
4. Canadian public
5. Japanese public

Bottom three for speed/quality of emergency care:
1. US public (thanks for having to get that finger re-broken, Dr N Competent!)
2. Russian public
3. Vietnamese private (but the public clinic down the street promptly fixed their errors and gave me a nice fishhead soup.)

Top three for walk-in, non-emergency care:
1. Chinese private
2. Japanese private
3. Italian public

Bottom three for walk-in, non-emergency care:
1. US public
2. Russian public
3. Egyptian public

Top three for ease of use (language problems excluded):
1. British public
2. Chinese private
3. British private

Bottom three for ease of use (language problems excluded):
1. US private (excluding trying to fill out a form with a broken hand, which would rank it somewhere above one; let's say "one with a bullet" including that experience)
2. Japanese private
3. Indian public

I don't know if that's of use in prompting thought but I thought a bit of first-hand data might give theory a place to anchor. Without wanting to draw an invidious comparison (the reasons are clearly different), outside of the US and third-world countries, I've never been found evidence from my experiences to say the public health care system is doing a better or worse job than the private, although I accept that my circumstances mean my experience may not be widely shared.

The difference in quality of care between public/private in the US is a public policy choice; in the third world it isn't. The only reliable exception to the neck-and-neck running is the quality of the room when one is forced to stay for a few days: private's always better, and should be.

I hope you find that useful.
Handprints

 

[amicus]

Handprints...Virgin

Just wanted to take a quick moment to thank you and welcome you to the forum.

Difficult to digest, at face value, the information you shared but it certainly creates an interest in your exploits, perhaps you would consent to sharing with us the why's and wherefore's of your travels and experiences?

amicus...

 

[Le Jacquelope]

I think I should start by clarifying, because I may not have been using the term in the way you're thinking of it. I think Marx's solutions are extremely silly things; the point at which he flatly states "the solution is to change human nature"

But that's how women got the right to vote. Arguably, depending on how you view things, Christ & Saint Paul achieved an even bigger example of changing human nature.

Human greed is just infinitely harder to change.

 

[BlackShanglan]

But that's how women got the right to vote. Arguably, depending on how you view things, Christ & Saint Paul achieved an even bigger example of changing human nature.

Human greed is just infinitely harder to change.

Giving women the vote didn't change human nature; it changed human opinion, which is a different thing.

Christ and Saint Paul have indeed achieved much. On the other hand, can we reliably run our economy based on the theory that everyone follows their principles with reasonable regularity? Christ challenges us to better ourselves, but that's a continual battle. One need only look at any police blotter to see that the change is a goal, not a current achievement.

And yes, self-interest is the hardest thing of all to change. It's wired into us at a very basic evolutionary level. It's painfully difficult even to bump up from short-term self-interest to long-term, say by rejecting the desire to defraud investors on the grounds that one benefits from a stable business environment in the long run. Part of every man is still just a chimp that sees a banana.

 

[amicus]

I've got to fight you on that one.

The only thing absolutism is really good at is being clear. It saves us from having to set foot in gray areas. But when it prevents us from achieving desirable goals in harmony with our fundamental beliefs, it's worthless. What's the use of clarity at the cost of liberty itself? To certainly condemn many to the slavery of ignorance out of fear that a few might lose the liberty of choosing it is to place too great a value upon simplicity and the desire not to have to wrangle out the awkward details.

Yes, it will always be difficult to balance the needs of individual liberty with the provision of necessary education. But sometimes difficult work needs to be done. That it's easier to retreat to absolutism is undoubtedly true; that it is better, liberty itself denies.

~~~


You seem a little agitated with me here, Shanglan, sorry, I perhaps should have chosen a word other than 'absolutist', or at least preceded it with 'selective' as a limiting factor.

I simply meant to reinforce my basic premise that government be restricted to its constitutional role and education was not given, by the Founders, to our government at that time.

In the span of human history, education for the masses is a very recent thing. The history of how it occurred in the United States is both an interesting and curious one at the same time and it has gone through many evolutions.

That I question the very premises upon which public education is founded, seems to upset many, in almost a religious fervor, as if I am being sacrilegious in just the act of questioning.

It was not educated people, for the most part, that fought in the war for independence from the King, it was common, uneducated men, who could neither read nor write, but knew damn well what freedom and liberty meant.

I do not think an educated populace is the only arbiter of liberty.

I have difficulties in imagining a future without mandatory education in the form of both parents employed full time. Society has adjusted to this event, brought about, I propose by taxation so confiscatory in nature that the incomes of two are necessary to support a family.

I cannot know, with certainty, that if it were financially possible that most women would remain in the home and nurture and educate their own children instead of hiring others to raise them.

An ongoing puzzle to me.

Amicus...

 

[BlackShanglan]

Handprints, your list is very interesting reading. I appreciated, too, your careful contextualization of your experiences so that we could envision the circumstances.

I've lived in a country with socialized health care for a time period, and I would have to say that it was much easier to get a walk-in doctor appointment for a non-emergency issue - although "urgent care" non-emergency walk-in facilities are starting to crop up a bit more in the US now. I did also find it very simple in terms of paper work, as opposed to the several pages of forms one has to fill out at pretty much every doctor's office in the United States.

The one area of difference we have in experience is, interestingly, the one area I've always thought was the greatest weakness in the socialized system I experienced: care for long term, chronic conditions. The SO has such a condition, and there were times when it was extremely frustrating trying to get basic issues dealt with. That wasn't the case everywhere, but then, that was part of the frustration. In the rural area in which the SO was raised, the local hospital was unbelievably awful. The SO sat in the waiting room and watched a nurse call a man for his appointment, tell him repeatedly that there was nothing wrong with his clearly broken medical equipment, and finally, when he demonstrated conclusively that it did not work, tell him, "Well, I haven't got any more time to deal with this today. You'll have to make another appointment." That was pretty much par for the course.

On the other hand, the care in a major city hospital was much better - although the waiting list for an appointment was three months. Still, the care eventually given was excellent. The SO was delighted to the point of tears to learn, after some actual care was given to the SO's case, that the problem could be more precisely identified and a few tweaks to the treatment could easily remedy what the SO feared was a permanent loss of functionality. It was a very happy day for both of us.

The dreadful part, though, was knowing that the SO's family, two other members of which suffer the same condition, were stuck back at the rural hospital where the staff simply didn't give a toss. They weren't allowed to choose to go to the hospital with friendly, competent, effective staff; they were required to attend the one in their own geographical area. That was an ugly reality to face.

 

[amicus]

Right. All of this I'm OK with, if you can show me how the market can assign ownership and/or price to all commodities of value. That's my point with the abstract and / or difficult to quantify things. Unless they have owners capable of setting a price on them, they aren't part of the marketplace.

You feel that a strict protection of property rights is essential to a functioning market, and I agree. That's bedrock foundation for capitalist theory. The marketplace functions because people are permitted to freely exchange goods at the price they set on them. They are also - and this is a key point - permitted to decline to exchange those goods. If I'm especially attached to my pet dog, then I can refuse to sell her to you at any price.

The problem is, not everything we value currently works on a property-ownership model, either because we haven't assigned it owners or because we haven't allowed the owners to set a price for use of the commodity. The free market is unable to fully function on two types of valued commodities: those which cannot be clearly assigned to any individual person, and those which exist in abstract forms rather than as physical objects. Both types of objects can have value; if you offered people money in order to have them drink sewage-laced water, most of them would charge you a pretty stiff price per glass, and if you offered them cash to have someone expose himself to their children, I think you'd have more problems than negotiating the price. Therefore, we can see that they do have value. What they don't have, in some cases, is full support for the property rights of the owners.

If, for instance, we look at the commodity of my house, I have fully supported property rights. No one is permitted to take it, buy it, sell it, use it, paint it, alter it, or destroy it without the permission of the owner; if they want to do those things, they have to persuade me by offering a price that I think is fair. If they do things I don't like without my permission, they can be fined and jailed. My ownership of that property is secure.

Now, take my right to happiness. In some senses it is protected. If people want me to give up lounging about the house sipping sherry and posting to Lit, they have to negotiate a price with me. If they want to stand outside of my house blasting air horns at me, I can choose not to accept any price for that loss of happiness and instead summon the police to remove them. However, there are other aspects of my right to happiness that are not supported; my commodity, my happiness, can be taken away from me without payment. My example earlier was the person who chooses not to plan for any health care. Watching him die would make me very unhappy, but it's his actions that caused that to happen. He's robbed me of a valued commodity - my happiness - and he hasn't paid for it.

The same thing is true of clean air and water. So long as it's impossible to assign ownership of those things to any one person, they can't be protected by property law. There is no price for destroying them. And, like anything that's free in a free marketplace, there will be less of it, because it costs nothing to consume the commodity.

In short, property rights can only protect everything if everything is clearly some specific person's or entity's property, if a price can be set for the use of it, and if the owner can choose not to sell the property. I think you need to price the trickier thi

ngs because it's the only way the market can actually work with them.

~~~

This seems to be an area of difficulty, perhaps only for me, perhaps for both of us.

The free market concept is not a panacea to all the ills of mankind, it is, instead, a basic framework and guideline that as its basic assumptions, includes the protection of individual and property rights.

There is/was a thing somewhere, perhaps in the dimwitted state of Oregon, concerning, 'Blue Sky Laws', wherein, a new construction could not obscure the view of a mountain range, a river, or even a view of 'blue sky', of another nearby or adjacent building.

Those, 'intangible' values that occupy much of our slightly contentious posts.

There is, and cannot be, a 'recipe' that pre-answers all the questions that will arise as individuals avail themselves of their liberties and begin to discover that their liberty begins to infringe upon others. That...is why we have courts.

Sometimes they are very difficult and complex questions and litigation continues for years and, sometimes, resolution is long in arriving, if ever.

But I prefer that over the heavy hand of a government edict resolving the issue depending on the party in power, and the make-up of the Supreme Court at a State or Federal level.

I guess this process of sharing thoughts must, by necessity, proceed in small steps, eh?

Amicus...

 

[Handprints]

Amicus - thanks for the welcome.

There are two reasons I have so many healthcare experiences: the obvious one is the disability. I had a very rough couple of years in my early 20's with Crohn's disease - lost a couple of meters of small bowel and what's left is badly scarred. The scars cause a lot of problems with obstructions which can - but haven't so far - lead to the intestine bursting. I think I've probably had more than 50 hospital admissions to deal with them over the past 20 years. I've also has some post-trauma corrective surgeries in three different countries.

The less obvious one is that, having survived all that, I pretty much lost all fear of physical pain and took up dinghy racing, luge (although my wife has since put her foot down on that one) and sevens rugby, where broken fingers, cracked ribs and joint dislocations are all part of the day's fun.

The reason the healthcare experiences are so international is that I work in the financial sector: in emerging markets, usually on the ground. You'll forgive me, I hope, if I'm not any more specific than that about my employment - disabled people in my line of work are so unusual that saying more would probably identify me instantly to anyone else in the field. I'll take a pop quiz, though, on any dysfunctional, up-and-down-like-the-barmaid's-knickers market you name if further assessment of my credibility is required.

More broadly, and back to the point of your post, living primarily in Europe and Asia for the last 15+ years has softened a lot of my views about the universal applicability of elements of the American Experiment, which I admire greatly, but perhaps more in principle than in every detail of its practice. Certainly I have come to believe that their are social costs not fully expressed or accounted for in a strict capitalist worldview - healthcare is not a bad example.

That said, I accept what many economists and capitalist theorists have suggested: models which require a rational actor aren't as likely to stand up in healthcare discussions as in other areas where cost/benefit can be analysed in a microeconomic sense, in part because pain and fear don't typically lead people to act rationally...

 

[Handprints]

The one area of difference we have in experience is, interestingly, the one area I've always thought was the greatest weakness in the socialized system I experienced: care for long term, chronic conditions.

That's the hard one, isn't it? Your SO and my mother could tell similar stories about the socialised health care systems in which they live. The rural/urban quality differential is pretty universal, I think. I've driven from a rural paradise to an ugly-but-giant port town with a broken hand after taking one look at the Army-surplus rural x-ray machine and the doctor trying to help the technician make it start.

One of my goals in the first ten years of my career was to earn enough money to guarantee top-drawer private health care for the rest of my life: a goal made solely through fear of waiting lists. Then a doctor told me I could expect to be treated as a ticking bomb for the rest of my life and that no doctor who had ever met a lawyer would dream of wait-listing me. That'll teach me...

 

[Le Jacquelope]

Giving women the vote didn't change human nature; it changed human opinion, which is a different thing.

Christ and Saint Paul have indeed achieved much. On the other hand, can we reliably run our economy based on the theory that everyone follows their principles with reasonable regularity? Christ challenges us to better ourselves, but that's a continual battle. One need only look at any police blotter to see that the change is a goal, not a current achievement.

And yes, self-interest is the hardest thing of all to change. It's wired into us at a very basic evolutionary level. It's painfully difficult even to bump up from short-term self-interest to long-term, say by rejecting the desire to defraud investors on the grounds that one benefits from a stable business environment in the long run. Part of every man is still just a chimp that sees a banana.

Yielding to human nature is even more lethal than fighting to change it is dumb.

 

[amicus]

Amicus - thanks for the welcome.

There are two reasons I have so many healthcare experiences: the obvious one is the disability. I had a very rough couple of years in my early 20's with Crohn's disease - lost a couple of meters of small bowel and what's left is badly scarred. The scars cause a lot of problems with obstructions which can - but haven't so far - lead to the intestine bursting. I think I've probably had more than 50 hospital admissions to deal with them over the past 20 years. I've also has some post-trauma corrective surgeries in three different countries.

The less obvious one is that, having survived all that, I pretty much lost all fear of physical pain and took up dinghy racing, luge (although my wife has since put her foot down on that one) and sevens rugby, where broken fingers, cracked ribs and joint dislocations are all part of the day's fun.

The reason the healthcare experiences are so international is that I work in the financial sector: in emerging markets, usually on the ground. You'll forgive me, I hope, if I'm not any more specific than that about my employment - disabled people in my line of work are so unusual that saying more would probably identify me instantly to anyone else in the field. I'll take a pop quiz, though, on any dysfunctional, up-and-down-like-the-barmaid's-knickers market you name if further assessment of my credibility is required.

More broadly, and back to the point of your post, living primarily in Europe and Asia for the last 15+ years has softened a lot of my views about the universal applicability of elements of the American Experiment, which I admire greatly, but perhaps more in principle than in every detail of its practice. Certainly I have come to believe that their are social costs not fully expressed or accounted for in a strict capitalist worldview - healthcare is not a bad example.

That said, I accept what many economists and capitalist theorists have suggested: models which require a rational actor aren't as likely to stand up in healthcare discussions as in other areas where cost/benefit can be analysed in a microeconomic sense, in part because pain and fear don't typically lead people to act rationally...

~~~

Chuckles...I love your 'barmaids knickers' analogy, tickled me....and no further inquiries to your credibility, was not my intention in the first place, just curious and I thank you for sharing what you did.

I do think, however, that inadvertently perhaps, you gave something of value to this forum; that of a 'global perspective' on matters of economic and health import. Most of our 'usual suspects' here, are closet socialists, complaining about 'outsourcing' and free market, open trade status with China and India and begging for trade restrictions and embargo's. Curious lot these AH'ers.

You rather clarify that it is happening regardless of their whining.

I do commend you for your courage in not just overcoming misfortune, but challenging it and continuing your life in spite of it. Well done!

A pleasure to make your acquaintance.

Amicus...

 

[BlackShanglan]

You seem a little agitated with me here, Shanglan, sorry, I perhaps should have chosen a word other than 'absolutist', or at least preceded it with 'selective' as a limiting factor.

Apologies, Amicus. If truth be told, I'm agitated over a wholly different thread, not one you're posting to, and it may be seeping over a bit. Please forgive me if I come across as a bit highly strung this evening; I shall try to rein that in.

I simply meant to reinforce my basic premise that government be restricted to its constitutional role and education was not given, by the Founders, to our government at that time.

There are quite a few things that the Founding Fathers didn't explicitly grant us; non-property status for individuals of African descent springs immediately to mind. They were broad, and I think that they were broad for a reason. They wanted us to be able to do what we needed to in order to grant the rights in their fullest sense rather than being stuck to the letter of a possibly restrictive law. The right to privacy is a good example; it's not explicitly granted anywhere, and yet we accept that it's entailed in the right to pursue happiness.

It was not educated people, for the most part, that fought in the war for independence from the King, it was common, uneducated men, who could neither read nor write, but knew damn well what freedom and liberty meant.

Amicus. Do you remember the thread a few months ago where you said this, and I and other posters told you that it was incorrect, and you went away and looked it up, and you discovered that indeed, reading and writing were common to the point of being standard in the United States at that time? I beg you to recall that to your memory.

I do not think an educated populace is the only arbiter of liberty.

Then here, I suppose we differ. I cannot imagine someone having liberty without having at least enough education to know his rights, know his country, know his trade, and know his options.

I have difficulties in imagining a future without mandatory education in the form of both parents employed full time. Society has adjusted to this event, brought about, I propose by taxation so confiscatory in nature that the incomes of two are necessary to support a family.

Two-income families are all over the world, in countries of all sorts of tax rates. One might also observe that the standard of living has continually risen, and the average size of houses nearly doubled. It looks to me as if there's a simpler explanation than taxation: people like money. They like to have more of it if they can. Two people can earn more than one.

I cannot know, with certainty, that if it were financially possible that most women would remain in the home and nurture and educate their own children instead of hiring others to raise them.

An ongoing puzzle to me.

Amicus...

I'm confused by your example. We're going to cut education funding and people with children will have more financial options available to them? That seems highly unlikely to me. At the moment, for a fraction of the total cost paid in their taxes in any given year, they get eight hours of instruction and supervision plus books, materials, and transportation. Losing the supervision alone would bankrupt anyone who had to pay a babysitter. If you actually mean, "Maybe cutting off public education would force women out of the workforce and back into their homes," it would be better if you were clear on that.

Mind you, I smile a little at that. You seem to assume that there are no other options. I can think of several. As John Stuart Mill observed, the fear (prevalent in his day) of opening up employment and property ownership to women wasn't really a fear that women would stop marrying, as many men suggested. It was only a fear that they would not longer marry on the same terms. A woman able to support herself may choose to stay home and school her children if she likes; she may also choose to seek a mate who offers a more attractive way of sharing duties.

 

[BlackShanglan]

~~~

This seems to be an area of difficulty, perhaps only for me, perhaps for both of us.

The free market concept is not a panacea to all the ills of mankind, it is, instead, a basic framework and guideline that as its basic assumptions, includes the protection of individual and property rights.

*nods* It's a damned tricky thing. But have you noticed how many places where people are eager for the government to regulate the free market involve these sorts of intangibles / no clear owner issue? They're turning to the government because the market hasn't resolved the issue to their satisfaction. If the market isn't going to be the solution (which your quotation above seems to suggest), then what is?

There is/was a thing somewhere, perhaps in the dimwitted state of Oregon, concerning, 'Blue Sky Laws', wherein, a new construction could not obscure the view of a mountain range, a river, or even a view of 'blue sky', of another nearby or adjacent building.

Those, 'intangible' values that occupy much of our slightly contentious posts.

There is, and cannot be, a 'recipe' that pre-answers all the questions that will arise as individuals avail themselves of their liberties and begin to discover that their liberty begins to infringe upon others. That...is why we have courts.

Sometimes they are very difficult and complex questions and litigation continues for years and, sometimes, resolution is long in arriving, if ever.

But I prefer that over the heavy hand of a government edict resolving the issue depending on the party in power, and the make-up of the Supreme Court at a State or Federal level.

I guess this process of sharing thoughts must, by necessity, proceed in small steps, eh?

Amicus...

Hmmm. I don't see how a matter can be resolved in the courts without the government basically doing what I've suggested - setting a price on those intangibles. If the government hasn't passed a law indicating that one has a right to those things, how could you sue?

 

[Handprints]

I do think, however, that inadvertently perhaps, you gave something of value to this forum; that of a 'global perspective' on matters of economic and health import. Most of our 'usual suspects' here, are closet socialists, complaining about 'outsourcing' and free market, open trade status with China and India and begging for trade restrictions and embargo's. Curious lot these AH'ers.

You rather clarify that it is happening regardless of their whining.

I do commend you for your courage in not just overcoming misfortune, but challenging it and continuing your life in spite of it. Well done!

A pleasure to make your acquaintance.

Amicus...

Thanks - very kind words! There's evidence to suggest that my own efforts had little to do with overcoming, challenging, continuing etc. At the risk of offending anyone who is (rightly) proud of the work they did to overcome health problems, a psychoanalyst friend of mine tells me there are only two types of outcomes from having that kind of life-threatening, long-physical-recovery event in your early twenties. One group retreats from everything, pretty much forever, and becomes a passive-aggressive Oprah subject. The other becomes the kind of hard-edged overachiever who walks out from the flames of their crashed plane and asks for double espresso. He doesn't believe personal efforts have a meaningful impact on which group one falls into...

 

[BlackShanglan]

That said, I accept what many economists and capitalist theorists have suggested: models which require a rational actor aren't as likely to stand up in healthcare discussions as in other areas where cost/benefit can be analysed in a microeconomic sense, in part because pain and fear don't typically lead people to act rationally...

Mmm, good point there. It's awkward for market controls to operate normally when people aren't thinking clearly when the commodity is purchased.

I'm sorry to hear of what sounds like some very painful experiences, but I've thoroughly enjoyed your humor and insight in discussing them. You made me laugh with your "that'll teach me."

What an interesting life you seem to have led. Anonymity, I'm happy to say, is generally well-respected here; I've been a genderless horse for years, and in part for similar reasons. Hence the extremely awkward attempts at obfuscatory generalities on things like countries and medical conditions - please do forgive them. I so badly needed something else to add to the length of my posts.

 

[BlackShanglan]

The other becomes the kind of hard-edged overachiever who walks out from the flames of their crashed plane and asks for double espresso.

"Smoke me a kipper, Skipper - I'll be back for breakfast!"

(Sorry, it's daft joke reference. It just sprang immediately to mind.)

 

[BlackShanglan]

Yielding to human nature is even more lethal than fighting to change it is dumb.

Undoubtedly. The struggle is of the essence. But planning one's economy as if the fight was won doesn't seem likely to help matters.