Hugo

As you all seem to be putting words in my mouth I will speak in my own defence - if you can all forgive that, in your arrogance. Ayn Rand is not an anarchist at all, but a minarchist. If you had read any of her texts, Thelonius, you would know that she advocates a state and state-provided monocentric law. This is the fundamental split between her and true anarchists such as Thoreau or Rothbard. Rothbard's theory of rights is the most advanced yet developed in political theory and is completely consistent. Of course, it leaves absolutely no room for any violence, including the state as the primary agent of violence in human society. Law does not have to be a collective argument at all, which you would know, Thelonius, if you had studied Rothbard or David Friedman at all, and examined their theories of polycentric, market-provided law. The fact is that the state requires a huge double standard in rights. The state daily commits violations of property rights (taxation), yet for the state to even exist this must be the case. The state also reserves the right to kidnap (conscription), to murder (resisting arrest), to racketeer (those who attempt to offer services similar to state monopolies risk fines and imprisonment) and so forth. Because the state is based on coercion it violates all notions of rights, because any rights theory based on coercion can be ultimately reduced to full rights for only one person, and none for anyone else. Rights theory that involves a state basically creates one set of laws for the ruled, and another for the rulers.

Why do you think that is? Why not make it $100 per hour? No, wait - $1000! $1,000,000! We'd all be stinking rich! No, actually you'd see everybody currently employed at a wage between minimum and $9-10/hr get fired. When they raised minimum wage by 50 cents in the US, half a million people lost their jobs straightaway, all of whom would have supposedly benefitted from the increase. Most of those people were teenagers, blacks and single mothers. As Murray Rothbard said, minimum wage does not create any jobs. It just destroys some that already exist. All minimum wage does is prove that you can buy as much unemployment as you want.

There is already a thread on healthcare options here.

See here.

These ideas stink! What revenue? Most public industries make a loss. Moreover, if the government is going to charge high prices and give the profits to social programs, what is the difference between that and just taxing people and giving it to social programs - other than another layer of bureaucracy that needs to be funded? The healthcare system is not available to all. It is available to those who are willing and able to wait a long time. Heaven help you if you are busy, or if you need urgent treatment. Same goes for public education. If you're willing to settle for substandard education, fine. What small businesses? Seeing as how you are penalising success and discouraging growth, what good reason is there for an entrepreneur to set up shop in Canada instead of a country that won't punish him if he is successful? Why - so the unions can rip the workers off? Do you plan to uphold union rights to commit violence against people and property? How do you think yourself any different to Al Capone? Malinvestment and misallocation of scarce resources, highly irresponsible and will cause greater poverty. Money taken from taxpayers to fund more public servants is money that they cannot spend on paying somebody to give them goods and services in the private sector. To grow the public sector means that you will shrink the private sector. Is a fully planned economy your goal? The government can control inflation by stopping inflation. Government creates inflation and absolutely nothing else by increasing the money supply in disproportionate rate to the increase in capital. If there is too much unemployment the state should lower minimum wage. All minimum wage does is prove that you can buy as much unemployment as you want. If you think me wrong, why not just raise minimum wage to $10,000 per hour? These are not "ordinary people", these are academics and intellectuals. See the state of universities right now to see how little the views and goals of academics correspond with those of the population at large. Why not just eliminate sales taxes? It is regressive anyway. The first part is a good idea. The second is not. Wealthy people create the investment that drives industry and creates jobs. Take their money away and there will be less jobs and lower real incomes (less investment in industry means less development and slower price decreases). To whom? They are already fully accountable and responsible to their stockholders. What business do you have trying to dictate to a corporation you have no stake in at all? Can I tell you you can't drive your car on weekends? Why? The people who leave the inheritance have already paid income and sales taxes all their lives. Why does their death give you an excuse to triple-tax them? To encourage single-parenthood? Good idea. We need more single mothers, because heaven knows that that mode of family life causes less crime, juvenile delinquency etc. Daycare is definitely used more by single parents. See here for more. If you cut out welfare you wouldn't need any immigration controls. The only people you'd get would be people willing to work. Again, this will create more unemployment and lower real incomes. There's already so much out there on how Kyoto is nonsensical junk science I don't think I need to add to it. The Ontario government estimates that fully implementing Kyoto will lose 400,000 jobs in the province.

Editing function is broken. Instead of: substitute

Now you're attempting to construct a strawman. The marriage market does not have to have a clear price, as Becker himself has said, people do not conduct themselves as though marriage were a market like gasoline, but nevertheless they follow market behaviour. It is not necessary to understand why you are doing something, to do it. Becker's theories on the marriage market have been well documented. Here you can read a column by Professors Labland and Sophocleus on Beckers work. Here is an interview with Becker himself in which he discusses the marriage market. Indeed, just do a Google search for "Gary Becker' and 'marriage market' and see what comes up. It is quite easy to see how marriage would be a market. There are people with things to offer, looking for things in a spouse. When two people marry, they make a contract to exchange what they have and satisfy each others want-needs. The opportunity cost is that both remove themselves from the market, making them unavailable should anything better come along. That is very silly, August. The same could have been said of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and so forth - they were in that situation because people valued it better than 'some alternative.' You assume that human history is a non-stop series of progressions towards better and greater things, but even a cursory glance at history will show that it is fraught with massive stagnations and set-backs. Because the exercise of violence can destroy market outcomes. Markets allow people to pursue welfare-improving alternatives, abrogation of markets with violence does not. Then make that point. You have already said that the onus would be on you to prove it, so make an argument. It's a good reason to forbid arson. How are you going to prevent that happening anyway? The history of the US and Canada shows that federalism is very difficult, if not impossible, to preserve. If you advocate creating multiple bureaucracies for healthcare, you must demonstrate how you will get them to compete with each other for efficiency rather than simply ganging up on the taxpayer. Assymetrical information is not necessarily a problem. Were it not for assymetrical information, Disneyland would never have been built, with all the jobs, industry and wealth it has brought to the Florida economy. Premiums would only be unaffordable if the healthcare was unaffordable. Is it better if we are forced to pay this outrageous price through taxation rather than given a choice? If you feel a Ferrari costs far too much, is it then OK if I steal the price of a Ferrari from you? In any case, you have no reason to believe that this would only be a temporary situation. The history of capitalism is a history of products becoming more and more affordable all the time, and now products that were 50 or 100 years ago only available to a very few are now within the grasp of all - computers, cars, etc. If people wish to buy something, but cannot afford it, that means that there is a big, virgin market just waiting for some entrepreneur to exploit it. This is a big incentive for people to find a way to bring costs down. There is no incentive for public healthcare to find any way to bring costs down, quite the contrary. They can have a seemingly unlimited supply of tax cash, but to be more wasteful means that they can get pay raises, jobs for their family and friends and so forth. No, why would it be?

Eureka seems to be asserting that healthcare is a right or an entitlement of which every human is deserving. In a free society, this cannot possibly be true. The only rights that can be granted equally to all are negative rights, the right to live, to not be harmed etc. These are called "negative rights" because they do not award anything and the only thing required of others is inaction. I need take no action to respect the right of another to live. That right only requires that I not kill him. Healthcare is a positive right. If a person is to have healthcare, and cannot provide it himself, then someone else must provide it for him. If that person does not want to, then for everybody to have healthcare as Eureka suggests, he must be forced. This means that for this person who is forced to pay for the healthcare of others, neither his labour nor the fruits of it are his own. What he has will be appropriated to pay for the healthcare of those who cannot provide it themselves. A person whose labour is appropriated against their will is a slave. The argument that healthcare is a "right" is an argument for tyranny. To grant healthcare as a right for all is to make some in our society privileged (the net recipients) and to enslave others (the net beneficiaries). This is completely incompatible with all traditional meanings of liberty and freedom - the notion of individual independence, the right to pursue ones own goals unhindered by others, the right to life and property, the right to live free from violence, and so forth. If Eureka believes that universal healthcare can truly be provided by the state - which I reject on practical grounds - it will be a slave state that provides it.

The problem is that a Pareto optimality only exists on paper, because the values it deals in are subjective. Pareto does not require optimality of efficiency, just that no change in the deal make any party "worse off" without making another "better off". These are highly subjective. It is impossible for an impartial observer to decide whether or not any trade is Pareto-optimal. To quote David Friedman, utopia is not an option. There is no need to pretend that markets are perfect, they are not. All one needs to do is to demonstrate that markets are better than any other alternative we know, and that is easy. Market failure is no argument for State interventionism, because history shows that State failure is both more common and has worse consequences than market failure. Market failure is Enron. State failure is a Cultural Revolution or a Stalinist Purge. I'll take loss of stock over a bullet in the back of the head any day. Not to say that state healthcare is about bullets in the back of the head, although there is evidence to suggest that such a system takes a very callous and inhumane view of life - see below. However, we must recognise that human beings all want to help themselves in life, and that agents of the State have been given license to use violence to better themselves. In State healthcare, this is why the system is so inefficient: why try to reduce the ranks of bureaucrats and pencil-pushers, to replace filing cabinets with computers, or to seek cheaper ways to perform surgery, when the effective gains could simply be taken from the taxpayer without having to lay anybody off and enrage their unions? Who says they are not? As I said to Eureka, Gary Becker says they are, and the fact that his peers saw fit to award him a Nobel Prize demonstrates that he is not a fool. But Hayek's other main point is that the managers of such a system may well be intelligent, but never humane. You see, planned economics are manifestations of huge amounts of power. The economic planner has massive power over other people. People attracted to such positions are people with a taste for power, and the lust for power does not accompany individual values such as compassion, moderation and empathy. Consider that in free market healthcare, the industry has a vested interest in keeping you alive: they can continue to sell you healthcare products and services. In public healthcare, however, if you are sick the bureaucrats wish you would die, because then they won't have to waste their finite resources on you. This has probably occurred to somebody in the Canadian healthcare system. Consider that with cancer, it is generally accepted that the earlier it is detected, the better the chances of survival. However, Canadian healthcare won't even start treating cancer until it is at least 3 months old (I know this because everybody in my wife's family has had at least one form of cancer - something that regularly keeps her awake at night). Somebody seems to have decided that the trade-off between cost and patient mortality at 3 months was "just right". In the free market, if costs for your treatment would exceed what your insurance company would be able to get from you in your lifetime, then your insurance company has an interest in seeing you dead instead of healthy. However, they are not in charge of your care: the hospital is, and they have a vested interest in keeping you alive. State healthcare, however, incorporates the caregiver into the insurer. What do you think the result is? Yes, and the US healthcare system kills 177,000 people annually through malpractice. The US system is still a state-run system and as such, has huge failures. It is an ad populum fallacy to assume that if everybody does or believes something, that thing must be correct. Consider that the State has a vested interest in perpetuating the status quo, and that the State is the most powerful entity in any nation today. Does that answer your question? The state healthcare system perpetuates because the foxes are running the henhouse.

However, the problem is that the resources that that money is allocated from are scarce and the government cannot expand those resources. Therefore, expansions in healthcare spending can only come at the expense of something else. What you propose essentially places in the hands of government the sole power to prioritise goods for people. What the free market does is to place that power in the hands of individuals so that they may decide for themselves what is most important for them. The further problem is that it does not matter how much more money you pump into healthcare. So long as the price is artificially reduced below market clearing, in this case to zero, demand will always outstrip supply. If you increase the supply of healthcare with more money, people will demand even more healthcare. This is simple human nature: people as a whole are never satisfied with what they have. Therefore you will always have queues, because this is how excess demand manifests. Unfortunately, healthcare is an industry where fast action is a measure of quality, so public healthcare will always by definition be of lower quality than private healthcare. Indeed, it has been proposed that it is. Nobel laureate Gary Becker has already explored this.

Actually, no, available resources are beyond the influence of government. The state cannot create prosperity or something from nothing, as the Soviet Union proved so graphically. What the state has to do is decide how to allocate resources, and what history has proven time and time again is that the efforts of a few bureaucrats to do this are inferior to the contribution of hundreds of millions of minds applied to the same problem. What are we talking about here? Changing the amount of money in the economy causes prices to rise or the value of money to fall. Allocating more money to healthcare has an opportunity cost elsewhere (the military, policing, First Nations transfers, etc). As long as the price remains zero demand will remain higher than supply. This is simple logic: if something is free, people will demand as much of it as they want so long as that thing is considered to be anything more than completely worthless. Human nature is never to be satisfied with anything, as availability grows, want-needs grow. Our present lifestyle would be unimaginably luxurious to those who lived a hundred years ago and beyond the wildest imaginings of those who lived a thousand years ago, and yet we still want more. This is why there will always be more demand than supply for anything whose price is artificially reduced below market clearing level. Human nature. Yes, supply is regulated as we have seen by bureaucratic allocation, and demand is regulated by queueing. But people generally see waiting lists as a bad thing. They do not understand that it is the only way the government has to regulate the demand for a zero-price good. I think they do have bearing. You claim that healthcare is essential, well, food and water are even more essential! You claim that the market does not adjust to demand for workers, the IT industry proves that it does.

Like any other commodity, product or service, healthcare has an opportunity cost which must be borne by somebody. Just as consumers sacrifice a larger car to buy a big-screen TV, so the government must sacrifice the armed forces or police spending for healthcare. Therefore, healthcare is another service that obeys the law of supply and demand and of scarcity. The fact that public healthcare always has had queues demonstrates that, like any other commodity, product or service, it is following Say's Law. This is even more apparent when one considers that those parts of healthcare that are still private (dentistry or optometry, and large parts of the US healthcare system) do not have the waiting times associated with public healthcare because the price mechanism matches supply to demand. The market-based prediction for "free" healthcare is that demand will always exceed supply, as with any good whose price is artificially reduced below the market clearing price, and sure enough this has been borne out empirically. Food and water are commodities which are far more vital to people than healthcare. I have not used any healthcare services for five years. I challenge you to find me somebody who has not consumed any food or water for five years. The question of how essential healthcare is must be decided by individuals, not by bureaucrats. Publicly provided healthcare assumes that everyone must put health first and be forced to pay for it. However, it simply is not the case. The country is flooded with people who put their health second to something: smokers and substance abusers, extreme-sport participants, etc. Therefore the essence of public healthcare is to say to the citizenry: we know what you need better than you do, so we shall make your decisions for you. You are simply too irresponsible to be allowed to do what you please with your own property and your own bodies. This does not make economic sense. If additional private healthcare did demand more personnel, then the demand in excess of supply would create increases in the wages of those personnel, which would induce more people to the profession, thus tending back towards equilibrium. Once again, supply and demand. The same thing was observed during the dot-com bubble, when demand for web-specialised IT personnel outstripped supply causing salaries to skyrocket. Then after that bubble burst the situation reversed, and now those personnel are no longer particularly well-paid on the whole. IT is no longer seen as the sure-fire money-making career it was ten years ago, so people are turning to other professions. This reduces supply of labour to the market equilibrium.

I don't agree at all. Spanking is a last resort and one that does not work. The only circumstance in which I could even understand spanking would be with a child who is placing themselves in imminent danger and is too young to understand words and warnings. Many child psychologists and pediatricians, including the widely published Dr. Christopher Green, have written that even children whose behavioural problems are so severe that they would physically attack parents and strangers with instruments such as golf clubs and baseball bats can be far more successfully dealt with using non-corporal methods such as time-out rather than corporal punishment. Indeed, violence in children is often a direct response to violence from parents. I believe that children only "require a whoopin'" because the parents have not applied good discipline from an early age. It is noteable that problem children generally occur as a whole rather than individuals within well-behaved families. Parents either have good children (I have three very good children) or they have bad children. "Black sheep" behaviour doesn't begin to set in until the mid-to-late teens, at which point it is far too late for "time-out". Up until that time, children are primarily followers. Most of parental failure in this regard can be chalked up to lack of consistency, failure to support each other and act as a united front, displays of fear towards children, and so forth. Spanking does not solve any of these problems. It merely teaches children that violence is an acceptable solution to a problem. My household has consistent rules and discipline that do not change, my wife and I do not allow the children to play us off against each other, and our children know that blackmail with e.g. threats of tantrums never works for them. As a result, my children never need to be spanked. I have far more effective punishments if they should transgress the long-established and well-known rules (e.g. keep your hands to yourself, bedtime is 9pm, dessert is only given to those who eat dinner etc.) Children crave rules, routine and discipline. The parents of unruly children never apply any. Since you have never experienced it, this is pure speculation and nothing more. For all you know, time-out would have worked wonders for you. This is highly disingenuous. Some children do genuinely have physiological problems such as chemical imbalances, overactive thyroids and so forth. To label them "little bastards" and hit them is on the same level as labelling schizophrenics "lunatics", locking them up in asylums without medical or even humane treatment and having members of the general public come laugh at them on weekends. I'm curious to know if you two actually have any children, or if you are basing your arguments solely on remembered experiences from your own childhoods?

Your return pleases me, August, you were often a voice of reason here. I am dedicated to my principles, at least until I encounter an argument that confounds them beyond my ability to reconcile. This is why I gave up being a socialist and became a capitalist - I have neither been able to refute capitalist arguments against socialism nor seen anybody else refute them. So I may be an ideologue, but only as my ideology is the one that I have found to hold the most reason and logic in my lifetime. I have already discarded many of my beliefs when I found them to be obsolete to me. So I reject your charge. Then does that not put the onus on you to justify State health insurance? Basically, if you argue that market allocation of (scarce) resources leads to more efficiency and greater prosperity, but that you prefer State health insurance, can you demonstrate to us that health insurance is the exception to this rule rather than another exercise of it? Say's Law. Reduce the price (i.e. send a market signal of increased supply), and demand increases. Reduce the price infinitely and demand will increase infinitely. Basically, if you make healthcare "free", demand will always outstrip supply, which means waiting for service, forever, because supply cannot be increased infinitely as long as the universe exists under the Law of Scarcity. It only functions at first because of economic time-lags. Things don't happen instantaneously - a company that makes a loss one month does not instantly lay employees off and close factories. They wait awhile. Same thing with inflation: an initial boom is produced, followed by a slowing and then a recession (unless further inflation follows). This would happen instantaneously were it not for the time-preference of humans, or the ability to weigh present costs and benefits against prospective future ones. With state enterprise, it functions until the effects of the inefficiencies of allocation it creates catch up with it. Then it starts to unravel. In the same way that the market mechanism has been used for thousands of other goods and services. Healthcare has been turned into some kind of Holy Grail in Canada, and a true solution will only come when people realise that healthcare is actually just another combination of goods and services, like plumbing or cars, that obeys all the economic laws applicable to any market. To paraphrase von Mises, if we had nationalized the car industry and left healthcare as a free-market, today people would be saying that of course cars could not make profit like healthcare does, that it is unreasonable to expect the car industry to advance as fast as the healthcare industry does, that cars are an indispensible service, nay, a right of the people and must be provided by the government and could not possibly be turned over to private enterprise etc. etc. That is my position and so far, nobody has been able to rouse a decent argument against it - at least, not one that they were willing or able to defend beyond my first rebuttal. I'm willing to discuss how to get there, but so far discussion of the principle itself has only reinforced it.

In that case no, however, if that individual is still unemployed six months later it probably has less to do with external factors and more to do with the individual. Actually, the time-out works very well. You don't let your kid play videogames, you put them in a quiet, boring environment. I have used time-out with all of my children with great effect, and I don't spank any of them. The time-out is very effective because it removes the child from the environment that is causing the disruption and creates distance for them, whereas spanking does not remove them from the environment but merely adds confrontation and humiliation to it. In the case of videogames I do believe that the situation is entirely within the control of individual parents. I don't think there are any external factors that a parent cannot override. That rather depends on the method of assistance, doesn't it? I don't disagree a bit. Had you said "the lucky should be forced to help the unlucky" I would have disagreed with you. But the existence of so many successful charities is sufficient evidence that the lucky are often motivated to help the unlucky through nothing more than simple, human compassion.

They haven't. I bought a portable CD player about 7 years ago for about $200. I bought another one 4 months ago for $80, and it had more features (MP3 playback) and longer battery life. It was also smaller and lighter, and had a longer warranty. And it looked cooler. Maybe because gasoline is not supplied in a competitive market but dependent upon state-controlled OPEC production, and the price rises are caused by a universal increase in the cost of crude as determined by OPEC? If the price of flour doubled tomorrow, would you expect some bakeries not to increase the price of bread? Ever tried taking one? Preferably in a non-Warsaw-Pact nation, or in a university that does not exclusively espouse Soviet Communism? Markets are never mature. There are less mature (flat-panel TVs) and more mature (foodstuffs) markets, but no market is ever "mature", in the same way that no human being is completely developed - it is an ongoing process that will continue for the lifetime of the individual, or the market, defined as being the period of time for which some consumers somewhere continue to demand the product. This displays a complete lack of understanding of markets. Consumers set the pace for markets, not suppliers. As they demand more, prices rise due to scarcity, as they demand less, prices fall due to glut. It tends towards equilibrium, or most efficient allocation of scarce economic resources which, at the end of the day, is the sole purpose of economics. Producers can affect things at the other end of the scale but it produces the same results - pushing prices up creates a fall in consumer demand, resulting in a glut, which pushes prices down again, thus tending back towards equilibrium. A producer cannot increase prices while also increasing or even maintaining demand. Because you agreed to buy it. Consent makes it a non-crime, in the same way as consent differentiates rape from lovemaking and theft from gifts. Or can't you see a difference between rape and lovemaking, charity and theft, murder and euthanasia, slavery and employment? All of those can be privatized. You can look at the books if you're an investor, otherwise it's none of your business. Do I have the right to look at your personal finances? Well, dentistry is expensive for a great many reasons, for instance, that the profession requires a great deal of skill and training, and the procedures require a lot of expensive equipment. Dentistry is not any cheaper in Japan, all you are seeing is that the costs are being borne by people who aren't deriving any benefit from the work, as opposed to being borne by people who are. There is a big difference between price and cost. Do not pretend that they are the same. What school of dentistry? You mean the Royal College of Dental Surgeons of Ontario (for instance), which is created by the The Regulated Health Professions Act (RHPA), the Dentistry Act and other provincial laws? So in other words, the government? Then weigh in, because none of your examples have any bearing on this question whatsoever.

Michael was stating that my view of the world only allowed for personal responsibility - "The real world lies somewhere between the one that you describe (we are all completely independent and absolutely responsible for our actions and in control of factors that govern our lives." That is not the case. I said there was a tendency. I think it is well-known that a lot of people - probably most - will blame things other than themselves for their misfortunes. It's easy to do, far easier than confronting ones own failings. We all probably know someone who has been unemployed for a year not because he can't find work, but because he considers the work he finds beneath him. We all know of black people who complain that "whitey" is keeping them down, despite the fact that he isn't keeping Bill Cosby or Colin Powell down, and despite the fact that these complainers refuse to get an education or hold down a job. We all also know Digby, who in this thread has blamed videogame manufacturers for something - his son playing violent games - that is entirely within his control. Yes, I realised at the time that it might cause some confusion, but I think what I meant was clear - the "externalities" I am talking about are individuals or phenomena beyond the control of the individual who has cause to complain about the circumstances he finds himself in. But I admit that the word wasn't the best to use - it was the best I could think of at the time. Exactly. Moreover, I think it is becoming easier for parents to control these things. Digital cable boxes and Tivos increasingly come with passcodes, parental controls and V-chips as standard. Firewalls and software like NetNanny can be programmed to block out adult content on the web. And, of course, there's that new-fangled idea of being involved in what your children do. A person who effectively uses computers or television to raise their children does not have reasonable grounds for complaint when these influences cause problems.

You are constructing a strawman argument. I never said that individuals were the sole acting agents for everything that transpired in their lives. I said that most of the time, people are responsible for their own misfortunes. Some things are definitely outside individual control - tsunamis, for instance, or a technological development that makes some jobs obsolete. However, there is an alarming tendency for people to blame everything on external factors when the actual fact is that a lot of their problems are self-inflicted. Videogames are like this. It is true that externalities - the manufacturers - are making and marketing these games, but it is also true that parents have the power to control what their children see. Those who claim otherwise are simply not applying themselves to the problem. I find it hard to believe that parents can be outwitted by 10-year-olds and I also find it hard to believe that distant corporations can be more powerful than parents in their own homes. To blame everything on external factors and demand that somebody else solve a problem is also to throw away that uniquely human of gifts: adaptability. Tsunamis may happen, jobs become obsolete, but humans rebuild and retrain. This is why humanity, unlike any animal, lives from the poles to the Sahara, and why humanity continues to prosper, develop and grow more numerous despite volcanoes, earthquakes, droughts, wars, you name it.

You can sum yourself up in your provision of a definition of something. You can't even do that... I find you extremely offensive and annoying... You give no attention to argument and no thought to anything. You simply trot out your patented spiel and twist others' words... [and it goes on like this] I'll take that as a "no".

Moving on, I notice that Blackdog has gone back and edited one of his posts with some questions for me. I'm going to skip over the questions on anarchy since they have already been answered here and there doesn't seem much point cluttering up this thread rehashing them. Even comparing life expectancies of a city like Toronto to Singapore, the latter still comes out on top, even though Toronto has around the same population as Singapore in a very similar area. So I don't buy that argument. Don't forget, also, that dense populations also have factors that count against them, for instance, the universal tendency of large urban populations to suffer more crime and pollution than in more rural areas. If you run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, you are not in a position to comparison-shop either: you buy gas at the first gas station you come across. Does that mean that the gasoline industry should be nationalised? No, and it's because the vast majority of gasoline purchases can be made with comparison shopping, and so it is with healthcare too. Your example only allows for emergency care, not checkups, MRIs, bloodwork, gynecology, planned surgery, pharmaceuticals, dentistry, optometry, etc. Even in emergency care there is often some choice as to what facility or doctor performs the said care. Helicopter transport from the scene of an accident usually makes several hospitals only minutes away. If one hospital was much better than another, with a much higher survival rate of patients, the pilot would certainly take an extra couple of minutes flying time to get the patient there. Consumers are even more reliant upon the providers of foodstuffs. We need food more urgently than healthcare to live! Still, a free market and competition in food provision seem to have worked out pretty well. Indeed, those countries that have state-controlled food industries are the only ones still suffering famines that cannot be attributed to natural disaster or war. It is the case that consumers are reliant on some services, but the providers of those services are also reliant on the consumers for their livelihoods. Therefore, it is in everybodys best interest to come to a mutually satisfactory agreement. Besides, with competition, if one provider decides to rip people off he breaks the market wide open for a competitor who decides to be more ethical. Consumers reject companies that they perceive to treat them unfairly.

So you're not going to answer any questions or make any arguments, then? Your sole purpose is to aggravate? That's how "troll" is defined, Eureka: --Urban Dictionary You are a troll. Now, do you have anything to say about healthcare? Anything at all? Or are you planning a continuation of this total waste of time and bandwidth?

Ad populum fallacy. Once upon a time, equal rights for women and blacks was also a thought that most people passed by and ignored. The fact is that society without government has arisen quite a few times in history, often separated by several centuries, so it isn't the case that this is an idea that nobody cares about. Jesus was an anarchist, and also the single most important person in human history. I advocate free-market healthcare. You are crying foul because in my advocacy I talk about free markets? How should I discuss free markets without discussing free markets? I completely dispute your claim that I have turned this into a debate about anarchy. Indeed, I even penned a lengthy proposal about how free-market healthcare could be brought about within the framework of the state as we know it today! You had no response to that - why? Yes, and once upon a time the same could be said for democracy, for a heliocentric solar system, for a spherical Earth, and so forth. Ad populum fallacy. Try again, and this time try not to trip over yourself. You're pretty new here, so I'll forgive that. If you do a search you will see quite a few threads where I have argued and described these things. You are welcome to continue them, Greg hasn't closed any of them. But as I said to Eureka, you are either very stupid or very prejudiced if you seriously think that advocating free-market healthcare is 'hijacking' a thread on healthcare. It isn't my fault that trolls like Eureka can't stay on-topic and keep a civil tone. The reason why this thread has been hijacked is because he happened upon this thread, made empty claims without any argument or evidence, and threw insults around in humiliation at his demonstrable lack of knowledge and ability. Very childish behaviour indeed. However, soon he will follow his usual pattern, deliver a final salvo of petty insults (for which I will probably have to report him to Greg - again) and abandon the thread, at which point perhaps we can get back to discussing the topic at hand. What I did was to posit that free-market healthcare is a superior option. A lot of people in this thread then demonstrated that they did not know what free markets were, so I had to explain that, otherwise they would not have understood my point (as they evidently didn't). Since we are not coming at the issue from a common frame of reference it became necessary for me to define my terms before moving on. We're still stuck there, because you and Eureka insist on quibbling about the terminology, so that we can't get back into the actual discussion.

It sounds like you got to him. Good story. Anyway, to touch on what you've said, I think this reaction stems from the fact that there are hard and easy answers to questions about bad things. We live in a world where Bad Things happen, or where we believe that Bad Things happen (although it is subjective). Most of the time, people are responsible for the Bad Things that happen to them, but they don't want to hear it. For instance, if you lose your job, it's much easier to hear that evil, greedy capitalists are keeping you down, or it's the fault of illegal immigrants, or cheap foreign labour, whatever - not your fault. It's hard to hear that you are lazy, underskilled, have a bad attitude, etc. That means it was your fault, and it also means that you have to do something about it rather than just whining about what has been done to you. This is why socialism is so popular. It's an easy sell. Capitalism tells us that if we want better, we have to go out and get it and if we fail, it's our own fault. Socialism tells us that we deserve better, and someone else better give it to us, and if we don't get it, it was somebody else's fault. Same thing with violence in the media. The parents of violent kids don't want to be told that it is their fault because they teach them violence in the home, neglect them, or let them see things that are wholly age-inappropriate (and I don't believe for a minute that the parents of young children cannot control what they see - I saw a toy gun for the first time in my life at age 10 and I thought it was an electric drill because I had never seen a gun before). It's a lot easier to tell these parents that it's the evil media - somebody else's fault. This lets them carry on living their inadequate yet easy lifestyle (which they like, or else they wouldn't do it) while blaming somebody else, rather than forcing them to admit their mistakes and make some changes for the sake of their kids.

But all you have brought up is some anecdotal evidence from your personal life. Where is the scientific evidence that advertising makes fundamental shifts in the want-needs of the audience? I just do not think it is the case. And as I have also said, it just does not make sense. Conforming the opinions of the masses requires a massive propaganda machine, such as that of the Third Reich, where all media and all social interaction are tightly controlled. Even then, not all people will be swayed by the messages. Advertisers do not have anything like that level of control. The odds are very much against their being able to construct an advertising campaign that dupes people into changing their want-needs, especially as their competitors will all be following suit. It is far, far easier to find out what the want-needs of the populace are, and then make something that meets those want-needs. That enterprise has a much greater chance of success. Ask yourself this: how much advertising would it have taken to stop consumers adopting automobiles, or electric light, or indoor flush toilets? How much advertising would I need to sell a square wheel, or a waterproof sponge, or a fire-proof match? How can I persuade people to buy my screen-doors for submarines, my radios for the deaf, and my cameras for the blind? According to you, all these things should be possible. It's just a question of marketing. Anything else means that advertising is largely informative rather than persuasive!

Hogo? Anyway, where has "all that" been demonstrated? I seem to have missed it. If you'll be so kind as to point it out... Inability to understand what? I'm still waiting for you to actually explain anything or construct an argument! How do you know? We haven't even discussed him yet. I happen to disagree with most economists who are not of the Austrian school. I do, however, like some who are not, such as Milton Friedman and the other Chicagoites. Though I think they are wrong on a few points, the vast majority of times we can agree. I also recognise that while, for instance, Marx and Keynes may have been wrong in a great many of their theories and assumptions they were certainly able enough thinkers to earn the respect of many of their peers. Therefore, I have given their work consideration and thought, although I ultimately disagreed with it. Galbraith, however, has no following and no recognition amongst his peers. His teachings are strictly for the layperson as economists give him no respect at all. However, my point was that while I have read a great deal of work fundamentally opposed to my points of view, you have read absolutely none opposed to yours, and what is worse, you shamelessly state that you have no intention of so doing. Therefore, it is ridiculous and utterly laughable that you would accuse me of being prejudiced, blinkered and uninformed, of being unable to consider points of view other than my own. I expect that you have only ever discussed these matters with those who agree with you, which is why you are dumbfounded that somebody would disagree, and which is also why you are incapable of formulating any kind of rebuttal - you've simply never bothered to think about it in any depth. Well, off you go, to whine about this episode in your Socialist Sewing Circle, or wherever the heck you half-baked your silly ideas.