Now you'd tell that baker, "We'll need 37 pages of forms filled out monthly, and we'll fine you if you're late." Because *we* don't trust *you*. And you'd tell the nail-maker essentially the same, in terms that apply to his industry.
And then you add that you want a piece of each loaf and a piece of each nail they trade between themselves.
You've made trade less free.
That, by itself, reduces the productivity of both, reducing their ability to make a living, much less rise up out of poverty. And it reduces the total amount of goods available to the society (since less is produced), which impoverishes the society.
But then you'd add a load of paperwork to go with it, because you don't trust them. "We need documentation--can't have trade without paperwork!"
We cannot possibly make all the things we need ourselves; we can *only* get them by trading with others, preferably in the most efficient manner possible. Setting aside stealing from others (or having the government take other people's things for you), free and voluntary trade is the *only* way for an individual to rise up out of poverty.
Socialism, by contrast, heavily discourages free trade, promoting legalized redistribution (the opportunity to live off your neighbors) instead of work and production.
One of those is constructive, the other destructive.
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On the other hand, the baker ends up pickier about the wheat he puts in his bread. History records a lot of interesting ways of making white bread whi ter, few of them good for the customer.
History does suggest that it isn't a good idea to put too much trust in the benevolence of your bakers.
On the other hand if the goods aren't of good quality, society doesn't do t oo well either.
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Germany is pretty socialist - by your standards - and is doing very well ou t of free trade. With a quarter of the population of the US, they export ab out a much as the US does.
Modern socialism is perfectly comfortable with free trade, and Germany and Scandinavia are thoroughly productive societies. Welfare programs are bette r and more comprehensive than they are in the US, but there still don't see m to be many free-loaders around.
Lying about socialism isn't all that constructive. Inventing phantom proble ms in other people's countries and ignoring real problems in your own isn't the most productive way of spending your time.
Perfectly correctly. The person most likely to be shot buy any gun you own is you, probably by you. Nobody thinks about getting depressed, but getting depressed is quite a bit more dangerous if you own a gun and keep it at ho me.
Pension schemes do seem to be necessary. Not enough people save enough for their old age if they are left to their own devices.
Sewage systems that work do a lot for life expectancy. Builders always seem to be able to find something that almost works and costs less if you give them half a chance, and home owners are rarely expert in the fine details o f plumbing.
Having enough money to buy the right health care when you need it is even m ore difficult than investing enough to keep you comfortable in old age. And if you get sick with something infectious and can't afford to get it treat ed you can infect a lot of your neighbours. You seem in incapable of realis ing that the first job of the health care system is preventing plagues, whi ch makes universal health care something closer to national defence than an y kind of socialist luxury.
Not that I've noticed. TV cameras on the streets can be handy to document w hat has happened after the event, but nobody has the manpower to keep track of everything that happens as it happens
You can home school your kids, but you do have prove that they are getting adequately educated. If the kids look scrawny enough for the neighbours to notice, you do need to check out the mental health of the parents - it does n't take a long period of malnutrition to completely wreck a child's devel opment, and parents aren't immune from mental illness.
Why shouldn't they be? I think you are misidentifying Democrat attempts to resist Republican-inspired voter identification rules which turn out to be unreasonably stringent in practice.
The rust-belt states voted for Trump - case closed. Progressives have got t hat right. None that I know of have proposed disenfranchising the under-edu cated - so I do have to wonder what you are getting at
Big Pharma can certainly look inherently evil from time to time. The Food a nd Drug Administration was formed in 1906 to deal with the adulteration and misbranding of food and drugs on the American market. Upton Sinclair had d one a lot to inform the public of the need for that kind of regulation.
It only takes one corner-cutting shyster to kill quite a few patients.
Where you want them ruled by people who share you silly ideas? The People w ho Know Worse?
Under the original version of the US constitution, 6% of the population qua lified for a vote. That 6% ruled the other 94%.
The idea was that the 6% all lived in the US and none of them lived in the UK, but the great majority of the original inhabitants of the states that u nited to form the United States of America didn't get to rule themselves. T he founding tax evaders didn't share that specific idea at all.
Err... no. Printing was developed to disseminate holy texts. Also, to reduce the volume of records based on clay tablets and tally-sticks.
Not Kaiser. They're only a reimburser to the folk who DO take care of you. Your claim that they take a fixed fee per month, though, is accurate. Until they change the fee. Sadly, they might also change the care standard.
Kaiser is a physician-owned non-profit. The guy who saved my retina (surgery at 10 PM, same day I walked in) could make 5x his salary in private practice. He doesn't care.
ACA made new Kaiser type organizations illegal.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
lunatic fringe electronics
If they cause injury, if a tradesman does an inferior job, we have courts for that. Such people are liable.
Great. So the poor black woman who wanted to sell bread to her neighbors, can't. You've kept her poor. Nice job.
And the young mom at home with her kids, can't take watch a couple of the neighbor's kids during the day for a few dollars, benefiting them both. Because *you* don't trust her (even if her neighbor does).
So you've kept poor people poor, robbed them of the chance to rise. With your worry. Mission accomplished. Meanwhile, if people want to be dishonest, you haven't prevented it. You can't, not even with a minder watching every loaf.
I spoke to a nurse yesterday who has taken on a side gig: she's filling out paperwork ON GOVERNMENT PAPERWORK. The hospital's government crap is so complicated they need to pay a registered nurse to keep track of it and file new reports (on the paperwork).
Paper and vellum go back a lot further than printing. Roman books were written on scrolls. There wasn't a lot of it around, and it did tend to get recycled.
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The problem is that there are good physician-owned health-care organisations, and others that exist only to make the physicians involved rich.
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The organisational structure that works so well in Kaiser is also one that makes it easy for criminal physicians to rip off their customers and Medicare.
ACA threw that particular baby out with the bath-water.
Courts are expensive. They work for large scale fraud where a lot of money is involved. It wouldn't be worth anybody's time to prosecute a baker for s elling them one inferior loaf of bread, but it is worth getting the local c ouncil to hire a guy who spends his time testing samples of all the bread b aked around town, and can tell the townspeople which baker is cheating them .
Once the word gets out, that baker doesn't do much business, even if he has n't been tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail (which was t he kind of thing that did happen to cheating tradesmen, if they were caught at it).
She has to jump through hoops before she can do it. Not every baker is smar t enough to know the downside of using unconventional additives to make the bread look prettier, and the current system of regulation evolved to stop them experimenting.
It doesn't take too many child abuse cases, with paedophiles setting up chi ld care centres, to make most people careful about where they get their chi ld care. Some people are stupid and careless, which can be very rough on th eir kids.
You haven't kept people poor. You've merely made it a bit more difficult fo r the honest and diligent to earn extra money, but you have also made it mo re difficult for the crooked and corrupt to rip people off. Germany is rath er better than the US in encouraging people to get documented tertiary educ ation skills - many of them through apprenticeships (which do tend to have a formal education component these days).
Of course, Germany collect more of it's GDP in taxes than the US does, and is happier about investing some of the extra money in making the children o f the less well off more productive (because they do end up paying more tax es out of the higher incomes they eventually earn).
James Arthur isn't bright enough to follow that logic, and is happy with th e US system where the rich can spend as much as they like educating their c hildren so that they can get jobs that the children of the poor can't hope to qualify for.
In the US wealth is more heritable than height, which does suggest that the children of the poor aren't being educated up to their potential, but that 's "freedom" for you.
Public health statistics do suggest that kind of crime is a lot less common than it used to be before 1906.
Politics isn't about achieving perfection - it's all about finding the best available compromise. James Arthur's preferred compromise involves him pay ing out a lot less in taxes, and living in a society where the poor don't d o all that well. As is pointed out, with loads of statistical support in
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he's actually accepting a poorer quality of life than he'd enjoy in a more egalitarian society, but he's more interested in paying less taxes than he is in living longer.
The problem is that it is actually helpful. Communications, command and con trol does depend on good communications, even if James Arthur is too ideolo gy-bound to admit it.
There is a profession called "coding". Not Python, but figuring out what insurance charge codes can be piled onto one medical visit. There are classes and seminars and stuff to teach coding.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
lunatic fringe electronics
So what? It is US medical insurers who like to keep the system complicated, not the US government. The Canadian economists who looked into why US medi cal care is about half again more expensive than comparable systems in othe r advanced industrial countries blamed bloated administrative costs in the medical insurance system as the main problem.
Nobody in the US seems to have worked out any scheme that cuts their overhe ads. The Dutch and German health insurance systems are competitive, in the sense that there are a number of organisations competing to sell you your c ompulsory medical insurance (none of which is exactly alike), but they don' t seem to have the same problem with bloat.
The US medical insurance business does spend a lot on lobbyists, which may have something to do with their capacity to get away with persistent over-c harging.
That's kinda complicated. When Gutenberg printed a bible, it was costly, BUT the best customer was ... literate. Which meant, a monk or priest, who was under a vow of poverty. There was lots of sponsorship and giftgiving.
Every academic was also under Church control (Isaac Newton was a deacon, for instance: that was the only way to get into a library).
Freedom of the press, after the Peace of Westphalia, changed things. But for many generations, it was Church power, not money, that dominated every aspect of printing.
Literacy wasn't confined to the clergy, and books of secular interest seem to have been printed from quite early on.
Rich people did have private libraries. Isaac Newton was a deacon because he was a fellow of his college in Cambridge. The students at the colleges - who weren't ordained at all - also had access to the college libraries.
Newton famously refused to become an ordained priest in the Anglican Church, and it took special permission from Charles II for him to be able to get away with it.
Not exactly. During the Dutch Golden Age from about 1600 to 1700, Amsterdam did very well out of publishing all sorts of books, some of them decidedly secular, and selling across Germany and into the Baltic States.
The Peace of Westphalia, in 1648, did make exports somewhat easier.
If, and it is a very big if, you are still around and can prove it. In practice it is virtually impossible.
1) we have corporate manslaughter laws, but I don't think they've ever resulted in a successful prosecution
2) consider the 2013 horsemeat scandal. Nobody realised how meat was actually traded. Romanian horses was traded all over Europe via Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands, the Netherlands and France. Some might have originated in Poland.
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You belief in the innate goodness of people is commendable, but regrettably sometimes misplaced.
y is involved. It wouldn't be worth anybody's time to prosecute a baker for selling them one inferior loaf of bread, but it is worth getting the local council to hire a guy who spends his time testing samples of all the bread baked around town, and can tell the townspeople which baker is cheating th em.
Your ignorance of the courts in the U.S. is noted.
ney is involved. It wouldn't be worth anybody's time to prosecute a baker f or selling them one inferior loaf of bread, but it is worth getting the loc al council to hire a guy who spends his time testing samples of all the bre ad baked around town, and can tell the townspeople which baker is cheating them.
The US does have the interesting feature that you can get a lawyer to fight a case for you on the basis that he will get a - large - chunk of your win nings if you win, and nothing if you don't. The phrase ambulance-chaser com es to mind.
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That doesn't happen if there isn't a good chance that you'll win, and win a lot of money. Individual bakers aren't rich enough to be worth suing.
A class action against a baking chain might be worth the trouble.
Meanwhile, back in reality, the FDA does a useful job, even if James Arthur would prefer it to be privatised and paid for by bakers (etc) rather than by tax-payers, and lies furiously about what it does in order to try and ma ke his tax-evasive preferences looks idealistic rather than cheap-skate.
Unsurprisingly "self regulation" fails miserably. There was /another/ one in the news earlier in the week, but I can't remember /which/ failure it was. It will probably be in the next Private Eye.
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