comments from another blog...

>>It’s something that has to happen. Americans are already literally dying in the streets due to the Status Quo. And Privatization-gone-amok.

It is Status Quo, but it is not “Privatization-gone-amok”. The government has its hands in it, in the form of medicare. That makes it “semi-nationalization-gone-amok”

To use an example from another thread:

In the “safeway” situation, the striking workers have a resource (their labor) that they are withholding from the store owners, in order to force a change in the valuation of that resource (the “market value”). If the government were to bring in labor (scab labor) from somewhere else, and charge less than what the striking workers were making in the first place, how effective would that strike be? Would the value of the workers’ labor go up (change)?

Now let’s substitute the players: The patients are the “workers”, The patients’ money is their “labor”, The cost of health care is the “market value” of the labor (basically, how much health care a dollar will buy) and medicare is the “scab labor”.

The medicare system (scab labor), at present, prevents any “strike” by the patients (taking their money elsewhere), from being effective in changing the price (”market value”) of the health care.

The only thing that makes a strike effective is the threat of losing money on the part of the employer. As long as the medical providers are getting that money from the government (in the form of medicare, or universal health care) they are not going to lose enough money to force them to lower prices. If you remove that stream of “public money” from going into the pockets of the medical providers, the only source of money left is the patients. The patients’ money supply will be a relatively fixed resource that different providers will have to compete for. This competition will drive down prices.

>>Since the Right Wing hasn’t anything besides “more Reaganite Bullshit” and “give the Private sector more Public Money” any policy which caters or compromises to that is going to be so insufficient that it would take nothing less than the most massive police state ever to hold the people down.

I agree there, that is why I suggest letting the “private sector” A.K.A. “the individual” keep the money he earns, and not funneling it (in the form of taxes) through the government which will care little where it goes, because government did not earn it. The government didn’t load the truck, or stock the shelves, or machine the lower gear casing, to earn that money. They just stole it from the workers who did all those things.

>>copy cat, YOUR side has had almost thirty years of almost complete unfettered access to the public money without public oversight, aka “government regulation”.

“my side” has had little or no control over policy since the Keynesians took over in 1913. I am a “Von Mises, Rothbard, Friedman”, kind of guy, not a Reaganite.

>>Thieves like Cheney and Bush and Wolfowicz have done what, exactly? to benefit the economy.

Worse than nothing, and the current policies will be even worse.

>>Yet we’re supposed to trust these bastards with more leeway, more money and less regulation? Fuck that.

I suggest trusting the government with as little money as possible. I suggest making the consumer the only source of income for businesses.

copycat