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Sorry, but most cuban health care facilities don't even have working toilets. Patients are instructed to bring their own supplies from home.

They have a little bit of decent health care, but it's reserved for Communist Party elites and foreign visitors who can pay. Everyone else in the country gets lousy health care where after waiting forever to see someone, they have to hope they washed their hands by bringing in their own soap and water and didn't go near the atrocious conditions of the rooms.

See also:
http://blog.acton.org/archives...
https://www.therealcuba.com/?p...
https://www.nationalreview.com...
https://www.washingtonexaminer...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
and many, many others with photos and videos documenting the real care there.

Castro did indeed create an amazing medical system for a third world nation and their education system isnt so bad.

Stop
spreading
this
myth.
Just stop.

Just use Google ffs.

Honestly, I don't understand how a conservative government can increase the size of government this much, and ask for internet regulations, I mean it does not follow the philosophy at all. Am I the only libertarian here?

Actually you like many others have switched what liberal means. Going back to the revolutions in the USA and France to be liberal meant to be for small government and Liberty, ie "liberal". A prime example of this in the USA was Thomas Jefferson. As a Liberal TJ wanted small government. Of course today most people don't use the word to mean the same thing, instead Libertarians come the closest to what it means to be a Classical Liberal.

But honestly, are there any Conservative republicans left? Anyone who actually believes in smaller government and keeping the military as a defensive force?

What's ironic is that the so called conservative is supposed to be for small government, when during the US and French Revolutions liberals were for small government and liberty as exemplified by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Thomas Paine.

libertarians are the old (18th century) kind of republicans.

Libertarians are Thomas Jefferson's Liberal Democrat Republican.

Of course many more people would own copies of an operating system if Windows were sold below monopoly prices. Consumers would be rolling in consumer surplus if the market could be evenly split between Windows, QNX, Plan 9, Solaris, and Hurd.

If Microsoft's profits were reasonable, they couldn't waste money on extravagant exercises like Project Green to integrate their four overlapping sets of business applications. They would stop squandering greenbacks on world-class engineers like Ray Ozzie. They'd quit financing dead-end high stakes ventures into new fields, like the Xbox. They wouldn't have an obscenely unfair hedge against the vagaries and volatility of the computer industry.

I grew up using the Commodore Amiga. I hated Microsoft for beating Amiga. I'd like nothing better than for the federal courts to use nineteenth century business regulations to squash Billy G and to restore Jay Miner (late creator of the Amiga) to his rightful prominence.

One caveat though... There's precedence of antitrust laws being used for rent seeking by competitors in the guise of consumer protection. So there may be some call for deliberation before unequivocally endorsing this tactic on our foes the way Nixon used antitrust against TV networks he didn't like. There may also be some reason to suspect that the effects of antitrust may include unanticipated consequences. Come to think of it, maybe we just should just compete on the merits and marketability of our work and leave the courts out of it.

Oh, and congratulations to the parent poster for being an actual conservative, rather than the current leading brand of NeoCon. You're a rarity these days. I never thought I'd see the day when Reagan looked like a better alternative to the current primate occupying the Oval.

If you mean by conservative and Reagan as a smaller and limited government then there's two problems. First it wasn't conservatives who stood for small and limited government, in the 1700s it was liberals (classical liberals for some) that wanted this. Three big examples of this Liberalism are Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith or Adam Smith (Institute) , and Thomas Paine (Network) , or TomPaine.common Sense .

Secondly Reagan didn't reduce the overall size of government, under him government bloomed. I don't recall most of it but "Liberty" magazine had an article in one issue with the numbers in dollars on how big some parts of government got and it wasn't just the military that did. The parts I recall are the "War on Drugs" and education but there were others as well.

Oh, and congratulations to the parent poster for being an actual conservative, rather than the current leading brand of NeoCon. You're a rarity these days. I never thought I'd see the day when Reagan looked like a better alternative to the current primate occupying the Oval.

If you mean by conservative and Reagan as a smaller and limited government then there's two problems. First it wasn't conservatives who stood for small and limited government, in the 1700s it was liberals (classical liberals for some) that wanted this. Three big examples of this Liberalism are Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith or Adam Smith (Institute) , and Thomas Paine (Network) , or TomPaine.common Sense .

Secondly Reagan didn't reduce the overall size of government, under him government bloomed. I don't recall most of it but "Liberty" magazine had an article in one issue with the numbers in dollars on how big some parts of government got and it wasn't just the military that did. The parts I recall are the "War on Drugs" and education but there were others as well.

Oh, and congratulations to the parent poster for being an actual conservative, rather than the current leading brand of NeoCon. You're a rarity these days. I never thought I'd see the day when Reagan looked like a better alternative to the current primate occupying the Oval.

If you mean by conservative and Reagan as a smaller and limited government then there's two problems. First it wasn't conservatives who stood for small and limited government, in the 1700s it was liberals (classical liberals for some) that wanted this. Three big examples of this Liberalism are Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith or Adam Smith (Institute) , and Thomas Paine (Network) , or TomPaine.common Sense .

Secondly Reagan didn't reduce the overall size of government, under him government bloomed. I don't recall most of it but "Liberty" magazine had an article in one issue with the numbers in dollars on how big some parts of government got and it wasn't just the military that did. The parts I recall are the "War on Drugs" and education but there were others as well.

Sorry, that's too wrong to let pass. In a Democracy, the government is controlled by the demagogues, the few who are able to get the many riled up. In a constitutional republic, such as the U.S. used to be, the government was controlled by the honest elected representatives, who were in turn controlled by the constitution (that's why I specified ``honest''). In a modern ``democracy'', the government is controlled by the apparatchiks, the people who are permanently part of the system, as the politicians and demagogues come and go. In the U.S. we call them bureaucrats. In every form of government, the government is the people who staff it. Only in an anarchy could your statement be accurate.

... as long as there is equality under the law, you have just as many rights backed by the same authority as the rest of us.

That's true, even as ``just as many rights'' asymptotically approaches zero. Therefore, I'd say it's irrelevant.

If good government was less government, we would have never developed the modern state.

The second phrase doesn't follow from the first. You seem to have assumed that ``modern state'' equates to ``good government'', or that the change in our government has been for the better during the last 100 years. Neither assumption seems defensable to me.

Good government is good government, size is irrelevant.

Again, too wrong to allow to pass unchallenged. Good government is unknown, a myth. All government eventually becomes bad government, though the better examples of government can be better than no government. Lord Acton said it best: ``Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.'' Small government, with little power, has little scope for the inevitable corruption and malfeasance. Every government will sooner or later go sour. It happened in Rome, and it is happening here. The difference between Rome and here is that (so far) we have enough social and legal checks in place to constrain the powermad[1]. Those legal and social restraints are definitely wearing thin.

[1] The powermad are mostly good, conscientious people, who have been given a job, like searching little old ladies at airports or looking for assets to steal for the government. Being good, conscientious people, they work hard to accomplish their allotted task, and they are tireless in asking for additional resources to do it better. If their task is destructive of a free society, we have an example of bad government, despite their good intentions and personal honesty.

Not only is it a tired cliche, but it's a misquoted one as well.
The actual quote is "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
It's also irritating that when this is quoted in literature, no one ever puts a citation for this (other than 'Lord Acton 1887'). I've emailed the Acton Institute (found here) to determine it's source.

Quotes become cliches when deprived of their context.

For a good part of the latter half of the last century, MNCs (which are incidentally mostly US owned corporations) have been trying to *market* their goods to third world countries with an aim to get their earnings up (expanding markets = more money). This has often resulted in loss of local jobs and industry and made the countries more dependent on foreign corporations, and local unions/organization have often opposed opening up local economies for this reason - but mostly to no avail.

Lately, we've seen that corporations have figured out that the skill/education levels in these so called developing countries have been increasing, and it's more cost effective to shift their manufacturing/services divisions abroad. This has caused widespread annoyance due to loss of jobs in the developed countries.

But really, is it the people's fault anywhere? Is it fair for people living in developing nations which have been invaded be these megacorps to just serve as profitable markets for the MNCs while being denied economic benefit from them? A bit of pondering may reveal that it's profit minded corporations which have been sucking peoples from both sides for their benefit (and for their parent countries' since the profit trickles down in the form of jobs/cashflow).

I think it's just the completion of a circle. Not flamebait - sincere concerns.

Some quotes:

Multinational corporations (MNCs) engage in very useful and morally defensible activities in Third World countries for which they frequently have received little credit. Significant among these activities are their extension of opportunities for earning higher incomes as well as the consumption of improved quality goods and services to people in poorer regions of the world. Instead, these firms have been misrepresented by ugly or fearful images by Marxists and "dependency theory" advocates. Because many of these firms originate in the industrialized countries, including the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Germany, France, and Italy, they have been viewed as instruments for the imposition of Western cultural values on Third World countries, rather than allies in their economic development. Thus, some proponents of these views urge the expulsion of these firms, while others less hostile have argued for their close supervision or regulation by Third World governments.

Incidents such as the improper use in the Third World of baby milk formula manufactured by Nestle, the gas leak from a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, and the alleged involvement of foreign firms in the overthrow of President Allende of Chile have been used to perpetuate the ugly image of MNCs. The fact that some MNCs command assets worth more than the national income of their host countries also reinforces their fearful image. And indeed, there is evidence that some MNCs have paid bribes to government officials in order to get around obstacles erected against profitable operations of their enterprises.

Why is that great?

would you want to live in the world with the same freedoms of uncivilized times?

9/10/2001 was uncivilized times? In that case, yes! The only way to ensure democracy is transparency in the government, not in the citizenry. I would consider this age of secret trials, secret military tribunals, and illegal captivity without due process to be uncivilized.

I'm still miffed that I lost my freedom to dump toxic waste in drinking water.

I can't believe you really did that. If you did, and when you say "I lost my freedom", I hope that means you're in jail for violating the rights of others. But, what I don't understand is how that relates to the State monitoring your every move in public, and after that's allowed who knows how much longer before they do it in private?

Why can't I take guns on airlines?

Because, unlike guarding your privacy from intrusive government, carrying a lethal weapon can be contributive to intentionally lethal acts? Couple that with the ease in which a single bullet could quickly wipe-out hundreds of lives, on the plane and on the ground, made the argument for a gun-ban on planes that much easier to swallow. Mass murder, as it happens, was illegal pre-9/11.

Why can't I have the freedom to molest young children?

Because you would be violating their rights?

This cameras sounds like a good one. Do people really have an expectation of privacy when they're on public streets?

Not from each other, but from a government proven to abuse the power granted to it by the people at every opportunity. Your unreasonable fear of everything in life (from sudden heart-attacks to skidding in the rain), and incessant need for safety, encroaches upon my liberty to enjoy life without intrusive government. Just behave sensibly and you'll survive as your forefathers did across millions of years simply to produce the unique individual known as *you*. There's no government-monitored camera on you right now, and look you're still breathing!!

I'd love to see national ID's, I don't even understand the privacy argument against it.

The reluctance you don't understand stems from years of documented abuse by what at first appeared to be reasonable (to the population at the time) requests and benign acts by various governments to keep order. The arguments are always the same, as are the results. I don't have to name recent government abuses to you, you know them. We won't even go into the governmental abuses throughout history. To ignore the lessons from the past and think that they won't be repeated is naive. People haven't changed, and it's people in government who abuse their responsibilities and their authority. Most do so without penalty.

It's simple the government needs a way to identify it's citizens.

How does it do it now? Have

What strikes me most immediately about the phenomenon of offshore outsourcing is the low level of the outcry about it in the mainstream media. Just one more revolution of the vicious circle - the global economy's levelling effect. Maybe even schadenfreude that it's happening to a highly-paid sector of the economy. But in RTFA, they make the comment that in the last offshore wave, the service-sector economy replaced the manufacturing economy, providing a soft landing. This time, they suggest, is the "structural" adjustment for which there doesn't seem to be another soft landing on the way.

The problem is in the Friedman-esque incentives that make it preferable for this to happen rather than to keep the jobs at home. I don't want to seem a wild booster of the US economy in this one - it's pretty much every country for itself out there - but the structural adjustment the article refers to hollows out the competence base of American IT. From there, I worry about the stock of high-value jobs and the follow-on impact that this will have on the US economy in strange places, like university tuition and social security funding.

No doubt it's coming, but it seems to me that the CIOs aren't operating with sufficient perspective to do anything about it. That's why the wider silence is disturbing to me. The CIO articles are definitely worth a read once the /. effect calms down.

A somewhat relevant essay comes to mind. Read Julio H. Cole.

"2) Eolas wins, and as it says in the article, only gives their patent to one or two browsers. We will say Netscape for example. Now, isn't Netscape all of a sudden a monopoly in the browser market?"

I believe there are anti-collusion laws to protect against this sort of thing. Eolas can't team up with Netscape against MS. They would likely be sued on Anti-Trust grounds by MS. Eolas does have monoploy powers; using these to try to destroy MS is an anti-competitive practice (yeah, MS would actually go after Eolas for breaking the same laws they did). A good page dicussing collusion is here

Check out the link, the article is a good read all around

Last year, 42 people in the U.S. died from SAS (sudden acceleration syndrome) due to roller coasters.

the US, which taught us the meaning of freedom, and the free society

There's a nice little article here you might want to read, called "The History of Freedom in Antiquity" written in 1877 by Lord Acton. Read it. You might learn something.

However Corporations exist for the sole purpose of making money and are not in and of themselves moral entities.

No less an authority than Peter Drucker disputes this statement. He says: "...no financial man will ever understand business because financial people think a company makes money. A company makes shoes, and no financial man understands that. They think money is real. Shoes are real. Money is an end result. What is a business? The only function of a business is to create customer [value] and to innovate."

He considers profit "the test of the validity" of the business's activities. Earning a profit, it says here, is how one measures the firm's efficiency in fulfilling its fundamental purpose, namely, to create a customer.

Corporations have a role to play in society so the ultimate question is is not what the purpose of the corporation is, but what the purpose of society is. Corporations cannot achieve a profit and at the same time thwart the objectives of society in which they exist.

The idea that work and human endeavor have no higher purpose than making money is a pretty miserable philosophy of life and has never been a sufficient foundation for a society or a corporation.

well, yeah.... not only do all the spray cans you can buy now NOT contain CFCs, CFCs never were the problem anyway. Don't buy into fear...

See: Environmental Overkill, Dr. Dixie Lee Ray
See: http://www.acton.org/publicat/randl/92fall/ray.htm l