No, that's not a problem at all. What that does is naturally adjusts the value of the the commodity, in this case, gold.
The word you're looking for is "deflation" and it's not without its problems any more than inflation is.
Decreasing real prices (because of decreasing costs) against an unmoving commodity price is a good thing; it increases the standard of living.
It increases the standard of living under the false assumption that your wage is not somehow a price. If we get into a situation in which steady deflation is the norm rather than steady inflation, the main differences will be:
1) People who are currently in debt become very unhappy very quickly.
2) The boss talks to each employee every year come evaluation time to talk about the possibility of a performance increase combined with a cut in pay to offset the drop in cost of living.
The reality is that the amount of work done for a given good remains the same, but the side effect costs of changes in nominal prices will change. The consensus at the moment is that due to wage stickiness and debt/investment patterns, the overhead associated with gentle inflation is more tolerable than the overhead associated with gentle deflation. I have no idea why so many people paint the latter as some sort of Utopian ideal.
I was handwaving, obviously there is more to it; but it doesn't matter in the least, because no matter *what* it is economists are doing, it isn't working and that is what matters. You can sing the praises of the complexity, sophistication and glory of economic theory and its practitioners until you're blue in the face, and not one word of it will make up for the simple fact that it takes more work today to heat a house, buy a house, educate your kid, and so on, than it did in 1965, and this has been a continuously wrong-ward trend. IOW, the economy is, and has been, moving very consistently in the wrong direction. So until whatever you have to say addresses that... you're just blowing smoke.
Part of your problem is that you appear to have been comparing the cost of living to the minimum wage rather than the average wage. That's not really much more helpful than comparing the cost of living to the maximum wage. By the most obvious measure, real GDP per capita, we're better off than we've ever been. That wealth may be distributed differently, but I don't think that there's a real argument to be made that the average person is worse off now than a generation or two ago.
You don't know shit about what I spend my money on, so everyone stop making false assumptions. I don't even go out anymore. I own one old car. I have one small old cheap TV with poor sound and get no extra pay channels. I very rarely buy CDs. I do my own yard work, own housecleaning. Etc. I don't play games. I spent literally nothing on Xmas gifts this Xmas. 0. My house is much smaller than my dad's was at this age. But well done for basing your entire argument on 300 or so false assumptions. Yeah, I'm SO much better off - puh-lease.
If you don't like being compared to the average person in your modern economy, it might make sense to stop generalizing your situation and assuming it applies to your economy as a whole. The reality is that while you may be objectively worse off than your parents (I have no way of measuring this), economies in the developed world have grown nicely over the past generation, and just about everybody is better off, even correcting for inflation. The distribution of prices has changed, but overall, people are getting their slice of a bigger, wealthier pie. I'm sorry it didn't work out for you as well.
I sincerely hope the same thing. One thing that would console me about a Republican victory this November is that it might send a message to the powers that be in the Republican party that they can win without the religious fanatic vote. I long for a time when a politician can be elected without having to feign nostalgia for the good old days when we stoned adulterers and burned witches.
Sure, it would mean another leader who has no concept of sunk costs in war and foreign policy, but it might make for some less frightening elections in the future.
So what's worse in government? Bad science or bad economics? Seems that's the choice we're given...
Don't sell yourself short. You can have both. Both parties appear to have a crack-headed view of economic principles and policy, probably because it's the job of an economist to talk about how scarce resources are allocated and it's the job of a politician to tell everybody that they can always have their cake and eat it too.
Re:Let's hurry up and get to the point...
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Science Debate 2008
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This -particular- issue is one for which you have emotional energy, out of literally thousands of science demarcation issues, in a context where much of human knowledge and endeavor is simply outside the scope of scientific method, in a further context where there are thousands of areas where such "need for education" could be applied. How about the atrocious level of American knowledge of the specific questions of recent cultural archeology relating to misperceptions of the Ming Dynasty?
There's a difference between not being familiar with a topic and being familiar with it and failing to figure it out. Going through medical school and not understanding evolution (or rejecting it for theological or political reasons) doesn't make you a bad doctor, but it is a red flag. A good understanding of Newtonian physics isn't necessary to be a good electrical engineer, but I might question the intelligence of any degreed EE who managed to get through engineering school without picking it up on the way.
It's sad when one's position on torture actually differentiates him from anybody in the field of candidates in a modern election. I shudder to think of us reaching a point where being "anti-crime" isn't a universal position among political candidates.
If you want to see how that works, just visit the UK, where they have Hillary-style healthcare and it takes five weeks to get heart surgery.
Or hang around here where our solution to the problem is just not to perform necessary heart surgery on some people at all. No system is without its costs.
You're right, but let me ask you a question. Do you think it's in anybody's best interest to tolerate the existence of professional politicians?
In an ideal world, no, but I also think that there's something to be said for not losing a particularly adept employee. I can understand the impulse for term limits, but I see it as a lazy way of implementing democracy. We should be getting rid of corrupt politicians by voting them out rather than waiting them out. If incumbency provides so much of an electoral advantage that we need term limits to crowbar the bad guys out of office, we need to reform the system or limit their powers. Otherwise, it's really our own fault.
The other practical problem for me is that the presidency is a hard job. There aren't many people qualified to do it, and the people who can do it can often make a lot more money doing it elsewhere. We're left with a field of people who want to serve and people who are attracted to power. I think that artificially limiting that field further than it has already been limited is an unhealthy idea. If you get a good one who seems to actually be serving, why knock him out of the running when you know that 95% of the possible replacements are already just bad people looking for power?
So, how many times would you have voted to re-elect FDR, if you had been around in the 30s and 40s?
Not to get into the "dynasties" debate, but there's a big difference between electing the same person over and over again because you think he's doing a good job and electing somebody else from the same family because you liked the last guy.
Second, a lot of Obama's wins in the South are due to the fact that he has attracted a lot of black voters. Black voters in the South already vote for the Democrat in the general election and the Democrat never wins.
Looking at the turnout over the past few elections, I'm starting to believe that the person who has the edge is not necessarily the one who takes the undecided voters in the center, but rather the one who brings out votes on their side who might not vote otherwise. Being strong with a base that you already have "in the bag" isn't necessarily meaningless if that base has a historically low voter turnout and you're able to get people to the polls better than your opponent.
If intelligence can be detected in such cases, then so can it be detected in the complexity of life itself.
In all of those cases, there's a mechanism. The ID folks don't seem to have a mechanism, probably because if they actually described the scenario they were thinking of, it would look a whole lot like biblical creationism, which wouldn't fly in public schools. If they can come up with a testable mechanism and actually describe what they're looking for, then I'll gladly call it science. Until then, it's just hand waving.
Also, the entire SETI project seems to be considered 'valid' science by most Darwinists, however, it would most surely be a violation of the exact same demarcation criteria used to exclude ID.
Not really. SETI is a classification exercise. They know the set of known natural signals and they know what artificially produced signals generally look like because we create signals ourselves. There is no such analogous information with ID. What does a designed organism look like vs an undesigned one? You need some sort of known data set to figure out whether your classifier works, and biological ID doesn't have one without begging the question.
What's interesting to me is that, for all their mathematical bluster about the "science of design" and "specified complexity" they've never been able to calculate the amount of "specified complexity" in a string or even outline methods to determine whether something is actually designed. If you actually have some sort of mathematical filter that detects design, we should be able to test it by having a set of patterns generated, some by design and some by chance, and running them through the filter. That's how you'd normally test your classification algorithm. For some reason, the ID camp hasn't bothered to do this. At all.
No one is saying that the intelligence has to exist outside time and space (it is entirely possible that it could have been intelligent 'aliens'-- see panspermia.
That's fine. Propose something. Who are the aliens, and how did they do it? What kind of objectively measurable test would you use to determine whether your hypothesis makes sense? I'll be the first one to admit that you have a scientifically valid question when you can say, "I hypothesize that life's complexity was introduced by X. If that's true, we would expect to see Y. I'll go look for Y and test my hypothesis." So far, ID has been nothing more than a rehash of old creationist canards against evolution combined with some mathematical bluster that hasn't actually amounted to anything testable. There's no theory or even any framework for forming a theory. Right now, all ID consists of is, "Somehow, at some undefined point in time, an undefined and undescribed entity inserted unmeasurable amounts of undescribable 'information' to life via some undescribed method." That's not exactly an auspicious start for a "theory" that has been bandied about for years in the popular press and is being pushed as the next big thing for for our public schools.
Why should something have to be justified in a secular sense? Surely people should be free to propose legislation regardless of secular/religious sensibilities and then leave it to the public/elected officials to decide on whether or not it should become law. Once it is proposed, then a debate can be had about whether it has any place in public governance, but surely the essence of democracy is that everyone has a voice and can bring that voice to the table and have their ideas listened to, discussed and a decision taken as to whether they are of benefit to society, rather than dismissing the idea before it is even brought forwards?
I would argue that any law that can't be justified to people with conflicting religious beliefs is simply asking for trouble in a pluralistic society. I don't have a problem with people proposing those laws, but I do get annoyed when they act as though the rest of us are somehow religious bigots when we point out that their proposal is nutty to anybody who doesn't share their particular religious quirks.
As I pointed out elsewhere, I think that the public willingness to accept what, IMO, amount to silly theocratic proposals has a lot to do with the fact that those proposals stroke their religious preferences and not somebody else's. My guess is that if a Muslim was the front runner for the presidency and he was throwing around a bunch of rhetoric about amending the Constitution to reflect Koranic law (even if he promised to go through the proper democratic channels), the same people who are touting the freedom to push religion into the public sphere might find themselves making some noise about how such proposals are inappropriate for a diverse democracy like ours.
More to the point, my major issue with Huckabee's rhetoric is that he isn't proposing laws, he's proposing changes to the Constitution. I'm generally only mildly annoyed with people wasting government time with pandering religious rhetoric because the Constitution places limits on the amount of influence religion plays in our public lives. Odds are pretty good that a law demanding the beheading of anybody who insults The Prophet would be struck down as unconstitutional, so if somebody proposes it, I'm just going to sniff and ignore it as more ridiculous pandering. Once you crack open the Constitution, anything goes. The point of that document is to describe how the government works and what its limitations are, not to enshrine the theological or moral whims of the day.
Incidentally, I'm a Presbyterain ministry student who drinks and occasionally goes bowling (proceeded by a trip to McDonalds) on a Sunday with my youth fellowship group.
Do you think that your views would be different if the Pastafarians were in charge and they wanted to debate whether Presbyterian churches are an Affront to His Noodlyness and possibly pass an amendment to the Constitution to allow regulation of them? As I see it, since there's no rational way to resolve a conflict like that (or even compromise on it), and there's no clear way to justify it without appealing to one's private religious preferences, there really isn't a good reason for it to be a question for the government. Things just work better in a pluralistic society when the debates we have in government can be resolved by reason and data rather than force of numbers. Why debate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin in Congress when there are budgets to pass?
Must scientific origins theories limit themselves to materialistic causes?
Can you propose a non-materialistic cause that can be tested in the real world? Let's apply this to a different subject: Should economists consider the possibility of divine intervention when discussing what causes inflation?
How much do you suppose they were paid from the federal government? As far as I'm aware, there's no "national police protection plan" that collects from individual taxpayers and then disperses it to local police forces.
Not a lot. There's some stuff from the DOJ, but it's not for day to day operations, and it's project-specific.
So why do we have presidential candidates proposing "national health care plans"? If it's the equivalent of law enforcement, then you only need a federal health care system for illnesses caused by crossing state boundaries.
Well, mainly because it's not the equivalent of law enforcement beyond the fact that it would be a public service that's paid for by some sort of tax. My original response was simply to point out that people who bitch and moan about all taxes being "theft" rarely have anything productive to add to the conversation and that their assessment of taxes as such includes things that they usually take for granted.
If you're interested in why health care differs from police protection, here are a few reasons off the top of my head:
1) Universal health care is partially an insurance plan. As insurance, the larger your risk pool, the better it works.
2) It can be partially a single-payer plan to aid in negotiations. The goal at that point is to come as close to being a monopsonist in order to have as much market power as possible to keep prices low. Smaller, fragmented systems don't do that as well.
3) On a macro scale, just about every region has reasonably similar health care needs, and to the extent that it's untrue (e.g. states with huge populations of the elderly), the situation is helped by making the plan larger (see 1). The amount and type of police protection differs from locality to locality, so a national policy doesn't make sense.
4) Police protection can be fragmented and offer a relatively high continuity of service from state to state. Health care would not, as the players involved are national companies that can move money and create local policies to work around bothersome local policies. This is similar to why you need the FBI in cases of large networks of criminals that span multiple states, taking advantage of inconsistencies in laws, enforcement, and jurisdiction.
Those are just the pragmatic concerns that I can come up with off the top of my head.
The thing is that in a democracy, people propose legislation that they believe is right and vote for what they believe is right.
I don't think that anybody really has a problem with that. I just can't figure out why people are upset when those who don't share some of their less universal moral proclivities try to stop them. It seems to me that most human beings have a common set of basic morals and what might be called an "extended" set. The common set (don't murder people, don't steal, etc.) is codified in just about every society. The extended set is where things get a little sketchy.
I believe that the basis of just about all worthwhile public policy can be derived without an appeal to anything beyond a more or less common set of axioms. I and people like me start to get nervous when we hear rhetoric from people who want to bring their extended morals into play and make them public policy. "Should we raise a tax to pay for a new bridge" is a question that can be debated by people in good faith based on more or less objective outcomes and a common set of assumptions about a healthy economy, property rights, etc. "Should we ban insulting the Glorious Prophet by eating cheese on Wednesdays" is a question that can't really be resolved by rational discourse. One side thinks that their understanding of an invisible entity makes for good public policy and the other side thinks they're nuts. Putting it to a vote simply results in resentment and "culture wars" over an issue that wouldn't even register on the radar of a society whose deity didn't care about cheese consumption.
Basically, I find that people are perfectly happy about religious freedom and expression of personal morality in the public sphere as long as that official happens to agree with them. I can't imagine that most of the Huckabee supporters would be so keen on the idea if a front runner was pushing a constitutional amendment to make Islam the national religion, even if he promised to go through the official constitutional channels. My guess is that they'd be calling for a little less religion and a little more inclusiveness.
The real problem I have with Huckabee's rhetoric is not that he plans to use Christianity to make his decision, but rather that he's chomping at the bit to amend the Constitution. I'm used to Christian leaders wanting to legislate their particular moral quirks, bring glory to their religion, and generally treat other religions as second class. I'm OK with that because the Constitution puts limits on their ability to do so. Amending the Constitution is, quite frankly, the nuclear option, and I don't see a good reason to do it unless things are really screwed up. Legislation is where you make policy. The Constitution is how you outline how the government works. We don't put our current whims in the Constitution because that's not where it goes. It's abusing the root password. Anything can happen when you do it, so doing it willy nilly to enforce your ancillary moral hang-ups is something that I regard as poor leadership in a pluralistic society.
Oh, I don't know, I think that the geniuses at the Wall Street Journal editorial page did a great job of capturing a beautifully smooth Laffer Curve that obviously fits the data points perfectly. Something I learned from that piece was that apparently, Norway is at exactly the optimum taxation rate for maximum tax revenues. Who knew?
If we swapped 'Christianity' for 'personal moral principles' would you still say it? If yes, do you think a president should have no moral compass or strong sense of principles of their own? If no, then what is the problem when moral principles stem from religious belief?
It depends. Is the principle "Treat people with kindness" or "Don't murder that guy and take his wallet" or is it "I don't drink on Sundays, so nobody should be able to purchase alcohol on Sundays"? The first two make sense and can be justified in a secular way. As I see it, the third is nutty and has no place in public governance.
Now, given, someone can be moral and not religious. But keep in mind, that morals came from religion.
I'm really not sure where people get this idea. It's certainly possible to come up with and justify a moral framework in the absence of religion. On top of that, it seems to me that the core set of "values" that most cultures have in common (don't murder people, don't steal their stuff, etc.) managed to arise independently with no religious crossover across continents. To me, that strongly suggests a combination of innate basic morality and a reasonable set of secular rules that make society function smoothly. Sure, the idea that we shouldn't eat shrimp or that we should be deeply concerned about what the gay couple next door is doing pretty much requires a religious foundation, but I can't think of any useful social policies that necessarily have to be credited to any religion, much less one particular religion.
This is what happens. You bring up that, and you know what they did believe that at one time. I doubt Mitt believes that at this time. I would hope his actions speak louder than some words from his religion's founder over a century ago. if we start down this path.. then it's fair game for all faiths.
I'll buy into that line of argumentation when religious candidates stop using their faith as a selling point. People liken Romney's religion speech to Kennedy's, but to me it sounded more like, "I know that my religion is a little different than yours, but at least I'm not a filthy atheist." If you want us to evaluate you based on your credentials as a person of faith, don't be surprised when people kick the tires a bit to see what that really means.
It drives me nuts when religious people hold up their religion as a paragon of morality and a source of all that is good and true and then on the other hand, wrap themselves in a cloak of "religious tolerance" when somebody actually wants to talk about the specifics of their ideas and how they might be flawed. You can't claim to have legitimacy in the marketplace of ideas if your ideas aren't held up to criticism for their faults as well as support for their benefits. That's called having your cake and eating it too.
OK, that aside, you mention some stuff about pharma companies. Total US pharma sales in 2000: $122B. Total US medical expenditure: $1.2T. The numbers are so far apart that any increase in pharma just isn't going to be noticed.
OK. Let's completely ignore pharmaceuticals for the moment.
Note that the only "large" portion of this is Hospital care - where the machines are. Most of the work (by numbers of patients seen, for example) would go under "Physician/Clinical". So it is fair to say that the majority of the possible cost savings are in R&D - building machines for hospitals.
I hate to do this, but I seriously wonder how "hospital care" breaks down. You seem to be assuming that it's mostly equipment, but I don't see any reason to believe this. Do you have an original source for it with some methodologies? I have to imagine that the balance sheet for a hospital is incredibly complicated, so I really don't see how you're making the jump that you're making.
I note with interest that you were happy to demand my numbers, but did not provide any meaningful numbers yourself.
That may well be because it seemed very much like your numbers were a case of substituting your intuition for reality. Remember, the main thrust of my original question was whether the US contributes most of the R&D to the world's medical community. The numbers you just provided have essentially nothing to do with that, so I repeat: Where do you get the idea that the US is carrying the rest of the world in medical research? You made a claim that is, as far as I can tell, nonsense, and now you're complaining that I didn't counter your claim with my own numbers.
Further, it's interesting that you're ignoring pharmaceutical research and focusing entirely on capital equipment when referring to the "free rider" problem. Presumably, if the US is doing all of the R&D on capital equipment, the freeloading Europeans must be buying it from us (or copying us or something). What percentage of their budgets are hospital care, and how (assuming "hospital care" translates cleanly into "hardware R&D" as you seem to think it does) does that contribute to the free rider issue? I went naturally to drugs because that's the easiest area to be a free rider, and it's one area where retail prices are demonstrably lower in other countries than they are here.
I can say that frog-catching costs have doubled, but that will still have no bearing on inflation rates...
And given the data you've just provided, you may as well have.
The Chinese could do that by dumping the bonds on the market that they have been buying that George W. has been selling to finance the war in Iraq.
People often suggest this as a realistic scenario, and I'm not sure why. The underlying assumption seems to be that China could do this and survive the economic repercussions of it.
If this doesn't make sense to you, then I don't know what will. Many parts of the PATRIOT ACT do go too far, and many of those parts have been declared unconstitutional or have expired.
I emplore you, please do more research before buying into the media bias that this legislation was all evil.
I would think that most of any piece of legislation is sensible and well-intentioned. It's the 1-5% of it that makes bad policy (or unconstitutional policy or insane policy) that's the problem. Any bill that's too long and complex to actually read before making it the law of the land needs to be broken into pieces and debated. The idea that it's more sensible to pass it through and detect the flaws on the back end strikes me as ridiculous. I see the PATRIOT act as a failure not because it's bad policy, but because it's symbolic of our complete failure to make the creation of policy a serious endeavor.
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It increases the standard of living under the false assumption that your wage is not somehow a price. If we get into a situation in which steady deflation is the norm rather than steady inflation, the main differences will be:
1) People who are currently in debt become very unhappy very quickly.
2) The boss talks to each employee every year come evaluation time to talk about the possibility of a performance increase combined with a cut in pay to offset the drop in cost of living.
The reality is that the amount of work done for a given good remains the same, but the side effect costs of changes in nominal prices will change. The consensus at the moment is that due to wage stickiness and debt/investment patterns, the overhead associated with gentle inflation is more tolerable than the overhead associated with gentle deflation. I have no idea why so many people paint the latter as some sort of Utopian ideal.
I sincerely hope the same thing. One thing that would console me about a Republican victory this November is that it might send a message to the powers that be in the Republican party that they can win without the religious fanatic vote. I long for a time when a politician can be elected without having to feign nostalgia for the good old days when we stoned adulterers and burned witches.
Sure, it would mean another leader who has no concept of sunk costs in war and foreign policy, but it might make for some less frightening elections in the future.
It's sad when one's position on torture actually differentiates him from anybody in the field of candidates in a modern election. I shudder to think of us reaching a point where being "anti-crime" isn't a universal position among political candidates.
The other practical problem for me is that the presidency is a hard job. There aren't many people qualified to do it, and the people who can do it can often make a lot more money doing it elsewhere. We're left with a field of people who want to serve and people who are attracted to power. I think that artificially limiting that field further than it has already been limited is an unhealthy idea. If you get a good one who seems to actually be serving, why knock him out of the running when you know that 95% of the possible replacements are already just bad people looking for power?
Not really. SETI is a classification exercise. They know the set of known natural signals and they know what artificially produced signals generally look like because we create signals ourselves. There is no such analogous information with ID. What does a designed organism look like vs an undesigned one? You need some sort of known data set to figure out whether your classifier works, and biological ID doesn't have one without begging the question.
What's interesting to me is that, for all their mathematical bluster about the "science of design" and "specified complexity" they've never been able to calculate the amount of "specified complexity" in a string or even outline methods to determine whether something is actually designed. If you actually have some sort of mathematical filter that detects design, we should be able to test it by having a set of patterns generated, some by design and some by chance, and running them through the filter. That's how you'd normally test your classification algorithm. For some reason, the ID camp hasn't bothered to do this. At all.
That's fine. Propose something. Who are the aliens, and how did they do it? What kind of objectively measurable test would you use to determine whether your hypothesis makes sense? I'll be the first one to admit that you have a scientifically valid question when you can say, "I hypothesize that life's complexity was introduced by X. If that's true, we would expect to see Y. I'll go look for Y and test my hypothesis." So far, ID has been nothing more than a rehash of old creationist canards against evolution combined with some mathematical bluster that hasn't actually amounted to anything testable. There's no theory or even any framework for forming a theory. Right now, all ID consists of is, "Somehow, at some undefined point in time, an undefined and undescribed entity inserted unmeasurable amounts of undescribable 'information' to life via some undescribed method." That's not exactly an auspicious start for a "theory" that has been bandied about for years in the popular press and is being pushed as the next big thing for for our public schools.
As I pointed out elsewhere, I think that the public willingness to accept what, IMO, amount to silly theocratic proposals has a lot to do with the fact that those proposals stroke their religious preferences and not somebody else's. My guess is that if a Muslim was the front runner for the presidency and he was throwing around a bunch of rhetoric about amending the Constitution to reflect Koranic law (even if he promised to go through the proper democratic channels), the same people who are touting the freedom to push religion into the public sphere might find themselves making some noise about how such proposals are inappropriate for a diverse democracy like ours.
More to the point, my major issue with Huckabee's rhetoric is that he isn't proposing laws, he's proposing changes to the Constitution. I'm generally only mildly annoyed with people wasting government time with pandering religious rhetoric because the Constitution places limits on the amount of influence religion plays in our public lives. Odds are pretty good that a law demanding the beheading of anybody who insults The Prophet would be struck down as unconstitutional, so if somebody proposes it, I'm just going to sniff and ignore it as more ridiculous pandering. Once you crack open the Constitution, anything goes. The point of that document is to describe how the government works and what its limitations are, not to enshrine the theological or moral whims of the day.
Do you think that your views would be different if the Pastafarians were in charge and they wanted to debate whether Presbyterian churches are an Affront to His Noodlyness and possibly pass an amendment to the Constitution to allow regulation of them? As I see it, since there's no rational way to resolve a conflict like that (or even compromise on it), and there's no clear way to justify it without appealing to one's private religious preferences, there really isn't a good reason for it to be a question for the government. Things just work better in a pluralistic society when the debates we have in government can be resolved by reason and data rather than force of numbers. Why debate how many angels can dance on the head of a pin in Congress when there are budgets to pass?
Well, mainly because it's not the equivalent of law enforcement beyond the fact that it would be a public service that's paid for by some sort of tax. My original response was simply to point out that people who bitch and moan about all taxes being "theft" rarely have anything productive to add to the conversation and that their assessment of taxes as such includes things that they usually take for granted.
If you're interested in why health care differs from police protection, here are a few reasons off the top of my head:
1) Universal health care is partially an insurance plan. As insurance, the larger your risk pool, the better it works.
2) It can be partially a single-payer plan to aid in negotiations. The goal at that point is to come as close to being a monopsonist in order to have as much market power as possible to keep prices low. Smaller, fragmented systems don't do that as well.
3) On a macro scale, just about every region has reasonably similar health care needs, and to the extent that it's untrue (e.g. states with huge populations of the elderly), the situation is helped by making the plan larger (see 1). The amount and type of police protection differs from locality to locality, so a national policy doesn't make sense.
4) Police protection can be fragmented and offer a relatively high continuity of service from state to state. Health care would not, as the players involved are national companies that can move money and create local policies to work around bothersome local policies. This is similar to why you need the FBI in cases of large networks of criminals that span multiple states, taking advantage of inconsistencies in laws, enforcement, and jurisdiction.
Those are just the pragmatic concerns that I can come up with off the top of my head.
I believe that the basis of just about all worthwhile public policy can be derived without an appeal to anything beyond a more or less common set of axioms. I and people like me start to get nervous when we hear rhetoric from people who want to bring their extended morals into play and make them public policy. "Should we raise a tax to pay for a new bridge" is a question that can be debated by people in good faith based on more or less objective outcomes and a common set of assumptions about a healthy economy, property rights, etc. "Should we ban insulting the Glorious Prophet by eating cheese on Wednesdays" is a question that can't really be resolved by rational discourse. One side thinks that their understanding of an invisible entity makes for good public policy and the other side thinks they're nuts. Putting it to a vote simply results in resentment and "culture wars" over an issue that wouldn't even register on the radar of a society whose deity didn't care about cheese consumption.
Basically, I find that people are perfectly happy about religious freedom and expression of personal morality in the public sphere as long as that official happens to agree with them. I can't imagine that most of the Huckabee supporters would be so keen on the idea if a front runner was pushing a constitutional amendment to make Islam the national religion, even if he promised to go through the official constitutional channels. My guess is that they'd be calling for a little less religion and a little more inclusiveness.
The real problem I have with Huckabee's rhetoric is not that he plans to use Christianity to make his decision, but rather that he's chomping at the bit to amend the Constitution. I'm used to Christian leaders wanting to legislate their particular moral quirks, bring glory to their religion, and generally treat other religions as second class. I'm OK with that because the Constitution puts limits on their ability to do so. Amending the Constitution is, quite frankly, the nuclear option, and I don't see a good reason to do it unless things are really screwed up. Legislation is where you make policy. The Constitution is how you outline how the government works. We don't put our current whims in the Constitution because that's not where it goes. It's abusing the root password. Anything can happen when you do it, so doing it willy nilly to enforce your ancillary moral hang-ups is something that I regard as poor leadership in a pluralistic society.
Oh, I don't know, I think that the geniuses at the Wall Street Journal editorial page did a great job of capturing a beautifully smooth Laffer Curve that obviously fits the data points perfectly. Something I learned from that piece was that apparently, Norway is at exactly the optimum taxation rate for maximum tax revenues. Who knew?
It drives me nuts when religious people hold up their religion as a paragon of morality and a source of all that is good and true and then on the other hand, wrap themselves in a cloak of "religious tolerance" when somebody actually wants to talk about the specifics of their ideas and how they might be flawed. You can't claim to have legitimacy in the marketplace of ideas if your ideas aren't held up to criticism for their faults as well as support for their benefits. That's called having your cake and eating it too.
I hate to do this, but I seriously wonder how "hospital care" breaks down. You seem to be assuming that it's mostly equipment, but I don't see any reason to believe this. Do you have an original source for it with some methodologies? I have to imagine that the balance sheet for a hospital is incredibly complicated, so I really don't see how you're making the jump that you're making.
That may well be because it seemed very much like your numbers were a case of substituting your intuition for reality. Remember, the main thrust of my original question was whether the US contributes most of the R&D to the world's medical community. The numbers you just provided have essentially nothing to do with that, so I repeat: Where do you get the idea that the US is carrying the rest of the world in medical research? You made a claim that is, as far as I can tell, nonsense, and now you're complaining that I didn't counter your claim with my own numbers.
Further, it's interesting that you're ignoring pharmaceutical research and focusing entirely on capital equipment when referring to the "free rider" problem. Presumably, if the US is doing all of the R&D on capital equipment, the freeloading Europeans must be buying it from us (or copying us or something). What percentage of their budgets are hospital care, and how (assuming "hospital care" translates cleanly into "hardware R&D" as you seem to think it does) does that contribute to the free rider issue? I went naturally to drugs because that's the easiest area to be a free rider, and it's one area where retail prices are demonstrably lower in other countries than they are here.
And given the data you've just provided, you may as well have.