I am my own employer through the corporation that I own, and my choice would be to pay for my own health insurance on my own, even though it costs me more in taxes. Much of the pre-existing issue comes from the fact that we lose our health care policies when we change employers, and the insurance companies know this. COBRA is only good for 18 months, after that you're on your own. However, if your policy is directly with your insurance company, not your employer, then the insurance company is stuck with you as long as you're paying your premiums.
I thank God that Wal-Mart is opening up its Corner Stores to compete with Walgreen's. The employer provided health care has also lead to a near complete disregard for drug costs. When employees expect all-you-can-eat plans from their employers, they make their decisions on where to get drugs based on convenience, not price. However, once most see the real cost of these plans, they'll likely opt for lower premiums and higher co-pays. This will lead to price reductions in the drug market similar to what we have seen in other markets not covered by health insurance (such as eggs, bread, and milk).
So you feel you are more an expert on the Constitution than the man who is quite commonly known as "the Father of the Constitution"? It is you who does not understand the meaning of the clause and are unwilling to learn, which is why your efforts anger so many who do take the time to read about these things.
It is those who are on your side of the argument who must change the document. And I must say you sound more like a despot than any I've seen on this site.
Believe it or not, the needs of the poor were much greater back then as the poverty rate in the U.S. was substantially higher. Certainly access to health care for a substantially higher percentage of the nation was completely non-existent, except for the fact that doctors changed their rates based on who they were serving. Instead of having a set rate for a particular procedure, they charged more to the wealthy and less to the poor. The wealthy knew this and were fine with it. It was a form of voluntary and direct wealth redistribution, whereby the services of the poor were directly subsidized without any middleman.
It is unfortunate that your dogged faith to an ideology is more important than the essence of our free society.
That's why I read books on the topic. From The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History by Thomas E. Woods, Jr., Ph.D., page 32:
Madison dismissed the claim that the proposed legislation could be justified by the Constitution's clause authorizing the federal government "to provide for common defense and general welfare." To the extent that politicians today even bother to justify federal legislation on constitutional grounds, they appeal to this clause. But to argue this way, Madison said, would render "the special and careful enumeration of powers which follow the clause nugatory and improper. Such a view of the Constitution would have the effect of giving to Congress a general power of legislation instead of the defined and limited one hitherto understood to belong to them." If the "general welfare" clause of the Constitution authorized the Congress to do anything that tended toward the general well-being of the country, then why had the Framers bothered to specifically list the powers of Congress in Article I, Section 8? This very fact logically precluded the possibility that the general welfare clause constituting a broad, open-ended grant of power.
Madison continued to promote this view in the years that followed. In 1792 he argued:
If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every state, county, and parish, and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision for the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads,; in short, everything, fro the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress.
So if we take what Woods and Madison are arguing to the next logical step, every word in the constitution is overruled by the general welfare clause. This includes the right to free speech, the right to trial; everything.
Maybe it's because 40-60% of their wages go to paying taxes, and prices have risen precipitously from all the Government and Federal Reserve manipulations of the markets.
Raising a child is a full time job, and thus requires someone to be on call, full time, to manage. Two parents working 60 hours per week to pay their various debts cannot make up for the lack of not being around.
No, because it is a state issue. States are completely within their rights to make such requirements.
This is my whole issue with this whole thing. Jefferson was strongly in favor of freedom of religion, while the state of Pennsylvania had required religion, thus the First Amendment reads, "Congress shall make no law..." (emphasis added).
We are a republic, and we can clearly see through these various debates that there are people in this country who want to have taxpayer provided health care and there are those who do not want taxpayer provided health care. If we were to honor the democratic republic that was formed, we would recognize that this is perfectly fine for a union. Massachusetts can have its pristine state system and Texas can have anarchy or whatever.
My belief is that everyone we all will lose when D.C. takes things over, including the people in Massachusetts. There will be no one to complain to except a Representative and a Senator who care little about doing anything to repair any issues. Special interests will latch their suckers to the tax revenue pouring into the program and K Street will expand to J and L Streets.
This argument falls flat on its face. Why would the creators of the constitution go to all the trouble of all the various conventions throughout the colonies to make all the various stated limitations on Government and then make a loophole that negates all of it? No, clearly the intent of the general welfare clause is not what we think it is, and has more to do with understanding the English of the time and not dictionary.com.
And don't try to tell me that Government health care is going to suddenly start covering midwives, especially when the plan is so well supported by big pharma and the AMA. You should watch The Business of Being Born.
I can't get it to work at all on my Vista Business laptop if FF or IE. Not even the Google Labs version works. I'm more looking forward to the next version of Flash that I think is supposed to offload to GPU.
We are in two wars that we can't get out of and can't pay for. Medicare and Social Security are two huge bills from generations past that we can't pay for. We have a financial system that is on an unsustainable course and the viability of our currency is in question. The numbers used to estimate the costs of this health bill came from the very people who promote it. It is most likely the same type of bill that we have seen for at least since the DMCA was passed with a voice vote in the House and unanimous consent in the Senate.
If anyone really thinks this bill is going to benefit people beyond big pharma, unions, lawyers, Wall Street, K Street, banks, and insurance companies, they're high on crack. It's the same game, same players, bigger steaks.
Excellent example! The banking industry is one of the most heavily regulated industries in the world, and that has lead them to be practically joined at the hip with the Government.
Granting the Government the power to regulate gives special interests control over the regulated areas. This is what really makes the whole thing so awful is that we actually end up with regulators who are approved by the regulated, who will then do everything possible to maintain the monopoly. The corporations do not fear regulation, they embrace it. Non-market strategies are a part of every major business school program, and for good reason.
Honestly, I'm too dimwitted to understand your Coke/Pepsi analogy. Perhaps the 'if' statements are false.
I do not have the power to not reelect a candidate. Democracy is tyranny of the majority and leaves me with no other options, unlike an unregulated market.
You apparently don't know much about the train stuff either, because the Great Northern Railway never took a penny from the Federal Government and was terrifically profitable. Clearly it was not necessary to subsidize the railways. Yes, they did accept passengers.
The government "should not furnish capital to [railroad] companies, in addition to their enormous land subsidies, to enable them to conduct their business in competition with enterprises that have received no aid from the public treasury.... Our own line in the North...was built without any government aid, even the right of way, through hundreds of miles of public lands, being paid for in cash." - James J. Hill of the Great Northern Railroad
The Great Northern prospered when all of the other transcontinental railroads when bankrupt in the downturn of 1893, and Hill both reduced his rates and turned a sizable profit.
I don't understand the argument that corporations can pollute to their heart's content when millions of people and companies have embraced conservation efforts without any legislation forcing them to. People do factor in the impact of their purchase decisions when selecting vendors, and especially when they have more available money. Poorer people who have fewer options are the ones that tend to make decisions without regard of impact, which is what makes a free market that much more important as that has been the single most successful method, possibly the only one known, to lift large numbers of people from poverty.
It is regulation that stifles innovation. There is an article a few down right here on/. about how demand for engineers has not actually increased, which would support the hypothesis that companies spending money on activities other than innovation don't innovate. They are more concerned with having the right lobbyist, good lawyers, top accountants, and 'their' man in the Government. These jobs all come with the price of hiring fewer engineers or less innovative engineers. It also sends the brightest towards these other less productive fields, so that instead of finding clever ways to make things more efficient, they're finding clever ways to make things less efficient.
I voted for none of the people in public office right now.
An unregulated CEO is more trustworthy because he or she knows that I will switch in a heartbeat if I am dissatisfied with the product or if a competitor offers me a better deal.
Direct control over revenue is far more persuasive than threats of voting against a candidate's eventual reelection.
So your contention is that good regulation, like the one that says only one telco can supply my house is better than bad regulation, which says only one long-distance telco can supply my house. I don't think this is correct. If more telcos can supply my house, then I will benefit from it through reduced prices and increased performance, just as happens in other unregulated industries such as microchips and elective surgeries.
You mean to say about Australia that activity of paying off the debt precludes other activities. Maybe they shouldn't have gone into debt? Imagine what they could have done with all that interest money...
So you're saying that having resources is a liability? If that were the case, we'd be better off banning the extraction of all resources. Hong Kong has only been 'bound' to China since 199..7? They've been growing since the 1950s. Additionally, skyscrapers are not cheap; nor are airports. Also, you could make the same arguments about many, many other city-states, but not one has experienced the same level of increases in the standard of living as Hong Kong.
I'm not that familiar with the history AT&T, other than the deregulation of long-distance calling sure did bring my phone bill down. However, I simply don't buy the argument that one firm can rule the country. If they were offering such terrible service at such a horrible price, then someone would happily have offered a competing service. Has Intel been able to keep new competitors from popping up? Of course not, because there is no regulation on microchips.
The goal of every business is to have a monopoly, which is why businessmen are not actually capitalists, from a philosophical perspective. This is why giving the businesses the power to control their destinies through non-market strategies is bad for everyone.
It could be argued that some companies may develop technologies that are so revolutionary that they gain a monopoly because nobody else has a competing product, such as was the case for the telephone for a few years. But this is a good thing - firms are encouraged to invent amazing new technologies so great that we can't imagine what life was like before them, and they get to make loads of money for doing it. However, these protections last for only a little while as either patents run out or competing firms develop different technologies that provide the same service. However, once regulation enters the picture the original firm is protected by the regulation, because no one can enter the market without meeting the requirements of the bureaucrats who are owned by that firm. So the regulation creates the problem
And therefore it is better to put someone in debt without their permission? Actually, most of the countries on that list are highly undesirable, but take note that Hong Kong is quite low, and they have on of the longest, fastest growing economies - and no resources!
The answer to that is: they will have to get out of some part of their business, because the first company that embraces wholesaling will put the rest out of business. If the cost of running a line is shared by 20 customers of a wholesale company, vs. the one customer of the integrated company, the wholesale company wins the game, and the true winner is the consumer, who gets higher speeds and more services.
The key is to stop looking at this as an integrated service - Netflix did not try to establish its own nationwide physical delivery service and the cost of that delivery is passed on in its subscription fees. There is more than one business model.
Rail networks are regulated to death. Amtrak loses $32 per customer and only exists because of large subsidies. Most of the rail laid in this nation was subsidized by the Federal Government and is very inefficient. The most efficient rail network created was the Great Northern ran by James J. Hill. The Government subsidies were increased based on miles of rail laid and terrain the rail was built on. So the other railways tended to have overly circuitous routes and would happily plow through mountains.
From today's perspective, if we had a free market, what property owner would wish to reduce the value of property by allowing a rail to be built next to it? Very few, probably mostly ones in industrial zones. Additionally, there are only so many available customers in a given region, so having too many rail networks would lead to putting some out of business or liquidating their assets to offer some other type of service.
If private industry were allowed to offer sewage services without competing with the Government (which operates through involuntary transactions), we would see all sorts of innovation in the waste management market. But we'll probably never know what could be done there. Just because there is limited space for a pipe to run under a road does not mean there is no other way of providing the same result.
So who shall decided the set of infrastructure? The kind and benevolent Government? When has Government ever facilitated competition? Never, except on K Street.
Slashdot Mirror
I am my own employer through the corporation that I own, and my choice would be to pay for my own health insurance on my own, even though it costs me more in taxes. Much of the pre-existing issue comes from the fact that we lose our health care policies when we change employers, and the insurance companies know this. COBRA is only good for 18 months, after that you're on your own. However, if your policy is directly with your insurance company, not your employer, then the insurance company is stuck with you as long as you're paying your premiums.
I thank God that Wal-Mart is opening up its Corner Stores to compete with Walgreen's. The employer provided health care has also lead to a near complete disregard for drug costs. When employees expect all-you-can-eat plans from their employers, they make their decisions on where to get drugs based on convenience, not price. However, once most see the real cost of these plans, they'll likely opt for lower premiums and higher co-pays. This will lead to price reductions in the drug market similar to what we have seen in other markets not covered by health insurance (such as eggs, bread, and milk).
Seems Congress does have the power.
See my post regarding this:
Re:Strikers Vow
So you feel you are more an expert on the Constitution than the man who is quite commonly known as "the Father of the Constitution"? It is you who does not understand the meaning of the clause and are unwilling to learn, which is why your efforts anger so many who do take the time to read about these things.
It is those who are on your side of the argument who must change the document. And I must say you sound more like a despot than any I've seen on this site.
Believe it or not, the needs of the poor were much greater back then as the poverty rate in the U.S. was substantially higher. Certainly access to health care for a substantially higher percentage of the nation was completely non-existent, except for the fact that doctors changed their rates based on who they were serving. Instead of having a set rate for a particular procedure, they charged more to the wealthy and less to the poor. The wealthy knew this and were fine with it. It was a form of voluntary and direct wealth redistribution, whereby the services of the poor were directly subsidized without any middleman.
It is unfortunate that your dogged faith to an ideology is more important than the essence of our free society.
That's why I read books on the topic. From The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History by Thomas E. Woods, Jr., Ph.D., page 32:
Madison dismissed the claim that the proposed legislation could be justified by the Constitution's clause authorizing the federal government "to provide for common defense and general welfare." To the extent that politicians today even bother to justify federal legislation on constitutional grounds, they appeal to this clause. But to argue this way, Madison said, would render "the special and careful enumeration of powers which follow the clause nugatory and improper. Such a view of the Constitution would have the effect of giving to Congress a general power of legislation instead of the defined and limited one hitherto understood to belong to them." If the "general welfare" clause of the Constitution authorized the Congress to do anything that tended toward the general well-being of the country, then why had the Framers bothered to specifically list the powers of Congress in Article I, Section 8? This very fact logically precluded the possibility that the general welfare clause constituting a broad, open-ended grant of power.
Madison continued to promote this view in the years that followed. In 1792 he argued:
If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every state, county, and parish, and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision for the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads,; in short, everything, fro the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress.
So if we take what Woods and Madison are arguing to the next logical step, every word in the constitution is overruled by the general welfare clause. This includes the right to free speech, the right to trial; everything.
Warren Buffett only gets like $150,000 per year, but I believe he gets dividends.
I don't know.
I rest my case.
Maybe it's because 40-60% of their wages go to paying taxes, and prices have risen precipitously from all the Government and Federal Reserve manipulations of the markets.
Raising a child is a full time job, and thus requires someone to be on call, full time, to manage. Two parents working 60 hours per week to pay their various debts cannot make up for the lack of not being around.
No, because it is a state issue. States are completely within their rights to make such requirements.
This is my whole issue with this whole thing. Jefferson was strongly in favor of freedom of religion, while the state of Pennsylvania had required religion, thus the First Amendment reads, "Congress shall make no law..." (emphasis added).
We are a republic, and we can clearly see through these various debates that there are people in this country who want to have taxpayer provided health care and there are those who do not want taxpayer provided health care. If we were to honor the democratic republic that was formed, we would recognize that this is perfectly fine for a union. Massachusetts can have its pristine state system and Texas can have anarchy or whatever.
My belief is that everyone we all will lose when D.C. takes things over, including the people in Massachusetts. There will be no one to complain to except a Representative and a Senator who care little about doing anything to repair any issues. Special interests will latch their suckers to the tax revenue pouring into the program and K Street will expand to J and L Streets.
This argument falls flat on its face. Why would the creators of the constitution go to all the trouble of all the various conventions throughout the colonies to make all the various stated limitations on Government and then make a loophole that negates all of it? No, clearly the intent of the general welfare clause is not what we think it is, and has more to do with understanding the English of the time and not dictionary.com.
And don't try to tell me that Government health care is going to suddenly start covering midwives, especially when the plan is so well supported by big pharma and the AMA. You should watch The Business of Being Born.
I can't get it to work at all on my Vista Business laptop if FF or IE. Not even the Google Labs version works. I'm more looking forward to the next version of Flash that I think is supposed to offload to GPU.
We are in two wars that we can't get out of and can't pay for. Medicare and Social Security are two huge bills from generations past that we can't pay for. We have a financial system that is on an unsustainable course and the viability of our currency is in question. The numbers used to estimate the costs of this health bill came from the very people who promote it. It is most likely the same type of bill that we have seen for at least since the DMCA was passed with a voice vote in the House and unanimous consent in the Senate.
If anyone really thinks this bill is going to benefit people beyond big pharma, unions, lawyers, Wall Street, K Street, banks, and insurance companies, they're high on crack. It's the same game, same players, bigger steaks.
Excellent example! The banking industry is one of the most heavily regulated industries in the world, and that has lead them to be practically joined at the hip with the Government.
Granting the Government the power to regulate gives special interests control over the regulated areas. This is what really makes the whole thing so awful is that we actually end up with regulators who are approved by the regulated, who will then do everything possible to maintain the monopoly. The corporations do not fear regulation, they embrace it. Non-market strategies are a part of every major business school program, and for good reason.
Honestly, I'm too dimwitted to understand your Coke/Pepsi analogy. Perhaps the 'if' statements are false.
I do not have the power to not reelect a candidate. Democracy is tyranny of the majority and leaves me with no other options, unlike an unregulated market.
You apparently don't know much about the train stuff either, because the Great Northern Railway never took a penny from the Federal Government and was terrifically profitable. Clearly it was not necessary to subsidize the railways. Yes, they did accept passengers.
The government "should not furnish capital to [railroad] companies, in addition to their enormous land subsidies, to enable them to conduct their business in competition with enterprises that have received no aid from the public treasury.... Our own line in the North...was built without any government aid, even the right of way, through hundreds of miles of public lands, being paid for in cash." - James J. Hill of the Great Northern Railroad
The Great Northern prospered when all of the other transcontinental railroads when bankrupt in the downturn of 1893, and Hill both reduced his rates and turned a sizable profit.
I don't understand the argument that corporations can pollute to their heart's content when millions of people and companies have embraced conservation efforts without any legislation forcing them to. People do factor in the impact of their purchase decisions when selecting vendors, and especially when they have more available money. Poorer people who have fewer options are the ones that tend to make decisions without regard of impact, which is what makes a free market that much more important as that has been the single most successful method, possibly the only one known, to lift large numbers of people from poverty.
It is regulation that stifles innovation. There is an article a few down right here on /. about how demand for engineers has not actually increased, which would support the hypothesis that companies spending money on activities other than innovation don't innovate. They are more concerned with having the right lobbyist, good lawyers, top accountants, and 'their' man in the Government. These jobs all come with the price of hiring fewer engineers or less innovative engineers. It also sends the brightest towards these other less productive fields, so that instead of finding clever ways to make things more efficient, they're finding clever ways to make things less efficient.
I voted for none of the people in public office right now.
An unregulated CEO is more trustworthy because he or she knows that I will switch in a heartbeat if I am dissatisfied with the product or if a competitor offers me a better deal.
Direct control over revenue is far more persuasive than threats of voting against a candidate's eventual reelection.
So your contention is that good regulation, like the one that says only one telco can supply my house is better than bad regulation, which says only one long-distance telco can supply my house. I don't think this is correct. If more telcos can supply my house, then I will benefit from it through reduced prices and increased performance, just as happens in other unregulated industries such as microchips and elective surgeries.
Did the people born yesterday vote for the debt?
You mean to say about Australia that activity of paying off the debt precludes other activities. Maybe they shouldn't have gone into debt? Imagine what they could have done with all that interest money...
So you're saying that having resources is a liability? If that were the case, we'd be better off banning the extraction of all resources. Hong Kong has only been 'bound' to China since 199..7? They've been growing since the 1950s. Additionally, skyscrapers are not cheap; nor are airports. Also, you could make the same arguments about many, many other city-states, but not one has experienced the same level of increases in the standard of living as Hong Kong.
I have to agree: in the world of public debate childish antics seem to be more effective than intelligent debate.
I'm not that familiar with the history AT&T, other than the deregulation of long-distance calling sure did bring my phone bill down. However, I simply don't buy the argument that one firm can rule the country. If they were offering such terrible service at such a horrible price, then someone would happily have offered a competing service. Has Intel been able to keep new competitors from popping up? Of course not, because there is no regulation on microchips.
The goal of every business is to have a monopoly, which is why businessmen are not actually capitalists, from a philosophical perspective. This is why giving the businesses the power to control their destinies through non-market strategies is bad for everyone.
It could be argued that some companies may develop technologies that are so revolutionary that they gain a monopoly because nobody else has a competing product, such as was the case for the telephone for a few years. But this is a good thing - firms are encouraged to invent amazing new technologies so great that we can't imagine what life was like before them, and they get to make loads of money for doing it. However, these protections last for only a little while as either patents run out or competing firms develop different technologies that provide the same service. However, once regulation enters the picture the original firm is protected by the regulation, because no one can enter the market without meeting the requirements of the bureaucrats who are owned by that firm. So the regulation creates the problem
And therefore it is better to put someone in debt without their permission? Actually, most of the countries on that list are highly undesirable, but take note that Hong Kong is quite low, and they have on of the longest, fastest growing economies - and no resources!
The answer to that is: they will have to get out of some part of their business, because the first company that embraces wholesaling will put the rest out of business. If the cost of running a line is shared by 20 customers of a wholesale company, vs. the one customer of the integrated company, the wholesale company wins the game, and the true winner is the consumer, who gets higher speeds and more services.
The key is to stop looking at this as an integrated service - Netflix did not try to establish its own nationwide physical delivery service and the cost of that delivery is passed on in its subscription fees. There is more than one business model.
Rail networks are regulated to death. Amtrak loses $32 per customer and only exists because of large subsidies. Most of the rail laid in this nation was subsidized by the Federal Government and is very inefficient. The most efficient rail network created was the Great Northern ran by James J. Hill. The Government subsidies were increased based on miles of rail laid and terrain the rail was built on. So the other railways tended to have overly circuitous routes and would happily plow through mountains.
From today's perspective, if we had a free market, what property owner would wish to reduce the value of property by allowing a rail to be built next to it? Very few, probably mostly ones in industrial zones. Additionally, there are only so many available customers in a given region, so having too many rail networks would lead to putting some out of business or liquidating their assets to offer some other type of service.
If private industry were allowed to offer sewage services without competing with the Government (which operates through involuntary transactions), we would see all sorts of innovation in the waste management market. But we'll probably never know what could be done there. Just because there is limited space for a pipe to run under a road does not mean there is no other way of providing the same result.
So who shall decided the set of infrastructure? The kind and benevolent Government? When has Government ever facilitated competition? Never, except on K Street.
So wrong it doesn't deserve a full answer
That is a very poor form of debate. You may as well have posted nothing at all.