It actually results in tyranny of the minority, a few people quashing overwhelmingly popular legislation in the interests of the five people they represent.
"Quashing overwhelmingly popular legislation" isn't automatically "tyranny", it may well be liberty. For example, "expropriate the Jews" may be "overwhelmingly popular" (it was in Nazi Germany), but killing such legislation actually protects liberty.
The US was set up to protect negative rights, i.e., liberty, but the federal government is currently primarily used to expropriate money from some people to give it to powerful lobbyists, and that includes "overwhelmingly popular" programs. It is precisely this kind of abuse of federal power that the Senate was supposed to stop. It does a piss poor job at it, so if anything, we need to strengthen the ability of the Senate (and other political bodies) to kill "overwhelmingly popular" legislation.
The intent is to require broad geographic as well as popular consensus to pass laws that apply to the entire country, thereby protecting minority rights from the tyranny of a 50%+1 majority concentrated in any one place.
I think it's even simpler than that: the US was intended as a voluntary union of states, and "you join us and you lose all ability to control your own future" is not a particularly good selling point for a political union.
I don't see how he fails to understand anything. It's a weird system, essentially making some people in extremely rural areas have a massively disproportionate influence on the 99% of the rest of the country.
It's not a "weird system" at all: the US is a union of states. If you want the rural states to be part of the union, then those rural states want to be assured that they can't steamrolled by the high population states. It works the same way in the EU. It's the way free and voluntary associations between states work.
The kind of majoritarianism you believe in, extended to the rest of the world, would mean that China and India get to tell everybody else in the world how to live their lives. I don't think that's a good idea.
1) Publicly financed researchers will make less money since public salaries are under much more scrutiny.
Which is also why many smart people will choose not to become medical researchers, or simply leave the country altogether.
2) Publicly financed researchers get more prestige and job security since that's one of the ways you compensate for the crappy salary.
If you pay crappy salaries, you get crappy researchers.
3) Public researchers are going to focus more on things that are really deadly (cancer) or rare diseases that affect only a few people. Private researchers are going to throw out a few more cold remedies and Viagras.
And how is focusing on preventable diseases or rare diseases a rational or efficient allocation of resources? In fact, we know what publicly funded researchers focus on: diseases that are important to groups with powerful lobbyists. And publicly funded researchers do a piss-poor job at that too, which much of the obesity epidemic in the US due to bad government science.
1) Patients often have co-pays or something which gives them cost exposure, though this system isn't perfect and drug companies can exploit it with rebates.
Co-pays don't provide an incentive for patients to reduce costs because they are capped and largely unrelated to the overall cost of the treatment.
2) Private insurers (regulated or not) have a HUGE incentive to reduce costs because they can then lower rates and steal clients from their competitors.
Private insurers in regulated markets have regulated rates and regulated payouts. And their primary incentive is to make the argument to regulators that they need to increase rates, and they do that by covering more and more expensive treatments.
3) Government insurers also have a big incentive to reduce costs because government are under constant budgetary pressure.
Governments are under budgetary pressures, but that doesn't motivate either politicians or civil servants to spend less; to the contrary. The way to gain power in a bureaucracy is to make an argument that you need to spend more than other departments. I mean, come on, look at the inflated prices the military pays or the useless boondoggles and pork politicians spend money on; you seriously want to argue that government "has a big incentive to reduce costs"?
Socialized medicine is cheaper because it can control the hospitals and set appropriate treatment levels, and it can cut out a bunch of the administration because you've lost some of the competing interests. This is partially why the VA in the US is generally does a good job.
The US has three large government-run healthcare systems: Medicare, Medicaid, and VA. They have little incentive to control costs and they spend substantially more than either US private systems or European/Canadian public systems. Government-run systems have an incentive to make voters happy, which means taking money from a minority of tax payers and transferring it to a majority of voters. There are cultural reasons why that effect isn't as large in Canada and Europe yet as it is in the US, but don't worry: it's going to hit you too.
As a Canadian I (and most other Canadians) are happy with our healthcare.
Canada is a socially cohesive, resource rich, small population country under the military and economic wings of the US, filled with voters who are constantly indoctrinated by public education and public media. The US is not like that, so what works in Canada doesn't work in the US. And I don't expect the Canadian model to be sustainable either because American political views and attitudes are going to take over Canada as well and there is nothing you can do about it.
Consider a treatment that costs $100K/year and a cure that costs $1M. A socialized payment system will obviously choose the $1M since it's going to be caring for that patient for decades.
You're presuming a socialized payment system that makes rational decisions based on what's best for society and for patients. That's absurd. Look at the current federal budget: are they spending money in rational ways?
But a private system may only have a patient for 5 years, meaning that opting for the cure costs them an extra $500K. Sure, the treatment needs to be covered for those remaining decades of life, but that's going to be covered by a different private insurer.
Would you sign an insurance contract that said "if you get sick, the insurance company can weasel out of coverage after a couple of years"? Of course not: it would be utterly foolish to do so. The reason private insurance contracts effectively function that way is because of bad regulations in the US. This is not an issue intrinsic to private insurance markets.
Why would a company trying to maximize profits even offer the 1 time cure at any price, when they don't have to and can charge as much as you can afford for the rest of your life instead?
Because they would go out of business when a competitor enters the market and does offer the cure.
If you privatize profits at all, that's what you get. How you pay for it makes no difference.
Absolutely right: if you privatize profits while socializing costs, that's all you get: that's crony capitalism and utterly dysfunctional. That's what we are doing. But the problem is not the privatization of profits, but the socializing of the costs.
Which is why only one country in the developed world does it that way, and why they have the worst health outcomes in the developed world.
Pretty much every part of that statement is wrong. I suggest you do some background reading.
If you spend a lot of money researching treatments, thinking it will be lucrative, and your competitor researches a cure that makes your treatment obsolete, you're fucked, eh?
In a free market, that would be true. But we don't have a free market in healthcare. Meaning, the people who actually make the purchasing decisions (doctors, hospitals, and regulated insurance companies) have an incentive to spend more money on treatments, not less, because their profits are effectively a percentage of what they spend; saving money doesn't increase their profits (at least not in the long run).
If this isn't happening, competition is being suppressed somehow.
Absolutely. And the way competition is being suppressed through socializing costs.
everyone will buy the cure from firm B
Who is this "everyone"? As a patient, I have an incentive to buy the cheaper treatment. But as a doctor or regulated insurance company, I don't, and it is doctors and regulated insurance companies that actually purchase treatments on behalf of patients. They don't spend their own money, so they don't care what things costs. But their profits are a percentage of their spending, so they are incentivized to spend more.
Every system will choose a cure over a treatment, for reasons including cost.
When costs are socialized, who has an incentive to reduce costs? Patients certainly don't, because they don't bear the burden of their treatments. The government or regulated insurers don't, because the more they spend, the more power they have and the higher their revenue. And health care providers don't either because, again, they earn more if they spend more.
Now, European nations are a little bit better at cost control in their socialized systems, but not a whole lot: they spend about 1/3-1/2 per capita of what the US spends. To be sure, that's a good thing: at that spending level, we could cover every American with Medicare without any new revenue or any changes to private insurers. But even European healthcare is vastly overpriced, has rapid and unsustainable growth in costs, and also delivers lower service for the lower costs.
You can call it unethical, but if the ROI on the treatment is 200% but only 80% for the cure then you're not going to stay in business making cures all the time.
But you won't stay in business if you offer a chronic treatment when your competitor offers a cure, and even more so when the lifetime cost of the cure is a fraction of the treatment. The only reason expensive chronic treatments are so successful is because there is little incentive to reduce costs in the US healthcare system.
Now you could fix this by socializing R&D (public universities do this to an extent), but it's not clear that they'll do a better job of drug development than drug companies.
The incentive structure of publicly financed researchers also don't align with those of patients or the public. Publicly financed researchers want to maximize their career advancement, their reputation, and their incomes.
The motive for treatment over cure comes from market pressures on the R&D side.
Quite correct. And when you socialize costs, the market pressures disappear (or even reverse). In fact, the market pressures disappear even if you simply overregulate an otherwise private healthcare system.
The rest of the system needs to make do with what treatment options are given them.
In a free market, "I'm going to produce expensive, low-quality crap that my customers don't want" is not going to keep you in business because competitors will enter the market and drive you out of business. The only reason this works in the US healthcare system is because patients are not buyers of healthcare, and the buyers of healthcare don't have an incentive to save money.
Note that for many diseases we already have cures: a large portion of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer could be eliminated if people lost weight and exercised. But the current US healthcare system provides no incentive for doctors to cure their patients in that simple, effective way.
"Is curing patients a sustainable business model?" The answer may be "no,"
The answer is "yes" when people have to make price-conscious decisions for their healthcare because people naturally will prefer a one time expense over open ended expensive treatments.
If you socialize costs while maintaining private health providers, however, curing diseases ceases to be an objective for doctors or drug companies.
If you socialize costs and have public healthcare providers, one time cures are preferred to ongoing expensive treatments. That's better than the mixed system the US has right now, but it's still worse than a fully private system.
It's unclear to me what you mean by "authoritarian laws" here. You may be referring to anti-discrimination laws, which do not appear to me to be authoritarian in general,
Of course they are authoritarian. They are saying "we are going to override your freedom of association because we want to achieve specific outcomes for society as a whole". This would be bad enough if there were actual evidence that systematic private discrimination is the cause of unequal outcomes and that government intervention is an effective way of addressing it. But history shows the reverse: government is the cause of systemic discrimination, and it is private actors that best address it, through freedom of association and market mechanisms. Employment discrimination against homosexuals was largely a consequence of the criminalization of homosexuality, and it largely stopped when homosexuality was effectively decriminalized, long before any anti-discrimination laws were passed.
The Oregon bakers got what they deserved, but I'm not at all comfortable with the Colorado bakery decision. No legal system is perfect. As far as indoctrination, everybody does it.
That's an authoritarian speaking. An actual liberal recognizes the right of people to discriminate for any reason or no reason at all; and that right exists not in order to protect bigots and racists, it exists in order to let society deal with bigots and racists through much better mechanisms than legal proceedings. Having the jackboot of government stomp on people who discriminate is not an effective way to change society: it causes resentment rather than acceptance, it drives discrimination underground, and it forces minorities to unknowingly work for people who hate them. I'm quite happy that one of my past employers openly created a hostile work environment (I wasn't out); I quietly left the place and that was the end of it. I didn't even tell them why I quit because I'd much rather see them go down in flames for having such lousy policies. That's the liberal way of dealing with discrimination, and unlike your way, it actually works.
Therefore, it's convenient to have a name for people in masculine gender roles or feminine gender roles, since it doesn't line up precisely with male/female, and you're fine with that under the current circumstances. "Gender" is in common use for this.
Correct. But you erroneously conclude from that that gender is a "social construct". It is not. Gender and gender roles are biologically determined, it is just that the mechanism that determines them fails in a small percentage of people.
Therefore, current society is imperfect.
Society is always imperfect. It is also always unfair.
Differences in outcomes based on gender or race or whatever are suggestive of differences in opportunity, and should be investigated.
They have been investigated and the results are clear. First, differences in outcome occur naturally even in the absence of any differences in opportunity or even any genetic differences. Second, the differences in outcome that we see correlate with gender and race specifically are the result of different choices, not different opportunities.
But be that as it may, you are equivocating. Specifically what "differences in opportunities" are you talking about? Where exactly are there documented differences in opportunities based on gender or race? Specifically which government laws discriminate based on gender or race?
Actually, no, that's the people who don't recognize that gender is a social construct, but try to make it a biological imperative, and thus not subject to change.
Something that is a biological imperative doesn't need to be imposed by government. For example, you don't have to make laws to tell people to walk on two legs because everybody already does it.
Sorry, but you're guilty of the offense here. You are the one who supports draconian coercion for any who defy your paradigm.
I'm proposing eliminating all sex and gender distinctions from the law. How is removing laws and restrictions "authoritarian"? How is simply accepting unequal outcomes by gender "authoritarian"?
oolorie, demonstrating the shibboleth of his cult of hate. All who believe in the Way of oolorie are rational, informed, and good, all who deny his mantras are ignorant, irrational, and bad. Preach! Preach on! Decry all those who do not know your enlightenment! They shall worship you and despair!
My parents experienced hate and oppression under the Nazis, and I experienced it personally under socialism. And I emigrated to the US in order to get away from self-righteous European bigots like you. The question is why you can't leave us in peace in the US. Why don't you worry about your own benighted country instead of obsessing about everything American?
All of this stuff can change across societies. In another society, I might wear a kilt instead of pants. I'd be expected to do and say different things
But it is a universal of human societies that they have separate male and female genders and gender roles, and that those strongly align with sex and biology. Furthermore, while there are many superficial differences between gender roles in different societies, there are also many commonalities that are determined by biology and are necessary for societies to function. Societies can function with a small percentage of people who don't conform to their gender roles, but they can't function if gender roles disappear.
Classical liberals (like myself) believe people should choose their gender roles freely, without government coercion or interference. That naturally produce unequal outcomes, outcomes where women earn less, men live shorter lives, and almost everybody chooses the gender that conforms to their biology.
Progressives (like you) believe that gender and gender roles are arbitrary social constructs. From that starting point, you then conclude that differences in outcome that correlate with sex or gender must be due to injustice and oppression. And to address that supposed injustice and oppression, you create authoritarian laws and try to indoctrinate people into believing in fictions that are clearly in conflict with biology.
In a nutshell you are fine with a dinner refusing gay's or African-Americans lunch because as a private business they are free to discriminate as they please
I believe strongly that it should be legal. And while I don't push the issue for African Americans (not being one), I strongly and personally object to anti-discrimination laws for homosexuals because I think they are very harmful to me as a gay man.
The GOP used to be the party of the progressives (heck Lincoln was a Republican)
Slavery was a set of racially discriminatory government laws and policies; Lincoln fought to abolish those laws. That makes Lincoln a libertarian or small government conservative, not a progressive.
Well if they can discriminator against member of the community, then why can't the community discriminate against them but let's say refusing them a business license!
Ah, so you believe that people should only be allowed to engage in business transactions if licensed by the state, and you believe that "the state" actually represents "the community". Both of those beliefs are typically progressive and fascist.
FYI: Democrats, liberal, progressive; Republican , conservative are not interchangeable terms.
Quite correct. When I say "Democrats and progressives", I'm making a statement that is true of both groups.
Southern slave-owners were members of the Democratic party.
And the people who gave us Jim Crow, anti-miscegenation laws, segregation, eugenics, and forced sterilization were both mostly progressives and Democrats. (Of course, there have always been some progressives in the Republican party as well; the Republicans have their share of jerks too, after all).
And finally I dare you to find me a African-American community that "believes" there were better off in the pre "civil rights" Jim Crow era
I didn't say that "they were better off". What I said was: "African American communities stagnated [after the 1960's] and the black family was destroyed." Those are facts that Democrats, Republicans, progressives, and conservatives agree on. Where they differ is on what they see as the cause. Democrats and progressives attribute it to massive, continued racism, but that explanation is ludicrous.
you asinine turd
Thank you for showing your true colors. I actually considered myself a progressive and used to be a registered Democrat myself, until I read about the history of the movement and the party. I'm just glad I got out. You people are just like a mindless cult.
The rest of us call it what it is; discrimination on sexual orientation based on religious grounds
Even conservatives call it that. The difference is that conservatives and libertarians believe that discrimination by businesses and individuals ought to be legal, on religious or any other grounds, As a gay man, I welcome any business to discriminate against me for my sexual orientation if they so choose.
Oh spare me. The conservatives were with the Democratic party (also known as the Dixicrats) until the Truman and the liberal wing of the party took control and pushed it towards supporting the civil rights movement.
Conservatives pushed for equality under the law; that is, they pushed for the abolition of the hateful and racist policies Democrats and progressives had enacted in the early half of the 20th century, and they were the primary driver of that movement until the mid-1960's.
After that, the Democrats and progressives then took a different tack on "civil rights": Democrats and progressives embraced social justice, massive welfare spending, and equality of outcome. And the consequence? African American communities stagnated and the black family was destroyed. Democrats and progressives are still racially discriminating, they are just doing it differently today, and it is just as harmful.
Republicans, libertarians, and conservatives have been pretty consistent: the government should treat everybody equally, and businesses should be free to do whatever they want to do.
Democrats and progressive also have been pretty consistent: they want to make legal distinctions based on race, and they want to impose those distinctions on businesses and private individuals.
Like I said progrssives (for my own private definition) rarely weigh more than 35 grams and are covered in warm fur. If you invent your own private definitions you sound silly.
I don't "invent definitions"; I simply go by the history of the progressive movement, i.e., people who self-identified and are still recognized as progressive. I'm sorry if you're not familiar with the history of the progressive movement.
Or do you mean religion advocates murder?
Islam advocates killing homosexuals and apostates.
here's a free clue: protected class is about a trait not an instance of that trait.
If say "I'm a Muslim and my religion teaches that atheists/apostates/homosexuals should be killed.", I risk getting slammed with an anti-discrimination lawsuit if I refuse to serve you. In the UK, I risk getting charged with a hate crime merely by saying something that might upset Muslims even if true.
How's that any different from Conservatives favoring laws that revert society back to Biblical times
First, saying "X likes to put people in prison" doesn't imply "only X likes to put people in prison".
Second, only a small percentage of Republicans or "Conservatives" are Christian conservatives; many conservatives are fiscal conservatives, free market conservatives, or libertarians/classical liberals.
But on your particular points...
Alabama only repealed it's ban on interracial marriages in 2006
Anti-miscegenation laws and segregation laws were laws pushed by progressives and Democrats; mainstream Christianity and Republicans generally did not oppose miscegenation. In fact, Christianity was a strong proponent of the idea that all humans are equal under God. To be sure, some people who favored miscegenation tried to justify it by the Bible after the fact (just like they did with science), but just because some progressives used X to justify their hateful policies doesn't mean that X actually supports their hateful policies.
and there are still states with anti-sodomy laws in the books
Anti-sodomy laws predate Christianity, and Christianity has never been consistently anti-sodomy or anti-gay. When Christianity has opposed homosexuality, it has opposed the sex act, not the orientation. And many American conservatives, even Christian conservatives, don't want homosexuality to be illegal, they simply want government not to promote it or treat it as a protected class.
Furthermore, most of the 20th century anti-gay political efforts were largely driven by progressives, fascists, and socialists, not by conservatives or libertarians. Progressives didn't just imprison homosexuals, they tried to apply forced sterilization and forced medical treatments, and they didn't make a distinction between thought and deed: if you were homosexual, progressives considered you deviant and wanted to fix or eliminate you.
So your neat division into "left/progressives=pro-sex, pro-interracial marriage", "conservatives/libertarians=anti-sex, anti-interracial marriage" is bullshit.
I mean sure, if you invent a new meaning for progressives then you can say that.
Nothing new about it: progressives favor strict regulations and laws in order to accomplish "progress". Those regulations and laws are backed by throwing people in jail if they don't comply.
Advocacy of murder is not as far as I can tell a protected class.
No, not per se. But some protected classes advocate murder, and they remain protected classes despite their advocacy of murder.
That's a very limited translation you made. Slashdot may have a clear US-centric audience, but Facebook has more than 1 billion users all over the world.
Quite the opposite: a lot of the reason why FB is banning this stuff is because of European restrictions on free speech.
Just take a look at what is considered "left" and "right" for politics in Europe vs USA, and you'll see that your local issues aren't really anyone else's issues.
I know exactly what is considered "left" and "right" in Europe, being from Europe originally. Yes, European and US politics are closely linked, even if most Europeans are too ignorant to see the connections.
Slashdot Mirror
"Quashing overwhelmingly popular legislation" isn't automatically "tyranny", it may well be liberty. For example, "expropriate the Jews" may be "overwhelmingly popular" (it was in Nazi Germany), but killing such legislation actually protects liberty.
The US was set up to protect negative rights, i.e., liberty, but the federal government is currently primarily used to expropriate money from some people to give it to powerful lobbyists, and that includes "overwhelmingly popular" programs. It is precisely this kind of abuse of federal power that the Senate was supposed to stop. It does a piss poor job at it, so if anything, we need to strengthen the ability of the Senate (and other political bodies) to kill "overwhelmingly popular" legislation.
I think it's even simpler than that: the US was intended as a voluntary union of states, and "you join us and you lose all ability to control your own future" is not a particularly good selling point for a political union.
It's not a "weird system" at all: the US is a union of states. If you want the rural states to be part of the union, then those rural states want to be assured that they can't steamrolled by the high population states. It works the same way in the EU. It's the way free and voluntary associations between states work.
The kind of majoritarianism you believe in, extended to the rest of the world, would mean that China and India get to tell everybody else in the world how to live their lives. I don't think that's a good idea.
Which is also why many smart people will choose not to become medical researchers, or simply leave the country altogether.
If you pay crappy salaries, you get crappy researchers.
And how is focusing on preventable diseases or rare diseases a rational or efficient allocation of resources? In fact, we know what publicly funded researchers focus on: diseases that are important to groups with powerful lobbyists. And publicly funded researchers do a piss-poor job at that too, which much of the obesity epidemic in the US due to bad government science.
Co-pays don't provide an incentive for patients to reduce costs because they are capped and largely unrelated to the overall cost of the treatment.
Private insurers in regulated markets have regulated rates and regulated payouts. And their primary incentive is to make the argument to regulators that they need to increase rates, and they do that by covering more and more expensive treatments.
Governments are under budgetary pressures, but that doesn't motivate either politicians or civil servants to spend less; to the contrary. The way to gain power in a bureaucracy is to make an argument that you need to spend more than other departments. I mean, come on, look at the inflated prices the military pays or the useless boondoggles and pork politicians spend money on; you seriously want to argue that government "has a big incentive to reduce costs"?
The US has three large government-run healthcare systems: Medicare, Medicaid, and VA. They have little incentive to control costs and they spend substantially more than either US private systems or European/Canadian public systems. Government-run systems have an incentive to make voters happy, which means taking money from a minority of tax payers and transferring it to a majority of voters. There are cultural reasons why that effect isn't as large in Canada and Europe yet as it is in the US, but don't worry: it's going to hit you too.
Canada is a socially cohesive, resource rich, small population country under the military and economic wings of the US, filled with voters who are constantly indoctrinated by public education and public media. The US is not like that, so what works in Canada doesn't work in the US. And I don't expect the Canadian model to be sustainable either because American political views and attitudes are going to take over Canada as well and there is nothing you can do about it.
You're presuming a socialized payment system that makes rational decisions based on what's best for society and for patients. That's absurd. Look at the current federal budget: are they spending money in rational ways?
Would you sign an insurance contract that said "if you get sick, the insurance company can weasel out of coverage after a couple of years"? Of course not: it would be utterly foolish to do so. The reason private insurance contracts effectively function that way is because of bad regulations in the US. This is not an issue intrinsic to private insurance markets.
Because they would go out of business when a competitor enters the market and does offer the cure.
Absolutely right: if you privatize profits while socializing costs, that's all you get: that's crony capitalism and utterly dysfunctional. That's what we are doing. But the problem is not the privatization of profits, but the socializing of the costs.
Pretty much every part of that statement is wrong. I suggest you do some background reading.
In a free market, that would be true. But we don't have a free market in healthcare. Meaning, the people who actually make the purchasing decisions (doctors, hospitals, and regulated insurance companies) have an incentive to spend more money on treatments, not less, because their profits are effectively a percentage of what they spend; saving money doesn't increase their profits (at least not in the long run).
Absolutely. And the way competition is being suppressed through socializing costs.
Who is this "everyone"? As a patient, I have an incentive to buy the cheaper treatment. But as a doctor or regulated insurance company, I don't, and it is doctors and regulated insurance companies that actually purchase treatments on behalf of patients. They don't spend their own money, so they don't care what things costs. But their profits are a percentage of their spending, so they are incentivized to spend more.
When costs are socialized, who has an incentive to reduce costs? Patients certainly don't, because they don't bear the burden of their treatments. The government or regulated insurers don't, because the more they spend, the more power they have and the higher their revenue. And health care providers don't either because, again, they earn more if they spend more.
Now, European nations are a little bit better at cost control in their socialized systems, but not a whole lot: they spend about 1/3-1/2 per capita of what the US spends. To be sure, that's a good thing: at that spending level, we could cover every American with Medicare without any new revenue or any changes to private insurers. But even European healthcare is vastly overpriced, has rapid and unsustainable growth in costs, and also delivers lower service for the lower costs.
But you won't stay in business if you offer a chronic treatment when your competitor offers a cure, and even more so when the lifetime cost of the cure is a fraction of the treatment. The only reason expensive chronic treatments are so successful is because there is little incentive to reduce costs in the US healthcare system.
The incentive structure of publicly financed researchers also don't align with those of patients or the public. Publicly financed researchers want to maximize their career advancement, their reputation, and their incomes.
Quite correct. And when you socialize costs, the market pressures disappear (or even reverse). In fact, the market pressures disappear even if you simply overregulate an otherwise private healthcare system.
In a free market, "I'm going to produce expensive, low-quality crap that my customers don't want" is not going to keep you in business because competitors will enter the market and drive you out of business. The only reason this works in the US healthcare system is because patients are not buyers of healthcare, and the buyers of healthcare don't have an incentive to save money.
Note that for many diseases we already have cures: a large portion of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer could be eliminated if people lost weight and exercised. But the current US healthcare system provides no incentive for doctors to cure their patients in that simple, effective way.
The answer is "yes" when people have to make price-conscious decisions for their healthcare because people naturally will prefer a one time expense over open ended expensive treatments.
If you socialize costs while maintaining private health providers, however, curing diseases ceases to be an objective for doctors or drug companies.
If you socialize costs and have public healthcare providers, one time cures are preferred to ongoing expensive treatments. That's better than the mixed system the US has right now, but it's still worse than a fully private system.
All the results I get from this "idea based search engine" could simply be based on smart query term expansion.
For example, when I say "List some lovers of Casanova.", all I get is a list of books related to Casanova.
So, are there good examples of queries that actually demonstrate a deeper understanding of books by this new search engine?
Of course they are authoritarian. They are saying "we are going to override your freedom of association because we want to achieve specific outcomes for society as a whole". This would be bad enough if there were actual evidence that systematic private discrimination is the cause of unequal outcomes and that government intervention is an effective way of addressing it. But history shows the reverse: government is the cause of systemic discrimination, and it is private actors that best address it, through freedom of association and market mechanisms. Employment discrimination against homosexuals was largely a consequence of the criminalization of homosexuality, and it largely stopped when homosexuality was effectively decriminalized, long before any anti-discrimination laws were passed.
That's an authoritarian speaking. An actual liberal recognizes the right of people to discriminate for any reason or no reason at all; and that right exists not in order to protect bigots and racists, it exists in order to let society deal with bigots and racists through much better mechanisms than legal proceedings. Having the jackboot of government stomp on people who discriminate is not an effective way to change society: it causes resentment rather than acceptance, it drives discrimination underground, and it forces minorities to unknowingly work for people who hate them. I'm quite happy that one of my past employers openly created a hostile work environment (I wasn't out); I quietly left the place and that was the end of it. I didn't even tell them why I quit because I'd much rather see them go down in flames for having such lousy policies. That's the liberal way of dealing with discrimination, and unlike your way, it actually works.
Correct. But you erroneously conclude from that that gender is a "social construct". It is not. Gender and gender roles are biologically determined, it is just that the mechanism that determines them fails in a small percentage of people.
Society is always imperfect. It is also always unfair.
They have been investigated and the results are clear. First, differences in outcome occur naturally even in the absence of any differences in opportunity or even any genetic differences. Second, the differences in outcome that we see correlate with gender and race specifically are the result of different choices, not different opportunities.
But be that as it may, you are equivocating. Specifically what "differences in opportunities" are you talking about? Where exactly are there documented differences in opportunities based on gender or race? Specifically which government laws discriminate based on gender or race?
Something that is a biological imperative doesn't need to be imposed by government. For example, you don't have to make laws to tell people to walk on two legs because everybody already does it.
I'm proposing eliminating all sex and gender distinctions from the law. How is removing laws and restrictions "authoritarian"? How is simply accepting unequal outcomes by gender "authoritarian"?
My parents experienced hate and oppression under the Nazis, and I experienced it personally under socialism. And I emigrated to the US in order to get away from self-righteous European bigots like you. The question is why you can't leave us in peace in the US. Why don't you worry about your own benighted country instead of obsessing about everything American?
But it is a universal of human societies that they have separate male and female genders and gender roles, and that those strongly align with sex and biology. Furthermore, while there are many superficial differences between gender roles in different societies, there are also many commonalities that are determined by biology and are necessary for societies to function. Societies can function with a small percentage of people who don't conform to their gender roles, but they can't function if gender roles disappear.
Classical liberals (like myself) believe people should choose their gender roles freely, without government coercion or interference. That naturally produce unequal outcomes, outcomes where women earn less, men live shorter lives, and almost everybody chooses the gender that conforms to their biology.
Progressives (like you) believe that gender and gender roles are arbitrary social constructs. From that starting point, you then conclude that differences in outcome that correlate with sex or gender must be due to injustice and oppression. And to address that supposed injustice and oppression, you create authoritarian laws and try to indoctrinate people into believing in fictions that are clearly in conflict with biology.
You also are unaware of the homophobic and racist history of progressivism. In fact, you're simply ignorant all around.
I believe strongly that it should be legal. And while I don't push the issue for African Americans (not being one), I strongly and personally object to anti-discrimination laws for homosexuals because I think they are very harmful to me as a gay man.
Slavery was a set of racially discriminatory government laws and policies; Lincoln fought to abolish those laws. That makes Lincoln a libertarian or small government conservative, not a progressive.
Ah, so you believe that people should only be allowed to engage in business transactions if licensed by the state, and you believe that "the state" actually represents "the community". Both of those beliefs are typically progressive and fascist.
Quite correct. When I say "Democrats and progressives", I'm making a statement that is true of both groups.
And the people who gave us Jim Crow, anti-miscegenation laws, segregation, eugenics, and forced sterilization were both mostly progressives and Democrats. (Of course, there have always been some progressives in the Republican party as well; the Republicans have their share of jerks too, after all).
I didn't say that "they were better off". What I said was: "African American communities stagnated [after the 1960's] and the black family was destroyed." Those are facts that Democrats, Republicans, progressives, and conservatives agree on. Where they differ is on what they see as the cause. Democrats and progressives attribute it to massive, continued racism, but that explanation is ludicrous.
Thank you for showing your true colors. I actually considered myself a progressive and used to be a registered Democrat myself, until I read about the history of the movement and the party. I'm just glad I got out. You people are just like a mindless cult.
Even conservatives call it that. The difference is that conservatives and libertarians believe that discrimination by businesses and individuals ought to be legal, on religious or any other grounds, As a gay man, I welcome any business to discriminate against me for my sexual orientation if they so choose.
Conservatives pushed for equality under the law; that is, they pushed for the abolition of the hateful and racist policies Democrats and progressives had enacted in the early half of the 20th century, and they were the primary driver of that movement until the mid-1960's.
After that, the Democrats and progressives then took a different tack on "civil rights": Democrats and progressives embraced social justice, massive welfare spending, and equality of outcome. And the consequence? African American communities stagnated and the black family was destroyed. Democrats and progressives are still racially discriminating, they are just doing it differently today, and it is just as harmful.
Republicans, libertarians, and conservatives have been pretty consistent: the government should treat everybody equally, and businesses should be free to do whatever they want to do.
Democrats and progressive also have been pretty consistent: they want to make legal distinctions based on race, and they want to impose those distinctions on businesses and private individuals.
I don't "invent definitions"; I simply go by the history of the progressive movement, i.e., people who self-identified and are still recognized as progressive. I'm sorry if you're not familiar with the history of the progressive movement.
Islam advocates killing homosexuals and apostates.
If say "I'm a Muslim and my religion teaches that atheists/apostates/homosexuals should be killed.", I risk getting slammed with an anti-discrimination lawsuit if I refuse to serve you. In the UK, I risk getting charged with a hate crime merely by saying something that might upset Muslims even if true.
First, saying "X likes to put people in prison" doesn't imply "only X likes to put people in prison".
Second, only a small percentage of Republicans or "Conservatives" are Christian conservatives; many conservatives are fiscal conservatives, free market conservatives, or libertarians/classical liberals.
But on your particular points...
Anti-miscegenation laws and segregation laws were laws pushed by progressives and Democrats; mainstream Christianity and Republicans generally did not oppose miscegenation. In fact, Christianity was a strong proponent of the idea that all humans are equal under God. To be sure, some people who favored miscegenation tried to justify it by the Bible after the fact (just like they did with science), but just because some progressives used X to justify their hateful policies doesn't mean that X actually supports their hateful policies.
Anti-sodomy laws predate Christianity, and Christianity has never been consistently anti-sodomy or anti-gay. When Christianity has opposed homosexuality, it has opposed the sex act, not the orientation. And many American conservatives, even Christian conservatives, don't want homosexuality to be illegal, they simply want government not to promote it or treat it as a protected class.
Furthermore, most of the 20th century anti-gay political efforts were largely driven by progressives, fascists, and socialists, not by conservatives or libertarians. Progressives didn't just imprison homosexuals, they tried to apply forced sterilization and forced medical treatments, and they didn't make a distinction between thought and deed: if you were homosexual, progressives considered you deviant and wanted to fix or eliminate you.
So your neat division into "left/progressives=pro-sex, pro-interracial marriage", "conservatives/libertarians=anti-sex, anti-interracial marriage" is bullshit.
Nothing new about it: progressives favor strict regulations and laws in order to accomplish "progress". Those regulations and laws are backed by throwing people in jail if they don't comply.
No, not per se. But some protected classes advocate murder, and they remain protected classes despite their advocacy of murder.
Quite the opposite: a lot of the reason why FB is banning this stuff is because of European restrictions on free speech.
I know exactly what is considered "left" and "right" in Europe, being from Europe originally. Yes, European and US politics are closely linked, even if most Europeans are too ignorant to see the connections.
Which part of "AI Will Curb Hate Speech In 5 To 10 Years" was too hard for you to understand?
That is, they are bad at banning it now, they will be getting better at it in the future.