Perhaps we should just spend time trying to figure out how to store food perfectly, instead of worrying about expiring food we literally cannot hand out without undoing the point of paying people for it.
Or creating disasters rather than destroying the food!:)
LOL, yeah I think we are on the same page generally. The point is that you need to do something outside of regular capital markets to ensure a food supply.
You've brought up a number of points where doing something so obviously good (giving away food) can actually be bad... free markets are confusing on their own, and trying to manipulate them always causes some side effect that you weren't expecting:)
I like the idea of ugly-colored food, BTW! LOL. Though I want to point out that even at the height of rationing in wartime England, people still wouldn't touch whale meat, despite it being completely free of rationing:)
And, of course, we'd now have supplies in the case of disaster and have 'government surplus' almost-expired stuff to sell cheaply or give to charities when disaster or famine didn't happen.
Well, you can't actually give any away or even sell it - it has to be destroyed. Otherwise it will drag down the prices and the farmers will suffer just as much as if they overproduced in the first place.
But otherwise, your plan makes sense.
It's worth noting that you might be able to get around all that canning by sticking to grains that store well in dry storage. It wouldn't be as healthy as canned produce, but a hell of a lot cheaper... and remember we are just trying to head off famine, not meet long-term nutrition needs.
You actually just have a right to liberty, and the whole trial procedure is there to ensure that you aren't deprived of it unjustly. The right to a jury and representation is a granted right, not an inherent one.
In other words, they wouldn't need to give you a lawyer if they weren't trying to strip you of a fundamental right.
Another way to look at it is that inherent rights are those that you are born with, even if you are born into anarchy. You have your life until someone takes it. You have your liberty until someone imprisons you. You have the ability to act on your free will until someone holds you back. Fundamental rights cannot be granted, only taken.
Mind you, I am PRO socialized medicine - I think it is the decent and neighborly thing to do. But the idea that getting free stuff is now getting equated with human rights blows my mind.
I wasn't arguing that the "American way" (actually we have at least 3 different ways, but I digress) was the way to go. I was just pushing back on the idea that health care is a fundamental human right. I think it can be a granted "right" like copyright if you can get 50% of the people to agree with you, but it is certainly not a fundamental right.
The US has been doing socialized health care very poorly for over 30 years, when emergency rooms were required to treat everyone regardless of means. The argument over whether we should have socialized medicine was decided long ago - but we have a really horrible system, so I'm not defending it.
Not all the healthcare people want, but all the basic care they need.
Exactly! We have to ration it - that's all I was saying. We can't afford to give every single person all of the care they want (or even need). We certainly can (and do) provide some basic level of health care, and there is a lot more that we can provide. But the idea that healthcare can be free to all with no rationing of any kind is preposterous, which is what I was replying to.
Actually, what got me riled up was that the statement that it is a "right" (with the insinuation that it is a basic right, civil right, inherent right, or whatever you want to call it). I think it is a laudable goal, but rights are not things that are given to you. Rights can only be taken by governments, not granted.
Well, there's certainly more than one way to skin a cat. I'd love to see a study of the costs of the current subsidy programs vs. the costs of alternatives.
We can't "produce" kidneys, we have to get them from a very limited supply of donors. Even if you had all the money of the world, you couldn't procure enough transplants for everyone, hence we have to give priority to the people who are most likely to survive.
I used kidneys exactly because they are an obviously scarce resource. Drugs are also a scarce resource, though it is not as obvious. A few years ago, we (in the US) had to ration flu vaccine because a whole batch went bad and it takes months to grow it. Then we had to ration swine flu vaccine worldwide because it took months to identify, test, and finally grow the vaccine.
Not so much with drugs which can be manufactured in quantities sufficient for everyone, once researched.
"Once researched". That's the rub, isn't it? If it costs a billion or so dollars to research and test a drug, who should pick up the costs? Look at the crap the US is taking for losing a few hundred million on Solyndra - imagine if they lost that or more every time they financed a drug that didn't work out? I'm not going to claim that the patent system is the best way to finance drug development, or that patent terms are ideal - but some people are claiming that university research and government is the way to go...
Why don't people have a right to basic transportation? A right to be loved?
Lots of things that I would love to provide to everyone given unlimited resources are not considered "rights". And if they are, then we need to come up with a new word for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. No one gives you life (except mom?) or liberty, and no one gives you the ability to pursue your dreams... these are things that can not be granted, only taken away. Saying that people have a right to be given stuff is, well, I just don't agree and you'd have to make a pretty strong case.
I'll give you an example. A coal power plant sets up shop on the east coast of the US. It has no pollution controls at all, because this is pure capitalism in this example and the government doesn't require any. Prevailing winds are westerly, so all the pollution blows out to sea and no one gets sick and no one sues. Problem is, all that mercury is getting into the fish. It's impossible for anyone to prove this to a jury and sue that particular plant, so it just continues. Even if they could prove that, statistically, the plant was responsible for some of the mercury - they still would have a heck of a time proving harm. Capitalism will never solve this problem.
Another is food. Capitalism always has cycles of shortages and gluts. A shortage of hard drives because of a flood in Thailand is one thing, a shortage of food is quite another. Capitalism will never solve this problem, because constantly producing a glut of food would drive farmers out of business which of course leads to a shortage. One solution is for the government to come in and buy the glut and then destroy it - unless of course there is no glut! Then you get to use the food and thank the usually wasteful food program. Not the only solution, but it's a common one. The point is, capitalism won't work on it's own when it comes to staple foods.
The pharma companies figured out how to defeat the co-pay penalty. They give you a "discount card" now that pays the difference between the generic and brand-name.
Yeah, my understanding is that the FDA only regulates (for the purposes of generic vs brand name) the active ingredient. You could have some negative reaction to the fillers, casing, etc. And even the delivery/timing could be slightly different.
A friend of mine was on Nexium, and his insurance made him switch to Protonix - a very close relative, so not really the same thing as a generic substitution... Anyway, he got headaches from Protonix, so his doctor had to write a letter explaining this to the insurance company before they would again pay for his Nexium. I'm sure the situation is similar with generics and insurance companies.
I disagree with some of your points, though. Specifically:
You _do_ realize that animals have lived on this planet millions of years without "paying" anyone. The universe provides everything you need to exist
Animals (including humans) spend a lot of time "subsisting". That is, chronically hungry or malnourished. Animals left to their own devices generally consume everything that they can, build up a large population, and then starve back to a more sustainable population. Healthy populations of animals tend to be healthy because some predator is culling the sick and old and generally keeping the numbers down. I don't think you want to look to the animal kingdom as any kind of a model for humans.
I'm sorry but EVERYONE has the right to life, regardless of the cost.
Everyone has the right not to have their life taken away, but no one has a right to unlimited, state-of-the-art healthcare. Money is just a way to quantify resources, and we don't have the resources to give everyone all the healthcare that they want, when they want it. You have to ration it. Different countries take different approaches. In the US, we have 3 different systems of healthcare and so we see wait lists, prioritization (like for organ transplants), restricted availability, and of course dollars. In some countries, they use restricted availability, age limits for certain procedures, and wait lists. And these are the rich countries. The point is, you have to mete out the health care somehow, and while it seems cold to say, "sorry, you can't afford it," I think it also sounds cold to say, "sorry, you are too old to have a kidney transplant." I'm not sure what the right balance is, but I'm willing to discuss it - but I think it is completely incorrect to say that everyone has a right to healthcare - I think that's more of a laudable goal, or an ideal to strive for, but not a right. You do have a right to die, though:)
The amazing thing is, despite icky shit like this, capitalism STILL has out-competed every other economic system devised by man. Maybe technology will let us move to a more sane system for matching supply to demand. We already monkey around with capitalism, because while it is pretty good at meeting demand, it seems to be terrible at factoring in external costs or contingencies. So we do things like screw with the market so we have a planned glut of food, and screw with the market by having emissions trading, and screw with the market by inventing IP laws, etc.
We should be cutting the middle-man and funding those projects more
I think you need both systems. Academia is just as attractive to hucksters as the free market when flush with money. How many BS grant proposals get written just to finance the existence of a department? The university system is one of the crowning achievements of humanity, but let's not get carried away and think it can replace capitalism.
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Perhaps we should just spend time trying to figure out how to store food perfectly, instead of worrying about expiring food we literally cannot hand out without undoing the point of paying people for it.
Or creating disasters rather than destroying the food! :)
LOL, yeah I think we are on the same page generally. The point is that you need to do something outside of regular capital markets to ensure a food supply.
You've brought up a number of points where doing something so obviously good (giving away food) can actually be bad... free markets are confusing on their own, and trying to manipulate them always causes some side effect that you weren't expecting :)
I like the idea of ugly-colored food, BTW! LOL. Though I want to point out that even at the height of rationing in wartime England, people still wouldn't touch whale meat, despite it being completely free of rationing :)
And, of course, we'd now have supplies in the case of disaster and have 'government surplus' almost-expired stuff to sell cheaply or give to charities when disaster or famine didn't happen.
Well, you can't actually give any away or even sell it - it has to be destroyed. Otherwise it will drag down the prices and the farmers will suffer just as much as if they overproduced in the first place.
But otherwise, your plan makes sense.
It's worth noting that you might be able to get around all that canning by sticking to grains that store well in dry storage. It wouldn't be as healthy as canned produce, but a hell of a lot cheaper... and remember we are just trying to head off famine, not meet long-term nutrition needs.
It's not just you.
Look at your $60-120 cable bill and tell me there isn't something else that would make you happy with that money. At the high end, that's a family mobile plan with data for a family of four.
Treat me like a child, then. Tell me how the futures market wards of starvation.
I actually get a kick out of watching huge companies try to outsmart one another.
You actually just have a right to liberty, and the whole trial procedure is there to ensure that you aren't deprived of it unjustly. The right to a jury and representation is a granted right, not an inherent one.
In other words, they wouldn't need to give you a lawyer if they weren't trying to strip you of a fundamental right.
Another way to look at it is that inherent rights are those that you are born with, even if you are born into anarchy. You have your life until someone takes it. You have your liberty until someone imprisons you. You have the ability to act on your free will until someone holds you back. Fundamental rights cannot be granted, only taken.
Mind you, I am PRO socialized medicine - I think it is the decent and neighborly thing to do. But the idea that getting free stuff is now getting equated with human rights blows my mind.
I wasn't arguing that the "American way" (actually we have at least 3 different ways, but I digress) was the way to go. I was just pushing back on the idea that health care is a fundamental human right. I think it can be a granted "right" like copyright if you can get 50% of the people to agree with you, but it is certainly not a fundamental right.
The US has been doing socialized health care very poorly for over 30 years, when emergency rooms were required to treat everyone regardless of means. The argument over whether we should have socialized medicine was decided long ago - but we have a really horrible system, so I'm not defending it.
Not all the healthcare people want, but all the basic care they need.
Exactly! We have to ration it - that's all I was saying. We can't afford to give every single person all of the care they want (or even need). We certainly can (and do) provide some basic level of health care, and there is a lot more that we can provide. But the idea that healthcare can be free to all with no rationing of any kind is preposterous, which is what I was replying to.
Actually, what got me riled up was that the statement that it is a "right" (with the insinuation that it is a basic right, civil right, inherent right, or whatever you want to call it). I think it is a laudable goal, but rights are not things that are given to you. Rights can only be taken by governments, not granted.
Well, there's certainly more than one way to skin a cat. I'd love to see a study of the costs of the current subsidy programs vs. the costs of alternatives.
We can't "produce" kidneys, we have to get them from a very limited supply of donors. Even if you had all the money of the world, you couldn't procure enough transplants for everyone, hence we have to give priority to the people who are most likely to survive.
I used kidneys exactly because they are an obviously scarce resource. Drugs are also a scarce resource, though it is not as obvious. A few years ago, we (in the US) had to ration flu vaccine because a whole batch went bad and it takes months to grow it. Then we had to ration swine flu vaccine worldwide because it took months to identify, test, and finally grow the vaccine.
Not so much with drugs which can be manufactured in quantities sufficient for everyone, once researched.
"Once researched". That's the rub, isn't it? If it costs a billion or so dollars to research and test a drug, who should pick up the costs? Look at the crap the US is taking for losing a few hundred million on Solyndra - imagine if they lost that or more every time they financed a drug that didn't work out? I'm not going to claim that the patent system is the best way to finance drug development, or that patent terms are ideal - but some people are claiming that university research and government is the way to go...
Fair enough - though I think that that kind of right is covered under either "life" or "pursuit of happiness" :)
I was replying to someone who was claiming that people have a right to be given stuff.
Adam Smith, meet John Keynes.
Right back at you: why?
Why don't people have a right to basic transportation? A right to be loved?
Lots of things that I would love to provide to everyone given unlimited resources are not considered "rights". And if they are, then we need to come up with a new word for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. No one gives you life (except mom?) or liberty, and no one gives you the ability to pursue your dreams... these are things that can not be granted, only taken away. Saying that people have a right to be given stuff is, well, I just don't agree and you'd have to make a pretty strong case.
It's a bit contrived, but yes it is a good thought experiment that makes you deal with the problem on a very simple example.
Of course I've heard of the futures markets... how in the world do they change what I've said?
I'll give you an example. A coal power plant sets up shop on the east coast of the US. It has no pollution controls at all, because this is pure capitalism in this example and the government doesn't require any. Prevailing winds are westerly, so all the pollution blows out to sea and no one gets sick and no one sues. Problem is, all that mercury is getting into the fish. It's impossible for anyone to prove this to a jury and sue that particular plant, so it just continues. Even if they could prove that, statistically, the plant was responsible for some of the mercury - they still would have a heck of a time proving harm. Capitalism will never solve this problem.
Another is food. Capitalism always has cycles of shortages and gluts. A shortage of hard drives because of a flood in Thailand is one thing, a shortage of food is quite another. Capitalism will never solve this problem, because constantly producing a glut of food would drive farmers out of business which of course leads to a shortage. One solution is for the government to come in and buy the glut and then destroy it - unless of course there is no glut! Then you get to use the food and thank the usually wasteful food program. Not the only solution, but it's a common one. The point is, capitalism won't work on it's own when it comes to staple foods.
The pharma companies figured out how to defeat the co-pay penalty. They give you a "discount card" now that pays the difference between the generic and brand-name.
Clever bastards.
Yeah, my understanding is that the FDA only regulates (for the purposes of generic vs brand name) the active ingredient. You could have some negative reaction to the fillers, casing, etc. And even the delivery/timing could be slightly different.
A friend of mine was on Nexium, and his insurance made him switch to Protonix - a very close relative, so not really the same thing as a generic substitution... Anyway, he got headaches from Protonix, so his doctor had to write a letter explaining this to the insurance company before they would again pay for his Nexium. I'm sure the situation is similar with generics and insurance companies.
Sadly enough, The whole hospital pharmacy apparatus becoming completely automated and mechanized within the next 20 years.
LOL, why is that sad? You just scared the shit out of me about what the meat-based pharmacists are up to! :)
I'm taking a swag but I'd say discounts on the other Pfizer drugs. :)
First, kudos for keeping the discussion civil.
I disagree with some of your points, though. Specifically:
You _do_ realize that animals have lived on this planet millions of years without "paying" anyone. The universe provides everything you need to exist
Animals (including humans) spend a lot of time "subsisting". That is, chronically hungry or malnourished. Animals left to their own devices generally consume everything that they can, build up a large population, and then starve back to a more sustainable population. Healthy populations of animals tend to be healthy because some predator is culling the sick and old and generally keeping the numbers down. I don't think you want to look to the animal kingdom as any kind of a model for humans.
I'm sorry but EVERYONE has the right to life, regardless of the cost.
Everyone has the right not to have their life taken away, but no one has a right to unlimited, state-of-the-art healthcare. Money is just a way to quantify resources, and we don't have the resources to give everyone all the healthcare that they want, when they want it. You have to ration it. Different countries take different approaches. In the US, we have 3 different systems of healthcare and so we see wait lists, prioritization (like for organ transplants), restricted availability, and of course dollars. In some countries, they use restricted availability, age limits for certain procedures, and wait lists. And these are the rich countries. The point is, you have to mete out the health care somehow, and while it seems cold to say, "sorry, you can't afford it," I think it also sounds cold to say, "sorry, you are too old to have a kidney transplant." I'm not sure what the right balance is, but I'm willing to discuss it - but I think it is completely incorrect to say that everyone has a right to healthcare - I think that's more of a laudable goal, or an ideal to strive for, but not a right. You do have a right to die, though :)
thats EVIL.
The amazing thing is, despite icky shit like this, capitalism STILL has out-competed every other economic system devised by man. Maybe technology will let us move to a more sane system for matching supply to demand. We already monkey around with capitalism, because while it is pretty good at meeting demand, it seems to be terrible at factoring in external costs or contingencies. So we do things like screw with the market so we have a planned glut of food, and screw with the market by having emissions trading, and screw with the market by inventing IP laws, etc.
We should be cutting the middle-man and funding those projects more
I think you need both systems. Academia is just as attractive to hucksters as the free market when flush with money. How many BS grant proposals get written just to finance the existence of a department? The university system is one of the crowning achievements of humanity, but let's not get carried away and think it can replace capitalism.
I fail at the internet. Try this link instead :)