The future of the GOP

Dean wrote:   Now, I fully admit that you may have intended to use the word "wealth" in that sentence, but I cannot read minds.

I apologize for claiming to not have used the word "money" when I in fact did.  I clarified my meaning in the very next post, but I suppose people would rather assail the first little piggy's house and then pat themselves on the back for knocking it down.

For anyone interested in the third little piggy's house, it had a big sign out front that said, "Even if you took half of what all rich people had and gave it to the poor, you would have the same rich-poor dichotomy in perhaps fewer than two years."

Gamemako wrote: No mention of practice or skill development. In fact, "never will" very specifically says it's not a skill but an innate trait.

Most people will never be able to wire a house.  Am I specifically saying that wiring a house is not a skill but an innate trait?

Epignosis wrote: Gamemako wrote: No mention of practice or skill development. In fact, "never will" very specifically says it's not a skill but an innate trait. Most people will never be able to wire a house.  Am I specifically saying that wiring a house is not a skill but an innate trait?

Shrieking White Hot Sphere of Rage: The Ann Coulter Story 

Epignosis wrote: I clarified my meaning in the very next post, but I suppose people would rather assail the first little piggy's house and then pat themselves on the back for knocking it down.

No no no, that's not how it works. The thing I originally objected to was the statement "most poor people can't handle money". You then defended that original statement and in the same post suddenly changed the wording to "wealth". I didn't even notice the change in wording because nothing else in that post indicated that you were actually changing your statement. If you change your position from A to B, you have to mention that, otherwise you can't blame your opponents for continuing to attack A and you certainly can't counter attacks of position A by pointing out that they don't apply to B.

Since you meant to say "most poor people can't handle wealth", I certainly agree with that. If you give a formerly poor guy and bunch of money and other assets, he will have no clue how to handle them. That is obvious. But it's also completely irrelevant to the point you were trying to make in the first place: If you take from the rich and give it to the poor, that doesn't make the poor wealthy, because there are so many of them that the individual gain is quite small. It puts more money in their pockets, sure, but not so much that they suddenly can't handle it anymore.

Epignosis wrote: For anyone interested in the third little piggy's house, it had a big sign out front that said, "Even if you took half of what all rich people had and gave it to the poor, you would have the same rich-poor dichotomy in perhaps fewer than two years."

Although I think you're exaggerating (not everybody will spent all their additional money over the course of two years and some might even save a bit, so there wouldn't be a complete reversal to the original situation), this is basically true. But what are you trying to say with that? If they spend all their money on goods and services, that doesn't mean all was in vain. Quite the opposite: Everybody benefits from it. The poor benefit from the goods and services that they spent the money on, the rich get their money back because they supply those goods and services, and the economy grows because the money that previously would have been resting in some savings account is now actually spent. Of course the benefit is temporary rather than permanent, but that doesn't make it any less of a benefit. By taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor, you help the economy because poor people are much more likely to spend all of it than rich people. This is why I don't understand the outrage over the whole "47%" issue. Yes, 47% of all Americans pay no income tax. But isn't that great? They get to invest more money into the economy where it belongs rather than the government where, at least according to the people who were outraged over the whole thing to begin with, it doesn't belong. The only one who doesn't gain from taxing the poor less is the government's budget.

Epignosis wrote: For anyone interested in the third little piggy's house, it had a big sign out front that said, "Even if you took half of what all rich people had and gave it to the poor, you would have the same rich-poor dichotomy in perhaps fewer than two years." Gamemako wrote: No mention of practice or skill development. In fact, "never will" very specifically says it's not a skill but an innate trait. Most people will never be able to wire a house.  Am I specifically saying that wiring a house is not a skill but an innate trait?

Although Gamemako is wrong here, there is a problem with your statement: The only reason why most people will never be able to handle wealth is because they will never be wealthy. So your statement is true, but it means nothing. If you give all the poor people lots of money, the vast majority of them will eventually learn to handle it, provided they haven't spent it all by then.

Edit: thellama73 made a good point in the post above me. There might be people (possibly quite a lot of them) who have no real interest in managing their hypothetical wealth because they don't feel like they need it. They have no problem with spending their excess money because they know that they can get by on what they had before. I accept this as a counterargument to what I said immediately above, but in the end it only strengthens by overarching point that if people don't hold on to their wealth, everybody benefits from it.


Edited by HarbouringTheSoul - November 09 2012 at 07:33

thellama73 wrote: HarbouringTheSoul wrote: thellama73 wrote: HarbouringTheSoul wrote: Let me say it this way then: Your idea of a civilized society is at odds with the idea of most other people. A society that enforces total self-sufficiency would be just as wrong and useless as a society that enforces total dependence on the state. It is okay and necessary to let people depend on the state when they need it. Total freedom may be a noble goal, but what's the use if it doesn't make your life any better? Oh, but it does. If people would try it, they would see that it does. Let's see: In a totally free society, health insurance companies wouldn't have to insure people with pre-existing conditions. Now does that make life better or worse for those people? If we held all other things equal, it would be worse, but that's not how things work. That's something that drove me crazy when I worked with undergraduate economics students, the assumption that you can change one variable while holding everything else constant as if the economy were a controlled laboratory experiment. In a free market not only would prices for medical care be dramatically lower, rendering insurance redundant in many cases, but the booming economy that would result would make everybody richer and more able to afford medical care.

This is irrelevant. I'm not talking about people who are too poor to afford medical care, I'm talking about people who are denied medical care because of a pre-existing condition, even though they might be able to pay for it.

thellama73 wrote: I think the assumption that people need to manage wealth and will therefore learn to do it is wrong. Most people don't need to manage wealth, because they can get by tolerably well on what they have. hey will not improve their situation, but I personally have worked with a lot of low income people who have no interest in improving their situation. That requires a concerted effort and the acquisition of a difficult skill, which is not strictly necessary for the continuance of life.

I don't disagree with you but only up to a point in that what you have said does not exonerate Rob's comment, which was based on the premise that the wealth was given to them (that they would then squander in 2 years) rather than them having to acquire a different skill set in order to earn more and thus gain wealth, that they would then have to learn yet another skill set to manage. My Mum received "wealth" as an insurance payout when my Dad died - she didn't need it so it sat in a high interest deposit account while she lived off her pension, and every year she gave away the interest accrued on that investment because all her immediate needs were covered and she didn't want more. That was an adequate management of her wealth as far as she was concerned and one she'd learnt by being prudent with money when there was little of it to go around.

What is a GOP?

Dean wrote: Snow Dog wrote: What is a GOP? Grand Old Party - it's the colloquial name for The Republican Party

thellama73 wrote: No one is denied medical care because of a preexisting condition if they can pay for it. They are only denied medical insurance, much the same way people are denied fire insurance when their house is already on fire.

That analogy is flawed because the two situations are incomparable: In the case of fire insurance, you buy insurance so that you get paid if the house burns down. If the two situations were analogous, that would mean you buy health insurance so that you get paid if you die from an illness. That is, of course, nonsense. You buy health insurance to make sure you don't die from the illness. Especially in the case of chronic, incurable diseases, it is akin to paying the insurance company so that it buys you water to keep the fire under control, but it can never be extinguished.

Let me put this in perspective: I suffer from a chronic disease that, if untreated, would leave me severely disabled and in extreme pain. The disease is incurable but trivial to keep under control with the right medication. Because the disease is rare and the medication is costly to produce, there is absolutely no way I could afford to buy the medication if I were uninsured. It might be less expensive if the medical system were completely unrestricted, but still beyond the financial limits of the vast majority of people. There are many people with diseases that are similar to mine, and in a society where insurance companies are allowed to reject patients with pre-existing conditions, they would all be left to death or severe disability. Now I ask you: Can you find anything civilized about this?

HarbouringTheSoul wrote: thellama73 wrote: No one is denied medical care because of a preexisting condition if they can pay for it. They are only denied medical insurance, much the same way people are denied fire insurance when their house is already on fire. That analogy is flawed because the two situations are incomparable: In the case of fire insurance, you buy insurance so that you get paid if the house burns down. If the two situations were analogous, that would mean you buy health insurance so that you get paid if you die from an illness. That is, of course, nonsense. You buy health insurance to make sure you don't die from the illness. Especially in the case of chronic, incurable diseases, it is akin to paying the insurance company so that it buys you water to keep the fire under control, but it can never be extinguished.

No, that is incorrect. Insurance is a hedge against a potential future event that what have very bad consequences. Insurance companies make money because most of the time, this future disaster never happens. Insurance is not a means of paying for something you expect. You don't get insurance to help you buy groceries, car insurance doesn't cover gasoline or basic maintenance costs.

The problem is that we are in a situation where medical care is too expensive in the absence of insurance for any normal person to be able to afford. The solution is not universal insurance, that will only make costs go even higher as insurance companies have to fork over more money for the chronically sick. The solution is to lower health care costs so that insurance serves its basic purpose of hedging against a potentially catastrophic future event like being hit by a car.

HarbouringTheSoul wrote: Let me put this in perspective: I suffer from a chronic disease that, if untreated, would leave me severely disabled and in extreme pain. The disease is incurable but trivial to keep under control with the right medication. Because the disease is rare and the medication is costly to produce, there is absolutely no way I could afford to buy the medication if I were uninsured. It might be less expensive if the medical system were completely unrestricted, but still beyond the financial limits of the vast majority of people. There are many people with diseases that are similar to mine, and in a society where insurance companies are allowed to reject patients with pre-existing conditions, they would all be left to death or severe disability. Now I ask you: Can you find anything civilized about this?

You are arguing that because you have been unfortunate, it is the duty of insurance companies to pay for your medicine, even though they know that by taking you on they will lose money. I don't see how you can possibly justify that. As I said, in a free market costs would fall and there is a good chance that you would be able to afford your medication. Intellectual property laws are also too restrictive and keep costs high, so repealing those would help as well. If you still couldn't afford it, there is always philanthropy. Doctors who practice out of the desire to save lives and private charities who want to help those who can't afford their medicines.

When you make companies do things that cost them money, they have to make up the difference by charging everyone more. Requiring insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions just exacerbates the problem of high prices. The fact that you think misfortune gives you the right to use force and to coerce others is, to me, shockingly uncivilized.


Edited by thellama73 - November 09 2012 at 09:28