Re: [OT] Re: Linux & BSD history
From: Nils Gösche (ngo_at_cartan.de)
Date: 12/31/03
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Date: 31 Dec 2003 00:05:51 +0100
Marco Antoniotti <marcoxa@cs.nyu.edu> writes:
> Ok. I'll answer this.....
Other people have answered most of your points already, so I'll add
only a few comments.
> Nils Gösche wrote:
> > Yes, how many. That's the question I was asking, and without
> > answering it, any such number doesn't say much.
>
> The number is pretty much correct.
That doesn't mean it contains useful information.
> Half of Germany without Health Insurance. Reading "Nickel and
> Dimed" by Barbara Ehrenreich will give you an idea of the "Bill
> Gates" who cannot afford Health Insurance.
I do not have to read any books to know that being poor sucks. But
this doesn't help us determining how efficient different health care
systems are.
> > Moreover, health insurance isn't /that/ expensive. Only a few
> > people will be /so/ poor that they wouldn't be able to pay for it
> > if they really had to. And they chose /not/ to pay for it, for
> > whatever reason. What would you do? Force them to pay for it?
> > Why would that be better?
>
> It is a decision that society as a whole must make.
Some government official has to decide for me how much my health is
worth? Sorry, I disagree.
> I am not for making the "poor" pay for health insurance. I want to
> make sure that they get medical help when needed. In any case, it
> is obvious that it is not by huge deficit-causing tax cuts for the
> rich that you achieve that goal.
"deficit-causing" tax cuts? It's not tax cuts that cause deficits,
it's government spending. Moreover, tax revenue is not linearly
dependent on tax rates.
> > Why are they /so/ poor that they cannot afford even that? Here
> > lies the problem, and /this/ has to be solved.
>
> They are so poor because in the past years the divide between rich
> and poors has been increasing in the Western World.
I don't know if it is sad or funny how many people are under this
silly misconception. Whether I am poor or not does in no way depend
on Bill Gates's bank account. If you double my bank account, I have
not become poorer, even if you triple Bill Gates's at the same time
(assuming no Keynesian politician has caused a horrible inflation
rate). What increases together with Bill Gates's bank account is not
other people's poverty, but only some leftists' feelings of envy.
> > No. An insurance is something I pay for when I want the risk
> > protection it offers. When the government forces me to pay, it
> > just becomes taxes by another name.
>
> The goverment is *you*
Oh. So, I am Gerhard Schröder, you are George W. Bush, and my grandpa
was Adolf Hitler? That's an interesting case of personality disorder
you got there ;-)
> The system of rpotections and safety nets that have been put in
> place have been voted in by majorities of the people.
The same majority that voted my grandpa into office, I suppose. :-)
> You can argue what you want, but in a fully democratic society (one
> were channels like Fox 5 ar fully counterbalanced by the free press)
> the money that you give the government is money that, one way or the
> other gets back to you.
Then why not taking a shortcut and leave the money where it belongs in
the first place?
> As protection by the Military, as a more just society where you know
> anybody can get the care s/he deserves when ill, and where losing a
> job does not result in loosing your health care.
Trust me on this, you don't want to get me started on "social justice"
;-). Anyway, of course there might be things that are best provided
by the government. I just happen to think that health care is not one
of them, and whether you agree or disagree, we have to think about
this carefully instead of just acting as if this was some kind of
axiom.
> What is the case, is people "going broke" because they did undergo
> surgery without having health insurance, and people going broke
> because of cronic or long decourse illnesses.
There are also people going broke because they saved the money for
fire insurance. Doesn't mean I am very motivated to pay for other
people's fire insurance, though.
> We are also getting in the era of genetic testing where an insurance
> company could refuse to take you in, or ask for an exhorbitant
> premium based on the results of such test. GATTACA is not so far.
That is an entirely unrelated problem, and one that can easily be
solved with an appropriate law.
> How do you justify an Insurance Company charging an extra premium to
> single self-employed males in their twenties and thirties just
> because they lived at an address too close to Cristopher Street in
> NY or in the Castro District of San Francisco?
Sounds very reasonable to me. Aids wouldn't have spread the way it
did if it wasn't for certain people's life style choices. If they
choose to live risky, let them pay for it, not me.
> >>Morevoer - as the leaders of the Libertarian Party - you are not
> >>reading the reports of the World Health Organization (they are
> >>online.) In the 2000 edition - if I remember correctly - the US
> >>system got ranked 37th or so: right next to Cuba. France got the
> >>top score to the dismay of the WSJ.
> > By what measure?
>
> Read the report. It is online. The number of uninsured people in
> the US di have a weight.
Is this the same WHO that is continually providing incorrect numbers
and predictions on Aids victims in, say, Africa? I do not trust this
source.
> > France's medical system couldn't even prevent thousands of people
> > from dying this year just because of a little hot temperature (it
> > wasn't hotter than in the US, BTW; nobody died there because of
> > the weather).
>
> Not really. This was - at least in NY - a relatively mild
> summer. Anyway, in Europe the Kyoto agreements were signed and there
> *much* less air conditioning. Maybe it is that the "cause" of the
> deaths?
Yes, that's one cause. That, together with a failing medical system.
> >>Moreover, Health Costs in Europe are lower than in the US.
> > Again, this is ridiculous. How was this measured?
>
> Per capita expenditures over GDP or something like that. If memory
> does not fail me, these are numbers published yearly by the OECD.
This is a pretty good measure, but it has one flaw: It doesn't take
the quality of service into account. It might be that some people
want better health care than others. And does this include all the
money American girls spend on silicon implants, for instance?
> > Any sane comparison shows that the percentage people pay of their
> > income for medical insurance and treatment is much lower in the
> > US.
>
> Of course. You have more than 40 million people who pay *no*
> insurance. It's a bit about the two chickens-two people statistics,
> isn't it? :)
Heh. They do not pay for insurance, but they pay for health care when
they need it. Of course, /every/ dollar has to be taken into account
that one way or the other is spent on the health care system.
> Apart from that, i would like some sources that I can check about
> this. I am willing to review my positions. Of course I will be
> deeply suspicious of sources like some of the notorious beltway
> "Think Tanks". :)
Maybe you shouldn't :-)
> Thanks for the information. I will not comment on things I do not
> know. I am sure some other German guy thinks otherwise.
That's goes without saying. Doesn't mean they're right, though :-)
> Looks to me that even some members of the CDU/CSU think otherwise:
> they had all the time to change things until the late 90's.
True. That's why the Frankfurter Allgemeine was ranting against their
"Herz Jesu Sozialismus" all the time ;-) Even our socialist
government acknowledges now, though, that the system has failed and
has to be changed. It failed for the very reasons I am talking about
all the time.
> Apart from that, how is it then that "health care costs" are rising
> here in the US as well (as reported by the NYT every other day)? If
> things here are working so well, why is there any problem?
I don't know. I can think of all kinds of possible reasons, but I'd
rather not speculate. Whenever I looked into it when such a thing
happened, though, it was always the government that raised costs by
often stupid regulations.
> Finally, I am not surprised that the rich have other insurances in
> Germany. What I object to is that "they" (in an inapproriate
> generalization) are not willing to share the burden and do anything
> they can to get ideologically driven tax cuts that will eventually
> hamper the well-being of millions.
Uhm, more than half of every Euro made in this country is eaten up by
the government already. The well-being of millions has already been
"hampered", nevertheless. We tried socialism. It didn't work. We
also tried free capitalism, back in the 1950s and 1960s. Not many
people know this, but not the US, /this/ was the country of free
capitalism back then. That /did/ work. Both of our socialist
experiments, in East as well as West Germany, turned out not to.
> > Health care does cost lots of money. This money is coming from
> > somewhere, somebody is paying for it, no matter in what system.
> > Yes, Keynesians think they can pay for things by simply printing
> > money, but the rest of us know better.
>
> Seems to me that you are not up-to-date with Keynes. I do not
> recall anyhting so specific being advocated.
"pay for things by simply printing money" is what you do when you are
causing inflation. Causing inflation is precisely what Keynesians are
doing whenever they get into power. In Keynes' system, stagflation
simply cannot happen...
> What is apparent to me is that you want one thing: universal health
> care.
I am not sure if that's what I want. What precisely /is/ universal
health care?
> The rest is figuring out how to pay for it. However, since when you
> are ill you want to get well (especially when you have a very
> threatening condition) it seems to me that you will always find
> yourself in a weak position as an agent in the market.
I'd say that when I am ill I am in a weak position in any case :-)
> How do you guarantee that no one is in such a weak position?
I don't. Poor people find themselves in all kinds of bad situations
all the time. The way to fix this is to make people less poor. The
question is whether everybody gets treatment in emergency cases. If
this didn't happen in any given system already, I'd say it would have
to be changed. Now, whatever else people get in addition to that is
always a complicated trade-off. No matter what system we have, this
will never be "universal" in the sense that everybody gets the
theoretical optimum. When you change any system, you will always
replace one imperfect system with another. We can only look at how it
works in practice. And we will see ugly things. But when we change
it, we might see even more ugly things. Socialized medicine will not
create an ideal system where everybody gets the theoretical optimum
care. Once this is clear, we see that we have to search for a system
with a minimum of ugliness. And this system might very well be what's
already there in the US, or something close to it, you cannot simply
dismiss this as impossible.
> As I said elsewhere, I am not against a system of privatized healt
> care based on insurance. But I do not see at all how you get there
> without massive goverment regulation and intervention. Sorry. This
> is one of the things "the market" cannot provide for.
Isn't it doing this already? Sure, some people decide not to pay for
insurance. There might be all kinds of reasons for this. In some
cases, poverty will be the reason. However, this is really not a
trivial problem. What would government regulation look like? Force
everybody to be insured? What about those who could theoretically pay
for insurance, but personally decided they need the money so badly
that they'd rather use it for something else, say, X. Do we really
help them by forcing them to pay for insurance instead? They
themselves obviously disagree, or they would have paid for insurance
and not for X. How do we know this X really isn't more important? We
don't. And the problems only start here. You might want to fix this
by having the government provide a super-cheap insurance for them.
But this creates several other, very severe problems. This is the way
we went in Germany, and now our whole system broke and everybody is
crying, and it turns out to be very, very hard to fix. And as always,
the poor suffer the most.
> > /Every/ economist knows that minimum wages kill jobs. People who
> > go into politics to command people what to do ought to know at
> > least that.
>
> Yes. And every person who works in a less than minimum wage
> (illegal) job knows that s/he has to work at least two or three of
> them to eat and pay rent (while at the same time being unable to pay
> for healt insurance - which the German Goverment, possibly in the
> CDU/CSU Kohl era, provided you). Sorry again, but the "every
> economist" you refer to is a very restricted category of people here
> and does not seem to include all economists.
Yes, /all/ economists. When you raise minimum wages, jobs will go
away. This is so basic, everybody agrees on this. You raise the
price, demand goes down, that's it, even Marxists know that; hey, even
Keynesians do :-) When people work illegally for less than minimum
wages, this alone should show you that people really need these jobs.
You want to take them away from them? Don't you see how evil this is?
"Oh my God, look at all those poor people, having to work for that
little money. Let's kill all those low-paying jobs, so we don't have
to look at all this poverty, anymore!" When you do that, you can
proudly say that wages are really high in your country, but it doesn't
mean you have helped the poor by doing so. It means you have made
their miserable lifes even worse.
This is another common misconception: Employers do not pay wages on a
whim, because they want to be nice or something, or because they fear
public opinion. They pay wages because they need the labor it buys to
make more money. There is always demand for labor. Labor can be
bought on the labor market. In turn, there is always demand for jobs,
because people want the money they get by working for somebody else.
The wages are thus determined by the market. These wages are the
price of labor, and they are not arbitrary at all: They reflect
accurately (unless the government intervenes) what people need, and
how badly. Yes, /every/ economist knows this, again. Every one of
them also knows the evil effects manipulating these market prices will
have. Everybody claiming otherwise is either ignorant or lying.
> Well. I am against rent controls myself because I know they do not
> work well, although i would really like a three bedroom apartment in
> the Village for less than 1000 a month :). What made you think I am
> in favour of them?
Because it's exactly the same kind of thinking (or not-thinking) that
leads to rent controls, that also leads to minimum wages, and possibly
socialized health care, although I admit that this case isn't as
clear. If you understand that rent controls don't work and /why/,
there's still hope for you, though :-)
> Instead. Why did you cut the other nice example I mentioned:
> federally mandated paid maternity and paternity leave? That is a
> nice discriminatory point. (Incidentally, in the pre-Arnold era, the
> Popular Republic of California passed, first among the US States, if
> I am not mistaken, a law guaranteeing five weeks of paid maternity
> leave. I bet Arnold will not repeal the law.)
Because I do not care about this law at all. It raises the cost of
labor a bit, thus having some bad effects for everybody, especially
the poor again, but there are really worse problems at the moment.
> > All through the 20th century, politicians have been saying things
> > like : "Look! Poor people have to pay rents! Let's make a law so
> > rents become cheaper. Wouldn't that be nice? Oh, what a great
> > guy I am, having so much compassion for the poor! Don't you just
> > have to love me, at least as much as I love myself?" And it
> > worked: People did vote for them, after all
>
> Not only they voted for them. It also worked. We luckily did not
> become Sovietized and the societies we lived in worked better.
Did it work? Apparently not in East LA ;-) I'd like things to work
/better/.
> But things are changing. It is *your* message that is constantly
> repeated now by a vast majority of journalists and TV stations.
> Mine is releagated into these off-topic rants on a newsgroup.
Well, not quite, but you have a point here.
> Face it. *You* have the upper hand now.
Yes, the tide is turning, at least I think (and hope) so. Slowly, and
only in traces, but people appear to get the message. Yes, I am quite
happy about this :-)
> The guy working two minimum wage jobs does not, and your message is
> that s/he should not even have that guarantee.
If people had listened to "my" message earlier, maybe there wouldn't
be as many people having to work two minimum wage jobs. That's the
question, that's what this is all about. (Not mentioning that there
wouldn't be any minimum wages in the first place, so in fact there
would be zero people working any positive number of minimum wage jobs
;-)
> > Merry Christmas,
>
> Same to you. And a Happy New Year. Sometimes Scrooge does get the
> message :)
Who knows :-)
Regards,
-- Nils Gösche "Don't ask for whom the <CTRL-G> tolls." PGP key ID #xEEFBA4AF
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