[ExI] Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations and People Always Die, and Life Gets Faster

[Kelly Anderson]

2011/6/11 Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com>:
> On 11 June 2011 03:55, Rafal Smigrodzki <rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> The common trick of leftist demagogues is to claim that the US is
>> system is not socialist, while in fact it mostly is. Then the
>> inevitable poor performance of the system is blamed on the vestiges of
>> private initiative (being able to choose a physician, having access to
>> new medications) and presto, Obamacare.
>
> On the contrary, I am inclined to believe that Obamacare itself has nothing
> especially "socialist" in any plausible sense of the word.

Requiring people to purchase insurance, even when they don't want to
and using the government's power to enforce that seems pretty
socialist (or at least social engineering) to me...  Even if you don't
label it as socialist, a couple of courts have labelled it as
"unconstitutional" which is accurate enough IMHO.

>  It is just
> "welfarist", but it does not imply any especial change in the ownership or
> planning of the relevant business.

Except that there is the government option when you fall through the
ever widening cracks. 30% of businesses polled recently indicated that
they would no longer be providing private insurance once the
government option was available. I suspect that number will
asymptotically approach 100% until the politicians just say "screw it"
we're just going to single payer.

BTW, isn't welfare itself a socialist concept?

> Cuba, in my understanding, is a more appropriate example, even though the
> country is perhaps too small and too poor to be comparable.

Yes, Cuba's model is even more socialist. A more accurate political
description for Obamacare is probably fascist, that being defined as
government control over private industry. From the Wikipedia
article... "They (fascists) support a regulated, multi-class,
integrated national economic system." Granted, there are many other
aspects of fascism that are separate from their economic theory that
do not apply to Obamacare. There is nothing particularly nationalistic
or racial about it, for example. Fascist is an incendiary word, and I
use it ONLY in the economic sense here.

-Kelly