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

[Stefano Vaj]

On 13 June 2011 09:18, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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...


In a true socialist system "insurances", medical or other, do not have any
sense in the first place.

Your economic planning allows for X% if national resources to be devoted to
the production of, say, health care services, such services are erogated to
the beneficiaries, and that's it.

On a societal scale, "insurance", be in compulsory or not, does not really
make any sense, given that there you know in advance how much you are
actually going to spend and how you want to allocate it (on the basis of
criteria that may be egalitarian or not).

Even if you don't
> label it as socialist, a couple of courts have labelled it as
> "unconstitutional" which is accurate enough IMHO.
>

In the US? Well, I am no specialist of US constitutional law, which appears
anyway rather tenuously connected with the XVIII document and its amendments
by now, and much more to political vagaries of the moment... :-)


>  >  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.
>

No, you misunderstand me. I am not referring to the insurance sector, but to
the health care sector itself, which in a socialist regime should be owned
itself by the State or some other public body.

BTW, isn't welfare itself a socialist concept?
>

It is not libertarian for sure. But was, say, Bismarck a socialist? Is
contemporary France a socialist country? Or Kuwait, for that matter?
Certainly not in any sense that Lenin or chairman Mao might have had in
mind...

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.


After a fashion you might be right.

As far as I can tell, the general fascist doctrine about economy was that it
does not really matter whether the solutions adopted one time or another
could be abstractly defined as "socialist" (as in expropriations and
nationalisations of strategic sectors) or "capitalist" (as in overt support
to large national private cartels) as long as they deliver what is demanded
from them and a strict political control could be maintained over their
operations.

But this approach is by now shared by a much broader political landscape...

Fascist is an incendiary word


Don't tell me... :-)

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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