[ExI] Single Payer Healthcare

Wed Mar 29 23:59:59 UTC 2017

Interesting video related to this subject:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2015/oct/28/david-graeber-what-government-doesnt-want-you-to-know-about-debt-video

Jason

On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 3:10 PM, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 11:54 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
>
>
>
>> > 
>> the US federal government is dysfunctional too: it does not and cannot
>> balance the budget.
>>
>> Spike, doesn't the FACT that the US federal government has failed to
> balance the budget nearly every year since 1835 make you question the
> theory that they must balance the budget or they are dysfunctional?
>
>
>> > 
>> In a family, when there is a budget shortfall, something doesn’t get
>> bought
>
>
> Or they get a loan. Most families can't afford to pay cash for their
> house, and yet they still manage to live in a house somehow. In the mid
> 1970s INTEL handmade in a lab a new gadget called a "microprocessor", they
> could have continued to make them in the lab and tried to sell them for a
> million dollars a chip or they could have massed produced them in a factory
> and sold them for $10 a chip. They chose the second option, but to do so
> they had to go into debt, they had to go to a bank and get a loan to pay
> for the expensive factory. I think you would agree INTEL made the correct
> choice.  
>
>
> > 
>>  I do not feel it is morally justifiable to speculate that the future
>> will be richer and it is my solemn responsibility to spend its wealth.
>> That the future will be more prosperous is my firm belief, but my firm
>> belief might be wrong.
>
>
> Yes we might be wrong, but if we waited until we were absolutely certain
> what the eventual outcome of our actions would be we'd be unable to perform
> any actions at all about anything; so all we can do is play the odds and
> place our bets to the best of our judgement.
>
> I think it is a very good bet that technology will improve and a even
> better bet that if technology improves then the total amount of wealth in
> the world will increase. The big uncertainty is how all that new wealth
> will get divided up.
>
>
> >
>> The future might be poor.
>
>
> The future could contain poor people even if the total amount of wealth in
> the world increases. It
> 's
> a good bet that if the number of poor people gets too large revolution
> will result and civilization will collapse, and it's a even better bet that
> if
> 
> civilization collapses everybody will end up being poor.
>
>
>> > 
>> By running big deficits, we might be robbing from the poor to give to the
>> rich.
>
>
> We might be, but we're probably not.
>
> John K Clark
>
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