[ExI] Single Payer Healthcare

Tue Mar 28 20:10:03 UTC 2017

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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