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In general, I agree that if a culture is to grow it needs to be capable of taking risks and making experiments. When every experiment succeeds, either you weren

In general, I agree that if a culture is to grow it needs to be capable of taking risks and making experiments. When every experiment succeeds, either you weren't innovating enough or you're lying and now supporting a failure. When he starts complaining about social protections though, I'd draw the opposite conclusion: Need health insurance? No problem, we'll make sure that's provided for. The article seems to me to imply that this sort of protection is a brake on innovation. I won't disagree that it has the potential to put a brake on innovation through additional taxation (though not as currently implemented in the USA, where total healthcare spending is far from efficient), but as a concept it enables failure and risk taking. We talk about startups being ramen profitable, and that's fine. But my first employer was a startup who, when he started, had a wife and young kids - he needed 4x ramen + healthcare + education profitable. He's since made a success of the company and sold it, but how would he have been able to responsibly take the risk to start the company if its failure would have left his family not just bankrupt but without any form of medical provision? What if he also couldn't have afforded to educate his children? Would that have been good? People are best enabled to innovate when they can be free to fail without a disastrous cost to their career and their lives - this is the lesson of the invention of the limited company and the prosperity that resulted from that. Social security safety nets such universal healthcare enable innovation over a wider pool of candidates because they reduce the harm of failure to the innovator and their dependents.

cgopalan 16y ago
> (referring to healthcare) as a concept it enables failure and risk taking. I cannot agree enough. Sorry for the sidetrack, but I have always thought about the scenario where say a person who is still far away from standard retirement age (maybe by about 20 years till medicare kicks in) has, say, just enough saved up to carry her through the rest of her life. If she doesnt have a working spouse with healthcare, she is forced to take a job. Whereas if healthcare was provided regardless of a job, it frees her from the necessity to work as well as opens up the job to somebody who needs the income as well as the care.
- jdminhbg 16y ago
  Single-payer healthcare has some selling points, but allowing workers to finance others' early retirements is not one of them.
  - cgopalan 16y ago
    The assumption is that the early-retiring worker has also paid in to the pool while accumulating the wealth.
- jimmyk 16y ago
  One consequence is that someone with specific life circumstances preventing her from leaving her job will now be able to do that to pursue something that might be better. Another consequence, and one that is unintended but virtually unpreventable for a government, is that someone with an idea he is less sure of and which is less likely to succeed will be pushed in the direction of quitting his job and pursuing his unproductive idea. My thought is that when a government does something like this, it pushes everyone further in the direction of risk, similar to when the US Government promised to back the banks in the case of impending failure. And like the banking situation, while it is possible that a lot of the risky decisions will pay off quite handsomely, a lot of them will end poorly, possibly enough to swamp the ones that paid off well. In the aggregate this could mean a lot of otherwise productive people working on unproductive projects, leaving less productive people doing the stable, productive work. That's why I don't think the government is the best tool to encourage or provide incentives for people to quit their jobs and work on startups. The government can't filter well enough to cause more of the good consequence and less of the bad.
  - cgopalan 16y ago
    The argument is not that the government should provide incentives for people to quit their jobs and work on startups. The way I see it, healthcare in its current state with its unreasonable costs, is a problem. Even if the average earner chooses to finance her healthcare herself, she will not able to sustain it. So this is a case of the government removing a roadblock so that the individual can weigh other factors to decide whether or not a job/startup/retirement is right for her.

cgopalan 16y ago

> (referring to healthcare) as a concept it enables failure and risk taking. I cannot agree enough. Sorry for the sidetrack, but I have always thought about the scenario where say a person who is still far away from standard retirement age (maybe by about 20 years till medicare kicks in) has, say, just enough saved up to carry her through the rest of her life. If she doesnt have a working spouse with healthcare, she is forced to take a job. Whereas if healthcare was provided regardless of a job, it frees her from the necessity to work as well as opens up the job to somebody who needs the income as well as the care.

jdminhbg 16y ago
Single-payer healthcare has some selling points, but allowing workers to finance others' early retirements is not one of them.
- cgopalan 16y ago
  The assumption is that the early-retiring worker has also paid in to the pool while accumulating the wealth.
jimmyk 16y ago
One consequence is that someone with specific life circumstances preventing her from leaving her job will now be able to do that to pursue something that might be better. Another consequence, and one that is unintended but virtually unpreventable for a government, is that someone with an idea he is less sure of and which is less likely to succeed will be pushed in the direction of quitting his job and pursuing his unproductive idea. My thought is that when a government does something like this, it pushes everyone further in the direction of risk, similar to when the US Government promised to back the banks in the case of impending failure. And like the banking situation, while it is possible that a lot of the risky decisions will pay off quite handsomely, a lot of them will end poorly, possibly enough to swamp the ones that paid off well. In the aggregate this could mean a lot of otherwise productive people working on unproductive projects, leaving less productive people doing the stable, productive work. That's why I don't think the government is the best tool to encourage or provide incentives for people to quit their jobs and work on startups. The government can't filter well enough to cause more of the good consequence and less of the bad.
- cgopalan 16y ago
  The argument is not that the government should provide incentives for people to quit their jobs and work on startups. The way I see it, healthcare in its current state with its unreasonable costs, is a problem. Even if the average earner chooses to finance her healthcare herself, she will not able to sustain it. So this is a case of the government removing a roadblock so that the individual can weigh other factors to decide whether or not a job/startup/retirement is right for her.