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I agree with the shared responsibilities, but you make it sound as if you are voluntarily subsidizing other peoples' children when in fact you are forced to. If

I agree with the shared responsibilities, but you make it sound as if you are voluntarily subsidizing other peoples' children when in fact you are forced to. If you would contribute to the education and the health costs of others, why do you need to be forced to do it? And if people agree with you, they will do so without a gang of people coercing them to. So cut out the middleman. > Similarly a society that has free, universal healthcare is better than one that doesn't. That's a pretty broad, unsubstantiated statement. And how is it free? Nothing is free; that's just propaganda.

yequalsx 13y ago
We all know that nothing, ultimately is free. However, the colloquial usage of the term means free means that the person receiving a free service means they don't fork over money specifically for that service. Free healthcare means, in essence, a person receiving it is not in danger of going bankrupt or of having significantly less money as a result of the care. I did not make it seem like I pay for k-12 education voluntarily. the opposite is true. It was an essential part of my point that it isn't done voluntarily. It should be forced because some greedy self-centered person will refuse to pay for it. It's called the free rider problem. Societies that don't have free, universal healthcare overwhelmingly have worse health outcomes, and are crappier places to live.
- ahallock 13y ago
  I find it funny that the person using force is calling the other people greedy and self-centered. You are being self-centered by acting like your ideas and needs trump everyone else's to the point of being mandatory. I'm sorry, they don't. If your ideas are good, you will get support. You can put down the guns. If you have kids and think that education is important (I agree), then work for it and get support from those around you. I know it's not easy as pointing guns at people via the State, but I don't think k-12 education is a hard sell.
  - showerst 13y ago
    The problem is, at some point it becomes the _individual's_ best interest not to pay for education, but it's in _everyone's_ best interest to have more education. This is a classic collective action/free rider problem. So you if your ideas are good, you get support from your neighbors, and you get your idea moving, so the benefits start to accrue. Then the situation changes so that education 'exists' whether you individually pay for it or not, so you need to put in some penalty for not-paying otherwise the system falls apart when people start acting in their best interests... and next thing you know you've ended up with governance.
showerst 13y ago
In most political philosophies, one of the main purposes of government is to tackle collective action/free rider problems. You're forced to subsidize everyone's education because although it's rational to subsidize it up to a point, if you can continue to accrue the benefits without paying, then why do so? So everyone benefits from better education, but after a certain point any individual is better off not paying into it, which breaks the system if you lack consequences. This is even more of an issue for healthcare than education, since people have wildly differing costs, and the mix of things you can control (healthy living) and things you can't (genetics) make it clash with lots of Americans' underlying political ideals. In stark economic theory, health care would be very simple if we just let people who couldn't afford it die, because then nobody would bear the costs of catastrophic care. We as a society (thankfully!) don't do that, so we end up paying for it anyway when a poor person goes into the ER. Given the baseline that you don't let people die who can be saved, it's a short jump to a collective action problem, especially given the wildly varying income inequality and the fact that health care is demand inelastic and price insensitive (you'll pay any amount of money to not die, and for the foreseeable future people will always get sick/injured). I'd argue that it's better to internalize those costs - Insured people are cheaper overall, so everyone gets insurance and it gets subsidized by everyone, with transparent-ish rates, than externalize them (the hospital has to cover the un-negotiated costs of a poor cancer patient, so tylenol is now $17/pill) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem

yequalsx 13y ago

We all know that nothing, ultimately is free. However, the colloquial usage of the term means free means that the person receiving a free service means they don't fork over money specifically for that service. Free healthcare means, in essence, a person receiving it is not in danger of going bankrupt or of having significantly less money as a result of the care. I did not make it seem like I pay for k-12 education voluntarily. the opposite is true. It was an essential part of my point that it isn't done voluntarily. It should be forced because some greedy self-centered person will refuse to pay for it. It's called the free rider problem. Societies that don't have free, universal healthcare overwhelmingly have worse health outcomes, and are crappier places to live.

ahallock 13y ago
I find it funny that the person using force is calling the other people greedy and self-centered. You are being self-centered by acting like your ideas and needs trump everyone else's to the point of being mandatory. I'm sorry, they don't. If your ideas are good, you will get support. You can put down the guns. If you have kids and think that education is important (I agree), then work for it and get support from those around you. I know it's not easy as pointing guns at people via the State, but I don't think k-12 education is a hard sell.
- showerst 13y ago
  The problem is, at some point it becomes the _individual's_ best interest not to pay for education, but it's in _everyone's_ best interest to have more education. This is a classic collective action/free rider problem. So you if your ideas are good, you get support from your neighbors, and you get your idea moving, so the benefits start to accrue. Then the situation changes so that education 'exists' whether you individually pay for it or not, so you need to put in some penalty for not-paying otherwise the system falls apart when people start acting in their best interests... and next thing you know you've ended up with governance.

showerst 13y ago

In most political philosophies, one of the main purposes of government is to tackle collective action/free rider problems. You're forced to subsidize everyone's education because although it's rational to subsidize it up to a point, if you can continue to accrue the benefits without paying, then why do so? So everyone benefits from better education, but after a certain point any individual is better off not paying into it, which breaks the system if you lack consequences. This is even more of an issue for healthcare than education, since people have wildly differing costs, and the mix of things you can control (healthy living) and things you can't (genetics) make it clash with lots of Americans' underlying political ideals. In stark economic theory, health care would be very simple if we just let people who couldn't afford it die, because then nobody would bear the costs of catastrophic care. We as a society (thankfully!) don't do that, so we end up paying for it anyway when a poor person goes into the ER. Given the baseline that you don't let people die who can be saved, it's a short jump to a collective action problem, especially given the wildly varying income inequality and the fact that health care is demand inelastic and price insensitive (you'll pay any amount of money to not die, and for the foreseeable future people will always get sick/injured). I'd argue that it's better to internalize those costs - Insured people are cheaper overall, so everyone gets insurance and it gets subsidized by everyone, with transparent-ish rates, than externalize them (the hospital has to cover the un-negotiated costs of a poor cancer patient, so tylenol is now $17/pill) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem