Now, I said everybody has three jobs, and still can't afford healthcare, and people are dying in the streets....
Europe. I hear about only two weeks of "paid time off" a year, to include sick leave as well as holiday! Now that's slavery, in my book! I hear about only two or three days of sick leave allowed in a year. I hear about working weeks of 45 hours and more (mine is 37). I hear about people having to take two or even three jobs to keep themselves."
Granted, the lepers in the street bit was gratuitous
The same way you said freedom was having a gun so you could steal from your neighbours
The only guns (we are told) in the UK are owned by the government, and they do indeed steal from you. You don't see it as theft and you think you actually have a choice in the matter.
and everybody in the USA is richer than everybody in Britain.
Repeated lie.
Why do you feel the need to criticise the arrangements of other countries, in order to defend your own system?
The thread is about US legislation. I do not care about your choice of system except inasmuch as it's bandied about as a replacement for ours and the supposed merits that make is superior. It is that I am replying to.
I would not post in a thread about the choices the UK is making about their health care. It's none of my business.
Which is a lot different from your original assertion that relying on the NHS was in effect a guarantee of dying on a waiting list.
Don't you have any other rhetorical fallacies you can use? This one is getting tired. How about some nice tu quoque? Or ad populum?
No, the option is to choose to rely on the system paid for by your taxes
You are terribly confused. My taxes do not pay for
me. There is no health care program in the US budget to take care of
me. They would have to tax me more or borrow more to do
that. Given those options, I am not interested.
There's one thing I am certain of and that is that I can spend those resources better, more wisely, more efficiently, and to better result than a mountain of disinterested government bureaucrats guided by a mountain of legislation and regulations.
You seem to have a different sense of the efficacy of bureaucrats in the UK. I'm glad you have selfless genius saints. We don't.
Rhetoric about slavery and inevitable death from untreated cancer is a funny way of demonstrating your respect for diversity, I have to say.
How Orwellian. Apparently you think you know my thoughts and their meaning. You don't. Did I suggest you change anything? If you want to accuse me of anything valid it would be
I do not care about what your choices are. I am pleased you think you are free to make them.
I point out that taxes are a fair contribution to the running of a society from which the taxpayer benefits.
You have a choice? How is it a
contribution?
Moreover how is it
fair? The harder you work the more they take. That's what you think is fair? That merely protects the pre-existing monied families and interests from you ever reaching their level. But of course they own the government who makes the laws.
Jerome got his backside handed to him every time.
I am not familiar with him. I stayed away for a while. But if the job is so easy you are sadly lacking in this easy task.
And you do, at 30% or whatever it is? Like I said, we've established what you are, we're only haggling about the price.
Lol do you suppose I disagree?
I'm just 10% more free to chose. I wish it were more. If you think 40% is good then isn't 50% better? If the government nominally acting
for the people makes better use of resources
than the people, then what sense does it make for you to keep any of your money? Surely you, and everyone, would work much harder knowing the all benevolent government is generating prosperity for all, and
fairly to boot!
Thus, you are forced, or obliged if you like, to make some arrangement for that.
Actually technically and philosophically, no I am not forced. I have insurance but thus far I have had very little cause to use health care. The insurance companies have made quite a bit of money on me. Had I chosen to save instead I would unlikely have ever in my life used all those resources. Of course I can't get them back now so I am behooved to retain insurance at this age.
Are you sure that doesn't make you a slave, in any possible sense of the word?
In any possible sense? Yes.
But not that sense.
If I don't labor I have no call to steal bread from others. If I don't provide for my health care I have no call to steal from others for that. If I don't provide for myself I have no call to invade and occupy my neighbors house. These moral facts do not make me a slave. They, in part, make me a person.
I came into this in response to a series of posts that described the British system as "socialism", slavery, and implied that anyone in the country who developed cancer could look forward to nothing but dying on a waiting list.
Seriously you need to branch out into another fallacy. I never said those things. I referenced cancer survival statistics. I said more of you die from cancer than us. That's that. You set up the false dichotomy (oh, there.. sorry you did branch out into other fallacies I stand corrected) about
our choices so I flipped it.
IOW if you stop making hysterical claims about the US system, which you
clearly have no clue, I'll stop flipping them about and showing how absurd they are.
Why do you have such a need to criticise arrangements in another country when trying to defend your own?
I don't. These are presented as solutions. I point out they are not good ones. I don't care about your choices.
I like the quality of our health care. I would like to address the price.
You said that Americans are, individually, all richer than British people.
Your lies are boring.
Of course it's coming, largely, from the other customers whose needs just happen to be less than they paid in.
In point of fact you are wrong. I have used very little health care.
I don't pay my insurance company for anything else than covering my care if I need it. How they do it is uninteresting to me as a consumer. If they screw up and become unprofitable they are
in turn insured.
I just wonder if the USA as a whole would be comfortable with its medical profession being on the same sort of level.
In general all Americans are going to have to or else keep mounting debt. I am absolutely opposed to trade barriers that keep wages high but send jobs and production fleeing.
In specific, yes the AMA monopoly on provider supply needs to be broken.
When you persist in declaring that I, as a Brit, am so poor and so enslaved
More lies. I didn't declare once nor did I persist in declaring.
And I know it's usually the very rich ones that come out with this guff about slavery and "fruits of my labour" and "taking at the point of a gun".
Well I'm not very rich. It's the rich ones who like you to think government is the answer to all your problems, because they own government.
Do you ever wonder how the larger the government is the more extreme income disparity is? Do you suppose it's coincidental?
You seem to think I should prefer to be the sort of American who works 18 hours a day for the minimum wage
Don't quit your day job for a career as a mind reader. I don't think you should prefer anything. Your preferences are your concern.
Just don't go round claiming superpowers like FRRREEEEEEEEEDOMMMMMM!!!!!,
Umm yeah.
Superpowers, the US no exception, nor governments in general, have shown little interest in freedom.
Americans tend to like it. We haven't had much luck in getting our government to act in that cause, and especially in foreign policy matters. It does what it does despite that most Americans want us out of foreign entanglements, and to stop spending our progeny into debt.
Your assumptions about me are as accurate as your rhetoric is angry and incoherent.
Rejected, see your post 187.
You would do well to read that post as well. I never defined freedom. Period. I'm not interested in debates over definition.
Brits are no less economically free than Merickans even according to the measurements touted by American conservative policy think-tanks.
And as I stated while I find their data interesting I think there are more interesting metrics. For me they are spending and tax burden for the reasons stated previously. I like them both lower than they are.
And just to help you out. Did I define freedom there? Even economic freedom? Will you continue to assert that I am
defining freedom as lower taxes?
Of course you will.
