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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (2701)	11/3/2007 9:39:29 PM
From: Mary Cluney	Respond to of 42652

<<<There's little constructive discussion on this topic, just dueling hype>>> This dueling hype can go on forever. A Libertarian can blithely argue that all problems would be solved by private charity, by people of goodwill, or if government would just get out of the way. It's a common tactic: If there's a problem, our first question is not, "How can government solve this problem," but "What government program must be eliminated to improve this situation?" Since there's no Libertopia, they never have to admit being in error and to what will happen under their proposed regime. That's a great debating advantage. "Any political philosophy has its nuts. Libertarianism no worse than any other in this regard" I disagree. I think it is. Any sort of ordered approach to thinking forms a kind of philosophical framework, and hence may be termed an "-ism" of some sort. But I don't see them all as equivalent, and I doubt many people do either. Is Feminism as bad for rational thought as Fascism? Every ideology has weaknesses and blind spots, but the specific manifestation of Libertarianism is to make its followers completely unable to deal with any sort of analysis of power other than the most basic sort of government action. Thus, not only do they develop a mental block against the actual functioning of huge portions of our society, but this block then often turns into raving denial when anyone else says something outside their blinders. It is often said "anything taken to excess is harmful", but this is unnecessarily crude. In medical substance information, there's the concept of lethal dose, average dose, and most importantly ratio of lethal amount to useful amount. For this last, I think a workable analog is a kind of "stupidity/utility" ratio, and informally, Libertarianism is just off the chart in terms of what is commonly seen among educated people. "Libertarians don't worship business. For example they criticize subsidies or tariffs all the time" This very frequent objection shows that reader usually hasn't understood the point at all. Liberty and individual freedom is held to be embodied in the ideal conduct of business, much like "building character" is said to be embodied via sports. This doesn't prevent criticism of any particular player as violating the rules of the game. But it does impose a mental block against seeing the whole system in a manner any way unfavorable, of examining negative effects from an institutional viewpoint. They're like fanatical sports fans who worship a game in the abstract but also particular athletes for being dirty bums. It's a case of being fans of the concept, not any particular individual. This is also something I go over a lot, but symptomatically, it doesn't get across And finally: "You're a Communist"