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

To: Road Walker who wrote (3754)	1/11/2008 2:43:12 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 42652

Yet you admitted that it works in many cases. If your talking about many thousands up to maybe trillions of things that could be called called cases (depending on whether your only counting the policies, or every time any of them has an impact on some person), than its not hard to find many cases where there is a good result. Generally government maintaining basic order, settling disputes, providing for defense of the country etc. has not been called socialism, so I'm not really even considering them. The traditional, and some might say fairly strict or limited, definition of socialism is government ownership of the means of production. Production would include services, so Government provided health care, or even government provided health insurance would be socialism by this definition, but technically government paying for private health insurance would not. Some definitions go beyond government ownership, and would call government paying for goods and services, "socialism". If you want to reject this definition than fine. Perhaps we can come up with some other term for it. If your ok with that definition than I don't have a problem with it either. But that your prejudice, without knowledge, is to assume it doesn't in any particular case. As I said we have a lot of knowledge. We don't have perfect knowledge, we never will have perfect knowledge. We probably do not have as much knowledge as we could have and eventually will have (which is just another way of saying that we will learn more as time goes on). Absent perfect knowledge its best not to make absolute and unalterable judgment. But it is reasonable to make a judgment based on the knowledge we do have, most of which doesn't suggest that increasing socialism will have a net positive effect.