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

To: gg cox who wrote (4957)	2/25/2008 8:52:40 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

GG, I don't know if it's smart, even if accurate, to expand the concept of the commons that way. With the commons you risk the tragedy of the commons. It seems to me that taking something that is private, aggregating and massaging it, and calling the output part of the commons is asking for trouble. There are enough problems without purposely asking for more. Re the definition, the Wiki piece mentioned money as arguable. I don't think you can hang your hat on that for establishing legitimacy.

To: gg cox who wrote (4957)	2/26/2008 12:22:30 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Redefining "the commons" to mean anything provided to the community as a whole, sort of makes it lose its original meaning, that would be fine if there was another word to cover that meaning but I can't think of any good ones. Changing around the terms like that without a real good reason, and without having a good replacement for the initial meaning just causes confusion. Also (perhaps more importantly) it doesn't really effect the argument. If its "the commons" by a new definition, that doesn't mean it has the important relevant characteristics of "the commons" by the old definition. All its means is your saying that the government pays for everyone to have access. Well we already know that so even if we use your definition of "the commons" calling it that doesn't give us any additional useful information. You sued the term commons in the following argument "So have a tax system that is fair, because it is the tax payers of a country that pay for all the ""commons," like it or not." Replace "commons" in that argument with your definition for the commons and the argument is close to circular. It becomes something like "So have a tax system that is fair, because it is the tax payers of a country that pay for all the programs that everyone can used which are paid for through the governments tax revenue"