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

To: Road Walker who wrote (36480)	5/4/2014 4:44:00 PM
From: i-node	1 Recommendation Recommended By TimF Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 42652

>> Seat belts are good, non toxic building materials are good. Yes, but one cannot infer that all, or even most, regulation pertaining to these things are good. One might say, "We think all cars should have seat belts." But it is a different thing to say, "A person can be fined $200 for not wearing his/her seat belt." Because a person may not want to wear a seat belt. And it simply isn't the business of anyone else, no matter how helpful you may think you're being. My local representative (state of Arkansas) seriously proposed requiring umpires at Boys Club baseball games to have an annual eye exam. Everyone wants umpires to be able to see and wants games to be fair, but there are some regulations that benefit people yet we just shouldn't have them.

To: Road Walker who wrote (36480)	5/5/2014 12:36:16 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Seat belts are good, non toxic building materials are good. Not all regulations about either of those things are good. In any case your providing cherry picked examples. Rent control and price controls in general are not good (except maybe when regulating protected monopolies, and protecting monopolies is usually itself bad), requiring licenses for florists (and most of the rest of occupational licensing) isn't good, imprisoning someone because their lobsters were packaged in plastic and not in cardboard, and actions under the Lacey Act in general are not good. 3000 pages of new law (and tens of thousands of pages of regulation) imposing massive government control over health insurance isn't good, an estimated 1.75 trillion dollars in costs to comply with regulation in the US in general isn't good. Do you have data or are you shooting from the hip again? Do you have any data supporting your ideas? Showing that politicians and regulators are less corrupt? That the vote is a more efficient check on excess than markets? I'm being generous by saying they are as corrupt as other human activities, they are likely more. People desiring power over others are disproportionately drawn to positions in government. Also in government there is more opportunity to exercise and benefit from corruption (including totally legal corruption).