[warcher]

Somebody pays, or you die in the gutter.

Lotta people talk about charity as a replacement for government services, but folks give around 3% of their income to charity (tax deductible) in the US. That ain't gonna get it done. Not even close.

People would have you believe they would give more if they didn't pay as much in taxes, but there is not one shred of evidence that is the case based on variations in local tax rates. And that's a hell of a gap to bridge based on a such a dubious promise.

Occam's razor, and the available evidence, suggests that people would just pocket the difference and the poor can go to hell. They're happy to argue the point until they're blue in the face, but if the past year has taught us nothing at all, it's that people are more than capable of crafting any number of passionate arguments around their self-interest, truth be damned.

[krupan]

And so we should put government in control of health care. But who runs government? Oh, it's people, who you just argued are all hopelessly greedy and self-centered.

[warcher]

It's not as if we don't have experimental data on both the ability to run a government that is more or less functional with a bunch of self-interested actors in general, or the relative merits of the free market vs socialized healthcare in specific. We ran the numbers. It isn't working. The arguments around doubling down on the free market I find intellectually spurious, and the most convenient explanation from my perspective is the fact that we are thus far wealthy and powerful enough to afford the application of a one-size-fits-all ideology to avoid the emotional strain of admitting we were wrong all these years.