And the winner of tonight's Republican debate...

ransom wrote:

racerdave600 wrote: If they deem racing is to much of a financial risk to the system, they can outlaw it with a stroke of the pen, never having a vote in congress.

Private insurers certainly don't need an act of congress to exclude racing. I think we're more likely to run into the total refusal of private companies to cover racing (save possibly with prohibitive rates) than to have the government ban a popular pastime which supports a not-insignificant industry.

The reason Rally America exists is because SCCA couldn't afford to buy rally insurance after Lovell and Freedman died at Oregon Trail. I don't know how Rally America does it..

fast_eddie_72 wrote:

tuna55 wrote:

fast_eddie_72 wrote: But what about health care? I happen to think some level of reasonable health care is a right.

Eddie, this point I disagree with, but this is really the crux. We have a decision to make as a country, and it is exactly this. Not black and white: Is health care a right, but "to what point is health care a right"?

I don't think you disagreed with me. We just kind of said it differently. I said "some level of reasonable health care" and you said "to what degree is health care a right?" What we both said is it's not reasonable to leave a dying American citizen lying in the street to die, and it's not responsable to provide cutting edge medical technology to everyone in every case. The aswer is somewhere in the middle. Point being, I can't remember hearing a lot of politicians say that. Seems it's always laid out as a one end or the other deal. But what we got is somewhere in the middle, even if one side is trying real hard to make it sound like something else.

Good point. We ended up at nearly the same point. I guess I would just be happier if what exactly those rights consisted of were written down as an amendment. This required a supermajority and therefore nearly ensures that nothing slips through the cracks.

Regarding your other point about Paul and Kucinich, I believe that Paul was asked during some debate in 2008 who his running mate would be if he had to pick from an existing candidate, and he said Kucinich. Awesome...

friedgreencorrado wrote: The reason Rally America exists is because SCCA couldn't afford to buy rally insurance after Lovell and Freedman died at Oregon Trail. I don't know how Rally America does it..

While that is part of it, there was a whoooooooooooole lot o' hurtin' going on before that happened. Think of that as a nail in the coffin...

fast_eddie_72 wrote:

Osterkraut wrote:

fast_eddie_72 wrote: I understand positions like Rand Paul's. He feels that if people don't want to serve blacks, they should be free to do so. It's a free country and that's how it is. I don't agree. I think we should have freedom for everyone.

Making you read this ridiculous statement one more time.

Not sure what you're saying.

Freedom for everyone! Except you, person who wishes to exclude others from his privately owned business. You have less freedom.

Osterkraut wrote:

fast_eddie_72 wrote:

Osterkraut wrote:

fast_eddie_72 wrote: I understand positions like Rand Paul's. He feels that if people don't want to serve blacks, they should be free to do so. It's a free country and that's how it is. I don't agree. I think we should have freedom for everyone.

Making you read this ridiculous statement one more time.

Not sure what you're saying.

Freedom for everyone! Except you, person who wishes to exclude others from his privately owned business. You have less freedom.

I think you missed my point...

fast_eddie_72 wrote:

Osterkraut wrote:

fast_eddie_72 wrote:

Osterkraut wrote:

fast_eddie_72 wrote: I understand positions like Rand Paul's. He feels that if people don't want to serve blacks, they should be free to do so. It's a free country and that's how it is. I don't agree. I think we should have freedom for everyone.

Making you read this ridiculous statement one more time.

Not sure what you're saying.

Freedom for everyone! Except you, person who wishes to exclude others from his privately owned business. You have less freedom.

I think you missed my point...

Negative. You said "freedom for everyone" then commenced to limit freedoms. Of course, one could go all Hobbes and argue that submitting to a government takes a way a man's freedom no matter what, but that's very 1600s.

Okay. You got me. Yes, I want to limit the freedom of people who want to exercise their right to limit freedom for others. I would limit the freedom of the guy who wants to take my car stereo while I'm sleeping. I would limit the freedom of the guy who wants to grab women off the street and rape them.

Guess that makes me a real left wing crazy, all that state control of what you can do.

fast_eddie_72 wrote: Okay. You got me. Yes, I want to limit the freedom of people who want to exercise their right to limit freedom for others. I would limit the freedom of the guy who wants to take my car stereo while I'm sleeping. I would limit the freedom of the guy who wants to grab women off the street and rape them. Guess that makes me a real left wing crazy, all that state control of what you can do.

Let's defend our stance by swinging to extremes! It's fun and requires no thought! Hitler just wanted freedom from the Jews!

page 12 before "hitler?"

fast_eddie_72 wrote: I don't think you disagreed with me. We just kind of said it differently. I said "some level of reasonable health care" and you said "to what degree is health care a right?" What we both said is it's not reasonable to leave a dying American citizen lying in the street to die, and it's not responsable to provide cutting edge medical technology to everyone in every case. The aswer is somewhere in the middle. Point being, I can't remember hearing a lot of politicians say that. Seems it's always laid out as a one end or the other deal. But what we got is somewhere in the middle, even if one side is trying real hard to make it sound like something else.

The point I'm trying to make, is regardless of if there is a proividing of government service, I am opposed to any sense of defining health care as a right.

At its core, you have to take the life/labor and property of another person to give it to another.

Regardless of if I can accept the government providing some type of health care, I am not going to acknowledge any attempt to define health care as a right. There's simply too many unresolvable ethical problems for me, from having to confiscate someone else's labor (the doctor), property (the medical supplies), or both (tax revenue paid by others)... and too many variables involved with being responsible for people's behavior as individuals negatively compromising their own health (smoking, drinking, driving without a seatbelt, tanning beds, etc...)

Unfortunately, defining health care as a right is the the straight-away destination people want to run to. If someone would abandon that ideology, I would personally be more open to simply saying "I want some type of social care system to exist."

People might scoff at me saying that as it being unrealistic, but think about it as it is today. Think about what it says on your Social Security statements. Paying into the system is no guarantee of receiving benefits, you have no rights, and congress at any time may revoke payments made by Social Security Administration. And before the New Deal passed, Social Security was operating at a surplus and was socking away money for savings. Its possible, if you don't mess with what is actually working, for such systems to be acceptable even if in principal I'm not too wild about it. But having it work, and redifining a 'right' are mistakenly being tied together in this case, thus the discussion gets muddled.

Osterkraut wrote: Let's defend our stance by swinging to extremes! It's fun and requires no thought! Hitler just wanted freedom from the Jews!

Ooooh k. I explained my position in pretty good detail. You're trying to pick at something just to have something to fight about. I believe on the internet they call that "trolling".

Have a nice day.

madmallard wrote: There's simply too many unresolvable ethical problems for me, from having to confiscate someone else's labor (the doctor), property (the medical supplies), or both (tax revenue paid by others)... and too many variables involved with being responsible for people's behavior as individuals negatively compromising their own health (smoking, drinking, driving without a seatbelt, tanning beds, etc...)

Okay, I'm trying to follow you, but you'll have to help me. Why does health care confiscate someone else's labor or property any more than any other service provided by the government? And how is it confiscation if they are paid? I can follow you on the tax thing. You don't like the idea of taxing someone to provide a service to someone else. But again, why is health care any different than anything else the government provides with tax funds?

Because not too many people are trying to define all the other government services as rights.

And for the last 30 years, the debate has been escalating as a means to justify increasing these services by defining them as a 'right'.

It bothers me because its not a right, and it also bothers me because there are other intelligent and empassioned ways to plead the case for such things other than trying to call it a right.

(But you are getting the picture right that I don't view it any differently than other social services, as far as the cost to provide it. Tax is confiscation of wealth of the governed.)

madmallard wrote: page 12 before "hitler?"

Intentionally invoking Godwin's Law is actually an exception to Godwin's Law.

fast_eddie_72 wrote:

Osterkraut wrote: Let's defend our stance by swinging to extremes! It's fun and requires no thought! Hitler just wanted freedom from the Jews!

Ooooh k. I explained my position in pretty good detail. You're trying to pick at something just to have something to fight about. I believe on the internet they call that "trolling". Have a nice day.

I'd say jumping from exclusion from private property to rape is trolling, but you could have just poorly explained your position. I believe on the internet they call that "failing."

I had a great day.

Haven't been reading this thread, so my apologies if this was already posted

This presidential campaign brought to you by...

With each election, presidential campaigns are run more and more like ad campaigns—sporting branding, taglines, and flashy marketing. We at BuzzFeed got to joking around about which brands should sponsor each 2012 Presidential candidate and what their ads might look like. And then this happened…

As far as the conscription debate goes, with very limited, very few exceptions, none of the other actual rights require someone to provide a service - Eddy, it would indeed be a very new thing.

Health care does not "require someone to provide a service". Say we have socialized medicine, which, we don't, so this is all moot anyway. But say we did. I'm a smart kid and I see that government paid doctors make a good living. I decide to be a doctor and I get paid for my service. If I don't want to be a doctor, I can be a teacher (and be paid by the government to provide a service) or a police office (and be paid by the government to provide a service) or I can go work at McDonalds and not be paid by the government at all. I'm sorry guys, I don't see it at all.

fast_eddie_72 wrote: Health care does not "require someone to provide a service". Say we have socialized medicine, which, we don't, so this is all moot anyway. But say we did. I'm a smart kid and I see that government paid doctors make a good living. I decide to be a doctor and I get paid for my service. If I don't want to be a doctor, I can be a teacher (and be paid by the government to provide a service) or a police office (and be paid by the government to provide a service) or I can go work at McDonalds and not be paid by the government at all. I'm sorry guys, I don't see it at all.

I've had like 3 hours of sleep, so I can't explain it much better than that. It is different. think about it some more, you're a smart guy, single payer health care can turn into conscription.

and that slipperly slope to make it that way comes along with taking it a step beyond just offering social medicine and classifying it as a 'right.'

ransom wrote:

racerdave600 wrote: If they deem racing is to much of a financial risk to the system, they can outlaw it with a stroke of the pen, never having a vote in congress.

Private insurers certainly don't need an act of congress to exclude racing. I think we're more likely to run into the total refusal of private companies to cover racing (save possibly with prohibitive rates) than to have the government ban a popular pastime which supports a not-insignificant industry.

The only thing a private insurance company can do is drop you. If health care were run by the government, they could ban the activity all together if they deem it to be contrary to the public good, or if it were deemed to add to much cost to the public to cover you in an activity. People are willing to give so much control over their lives to the government without exploring the long term consequences.

In reply to racerdave600:

There are limits to what the government will want to do if it's going to be sufficiently unpopular. Hence my observations about the activity's popularity and the fiscal impact of its associated industry.

If insurance companies universally decide not to cover racing at a viable cost, there is no recourse. You can't vote them out. You could start your own company.

If it is genuinely impossible to cover racers without a net financial loss, then we must either ask a larger portion of society to bear some of the cost of putting us back together in exchange for the amusement we provide, or accept that racing is fun, but that you must be prepared to face the reality that a broken leg suffered while racing may not only end your racing pursuits, but bankrupt you completely.

As an aside, after twelve pages of fairly reasoned discussions of pros and cons, I'm puzzled that you repeatedly lump together everybody who has drawn a different conclusion from yours as [paraphrasing] "people who are willing to give the government control because they haven't considered the consequences." I think it's pretty clear that people on all sides of this have given it a fair amount of thought.

ransom,

I wan't trying to sound as bad as that came across. I suppose it is because the industry I find myself in has a variety of unreasonable laws and regulations thrown at it at will without much forethought or any repercussions. None of it gets repealed when offices change, and it is almost impossible to to work through the process to get anything accomplished. You simply cannot imagine the frustrations and money involved. (I should add that we got into this at the request of the government)

Our small company spends millions getting things approved for sale simply because our industry is controlled by the government, and one small change can take years for reapproval. One of our employees used to be with the controlling organization, and basically, according to him, one of the reasons for the delays is that no one wants to make a decision out of fear. A fear from changing administrations and a fear for their jobs. Mandates from the various administrations seem to never be questioned.

To make matters worse, we deal with numerous countries throughout the world, and believe it or not, ours is better than most. The problem is, I see ours heading towards those countries, not the other way around. Also, most of those countries didn't start out with that restrictive of a government either. They evolved over time to the point.

I used racing as an example because we all understand it. I grant you it is an unlikely scenario, but small things like limits placed on the amount of cookies, beer or ice cream could occur, as well as heavy usage taxation or penalties for overweight, etc..

Once you give any agency the kind of power it would take to control health care, they could simply madate a law regardless. And, and this is a big and, it would not matter who is in power because it would opperate independantly of the elected administration. You could not vote it out. It would take a defunding of congress, or a fundamental change in the agency. Defunding is not easy as it takes a passing vote from the house, senate and a signature from the president, rendering the entire agency useless. So it would not matter at all at that point who is elected and who is not. We won't be able to elect someone to control what the health agency deems responsible eating or health habits.

I suppose it is bacause I have viewed first hand the way some of these agencies work that I am so sceptical. I see how they put some of the most inept people in power, how they go against anything even remotely involving common sense, and how they work against the best interest of the entities they are supposed to be serving. I see the corruption, the special interests, and the money involved. And those are the good points.

So while I agree that insurance companies are far from perfect, I view the government as the worst possible scenario. Corruption and waste for everyone is their mission statement.

That is another key point I fail to see being addressed.

I don't run into too many arguements that government is inefficient, bloated, and generally wasteful.

But nobody seems to want to answer my question of "why don't we fix the government some more before we give it more powers?"

I suspect most of the "fixing" that would be done in government would be some of the oppressive oversight and regulation. So, you could also ask:

Why don't we fix companies so that we don't have to make all these stupid laws to keep them from doing stupid things.

It is a rather circular problem.

I certainly don't see it as circular, they are 2 largely different problems.

We don't all own a business, or are forced to consume a product (until Obama sign the law anyway), but we are all governed.