Single Payer is they will give us in end
- Thread starter wildchild
- Start date
You have touched on some important issues. I like the tenor of your conversation in this post it ovoids the "but your the one" approach to discussion and gets down to base problems that underlie. This is the way to make progress, IMO. Have you read Thomas Piketty's "Capitol in the Twenty First Century" ? It will eventually, of course, if politics doesn't intervene, gain him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Whether you've read it or not, here is a link to the most readable and thoroughly correct, IMO, review, which I've come across; please read. And then, if you haven't yet read the book, please read that too. It should be a part of all of our 21st Century educations. (And don't pay any attention to the opinion of those who quite obviously haven't read the book.) Still two other books that should be on the required reading list are "Zombie Economics," by the Australian economist John Quiggin, and "The Social Conquest of Earth," by the Octogenarian, Harvard ant expert E. O. Wilson. It is not about ants; it is about us! Three cheers, if you have already read any of these three books.
Now what does this have to do with U.S. medical care? Much more than it would seem!
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/28/thomas-piketty-capital-surprise-bestseller
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Yes, I know the routine. They want to start in the 21st century after it has all been made. Marx wanted to start in the 19th century. See the difference? Whatever did happen to that revolution? I haven't hear much about it lately, but you know fashion. That's why I never throw away an old tie. They always come back in fashion.
That is the point I was trying to make. It is not just democrats. Plenty of republicans were on board with this idea too.
There is nothing Marxist about Piketty, if that is what you are trying to say? You'll hear people say he is a Marxist, but obviously they haven't read both Capital in the 21st Century and Marx. It's likely they have never read either. If they had, they wouldn't make that mistake. Have you read Marx? Brilliant mind, but some of his key premises have turned out to be critically wrong. To understand Marx it helps a great deal to picture the mid nineteenth century context in which he found himself and which had such an obvious influence on his world view. Similarly, economic philosophy today is being profoundly influenced by globalization. One of Marx's many truths however, one that has stood the test of time, and one that is very evident today, is that capital drives out labor! This truth is central to the permanent loss of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. and the consequent increase in productivity. And Marx foresaw it. Brilliant! Though in his time I doubt he could have imagined the extent to which his dictum would one day be true.
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How does capital drive out labor?
What he meant by that, and this is truly insightful considering that it was mid 19th Century when he wrote that, is that if labor costs rise, those with capital will use their capital to buy machines that will replace labor; thus the cost of labor will be held in check. The affect on labor of course is to hold down wages! Today it is robotics!!! Marx was truly brilliant, but he didn't foresee that human nature would make it impossible for communism to succeed beyond the family or tribe level.
Malcolm Muggeridge , the British journalist, satirist, self-styled philosopher and Christian convert, said one time that all of human endeavor can be laid to vanity, greed, and instinct. We Homo sapiens don't want to acknowledge this unattractive feature of our species -- because of our vanity, I suppose. We like to think of ourselves as being on a higher plain than the other animals, and not merely as one of the many species that inhabit the Earth.
One of my favorite Muggeridge-isms is "Only dead fish swim with the stream."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Muggeridge
