Pointedstick wrote:
moda0306 wrote:
Well I hope your book has evidence that Medicare makes healthcare more expensive, and that the services such as SS, snap benefits, etc are of "terrible quality" compared to what the market would/does provide.
This is stuff conservatives say all the time but I see no real evidence of it. SS is a lot more reliable than most annuity salesmen out there, for example.
Most of this is because of informational asymmetry.
…which is true of every industry and every person. Information asymmetry is a BS excuse for government programs, IMHO, because, as usual, is assumes that the present condition will continue forever and therefore makes this true by eliminating everyone's incentive to improve. If there's informational asymmetry in the retirement product market, SS is basically giving up on the possibility of people ever being smarter and more informed about the options for their financial futures and better, more comprehensible products to exist, thereby reducing the reasons for it these things to happen.
moda0306 wrote:
Lastly, propaganda is pushed by schooling in general... by no means is this limited to public schooling.
Sure. But I hope you'll agree with me that some forms of propaganda are more damaging than others. Being taught to believe that mass murder can be a good thing is probably a worse form of propaganda than being brainwashed into buying new clothes, no?
moda0306 wrote:
And further, how can one "buy votes?" I am offered nothing for voting. It costs me money, as does it most others. For that money, I get a 1-in-several-million chance at affecting an election to my benefit. It seems that's a nasty value proposition.
You're looking at it too rationally. Most people don't think this way. They're who I'm talking about.
So poor liberals are too stupid to realize their votes are being bought, but wealthy conservatives/libertarians are voting their true conscience?
Maybe our opinions on "what is right" is simply colored by our socioeconomic position, and both rich and poor alike tend to vote in alignment with their best interest, with reasonable understanding that their voting is mostly on principle.
Regarding different forms of propaganda, I'd agree that the extremes you mention are an example of one propaganda being much worse than another. I'm not sure I ever heard mass-murder being advocated for in the public school I went to, though. War was obviously discussed, if that's what you mean, but I'd be surprised if all the private schools and home-schooled kids out there, but for a few examples, are teaching that all U.S. involvements in war have been essentially "mass murder."
Informational asymmetry makes economic transactions more difficult in varying degrees. Especially when it comes to the risk of something uncertain happening (the business owner KNOWS he needs to hire an engineer to work daily on the assembly line, even though it's too complex for him to understand... it's more difficult for him to engage private healthcare with any degree of being able to measure cost/benefit). Me picking my favorite flavor of ice cream is VERY different than someone picking their favorite insurance policy (filled with hundreds (if not thousands) of different procedures that may-or-may-not be covered)), or someone who just had a stroke picking which surgical procedure he'd like from Med-Ebay.com.
I'm not saying that any time someone is confused by something the government should step in, but the worse it is the more it's going to look like an area that the market is failing to use the profit motive to generate superior service, because the profit motive is too busy motivating the more educated party to trick the other... and maybe government will be able to improve the overall situation for most people.
But of course, any intrusion in medicine is to turn the poor into dependent lemmings and the uber-rich into... even richer... somehow.
"Men did not make the earth. It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds."
- Thomas Paine