And I thought the Republican Party was dead and gone.

[rareboy]

No where in the Constitution does it say citizens can be forced to purchase something. The U.S. Constitution doesn't mix well with your Socialist agenda.

So will car insurance be next?

Why should anyone be forced to carry insurance.

But they are.

By the state.

You lose.

 

[jackoroe]

Yes, I must have an inadequate understanding of the constitution, me and every court that ever ruled on the right of the government to enact statutes not specifically enumerated in the constitution.

Let's try and stay on point, here OK? I've provided you with the language of the Constitution that very clearly prohibits the Federal government from doing things not specifically enumerated within the document. That is a fact that is not in dispute.

I've provided you with the Federal government's requirement that I purchase health care insurance, simply to remain a citizen in good standing.

Now, given the prohibition of activities by the Federal government, not specifically allowed for within the founding document, either you find a passage allowing them to require me to purchase health care coverage, or admit it isn't within the parameters of the Constitution and it must, on it's face, be Un-Constitutional.

 

[jackoroe]

So will car insurance be next?

Why should anyone be forced to carry insurance.

But they are.

By the state.

You lose.

States can require you to carry insurance. In fact Massachusetts requires you to have health care insurance. The Federal Government is not permitted to do so, by the Constitution. I'm afraid your mistaken on this point.

 

[laikaNYC]

So will car insurance be next?

Why should anyone be forced to carry insurance.

But they are.

By the state.

You lose.

This shows how little you know. No one is forced to buy car insurance. Not driving is an option.

You lose.

 

[rareboy]

This shows how little you know. No one is forced to buy car insurance. Not driving is an option.

You lose.

You want to drive.

You can be made to purchase a product by the state.

You lose.

But hey.

We've got great coverage up here in Canada along with better outcomes and lower costs.

You keep doing it your way.

 

[laikaNYC]

Not the same thing. With car insurance you have the choice not to drive. With Obamacare, you don't have the choice. Is it really that difficult to comprehend?

 

[rareboy]

No.

We've been down this road before.

Health care is simply not optional in all cases. This is a concept that many slow thinkers on the extreme right of this just don't grasp. Particularly the ones that already have the taxpayer picking up their insurance premiums.

Emergency care and pediatric care are not a luxury. The patients do not have the choice, nor do those who are there caregivers.

Why do the insured citizens of a country have to bear the costs of the uninsured?

This is what led the states to impose the obligation of being insured to drive a car.

So if the feds can't do it in the only western country without universal care, then maybe the states should impose the requirement.

It is almost as though there should be a short bus for those who just can't grasp the concept.

 

[JasunStrikesBack]

It is almost as though there should be a short bus for those who just can't grasp the concept.

There is...

 

[Kulindahr]

What a load of delusional crap.

If America never had a socialist agenda we'd have no

• 
  [*]roads
  [*]schools
  [*]libraries
  [*]food safety
  [*]water safety
  [*]mail
  [*]public parks
  [*]police
  [*]national security
  [*]GPS
  [*]weather reports
• insurance (an inherently socialist concept)

And conservatives don't tell me those aren't things you use or have almost every day.

The item in blue isn't socialist.

Those in purple don't need the government to be accomplished; they have been, and can be, done by the private sector.

The ones in green could easily be done by the private sector; they just don't happen to be because government doesn't let go of anything once it has it. There have been private ventures in mail delivery, and their only problem was that they were up against a monopoly. UPS and others have avoided the monopoly's massive foot and are doing quite well.

The ones in brown probably have to be legitimate government functions; Freidman might have ventured an argument for doing them privately, but unless you want competing water companies trenching and putting in new lines all the time, I don't see much of a way to introduce competition... unless government digs and provides monster access tunnels and charges for their use, so citizens don't have to put up with constant rearrangement of land.

In red -- could be done privately. Our society was more mature in terms of social responsibility two hundred years ago, though; we're farther from being ready for this than they were -- and in fact, the government has firmly stamped down the different sproutings of beginnings at private police.

In what looks to me like lavender but the site calls magenta is an interesting case. It's the sort of thing that arguably took government to do, but that's not at all certain; the situation was entirely muddled by an array of monopolies... which under the Constitution are not legitimate, and the government ought to stop doing. But, once built, I can see no real reason the system needs to be in government hands. The real problem with it in terms of the free market is that there's no way to get payment from users, because it isn't necessary to have any codes for access.

That leaves insurance, and there's nothing "inherently socialist" about -- unless you want to call a game of pick-up baseball "inherently socialist", or a neighborhood poker game. All three are matters of people deciding to function together in a cooperative way, the difference being that in one there's no payment required to the organizer, in another the organizer may dip in for funds to provide 'side benefits' to all (and keep the change), and in the third the organizer generally (not always) states up front he's out to (not always) benefit. There's no state involvement, no government monopoly, no compulsion or coercion.

And don't deceive yourself: socialism is based on coercion. Force and monopoly are central to the scheme. It's a plain demonstration of what G. Washington pointed out to early Americans: government is force, nothing but force.

 

[Kulindahr]

Ah. Interesting.

Still not sure you can get a very accurate result with exit polls. Especially when we're talking about only 3% of the people saying they were gay (which I find an odd number to begin with).

I'll invoke two phenomena:

even gays otherwise out sometimes avoid identifying themselves as gay when there's a camera and microphone involved (that gets more pronounced as age drops, which seems backwards in some ways but obvious in others)

gays upset at Obama may have done what more than a couple here in JUB said they were going to: stayed home


I give heavier weight to the second.

 

[Kulindahr]

What about those of us who voted a split ticket?

I vote Democratic for most big stuff, but I think Republicans are generally better for law enforcement. As such, about six of my votes were for Republicans (judges and so forth).

Where does that put me?

I NEVER vote for Republicans where it has anything at all to do with justice -- they're the ones who support the police state and believe in doubling the size of police forces when crime has dropped fifteen percent. And in every last case I know of where cops have deliberately declined to intervene, or have participated in, gay bashing, they've been Republicans.

Only good thing from the Republicans they will keep Obama Spending in check.

Only because it isn't THEIR spending.

But remember, by several different estimates, if the program articulated loudest by Republicans during the campaigns get put into place, the deficit Obama has right now will jump by at least fifty percent.

Until they're ready to slash $600 million from the Pentagon that isn't related to the 'war effort', they're lying to us about money. Even several conservative and libertarian think-tanks have said the Pentagon can cut far more than that without reducing effectiveness.

 

[Kulindahr]

Yes, I must have an inadequate understanding of the constitution, me and every court that ever ruled on the right of the government to enact statutes not specifically enumerated in the constitution.

FDR got that rolling, by deliberately picking Supreme Court justices who thought that socialism trumped the constitution. We've been suffering from his autocratic legacy ever since.

 

[Kulindahr]

This shows how little you know. No one is forced to buy car insurance. Not driving is an option.

You lose.

Lousy argument -- except for the simple fact that you're facing a monopoly.

The situation with driving is a simple contractual one that doesn't even need the state in it: the entity that owns the roads can make rules for their use.

Personally, I think the government highway authority ought to be cut loose rather like the Post Office -- associated, even funded, but no law enforcement involved; it would have its own highway patrol, but they'd be the private employees of a private entity.

And you'd still need a driver's license, except to make things clearer the name should be changed. To get into BiMart, I had to buy a membership, and I carry a BiMart card; to drive, I should have to buy a membership, and get a Road card or something like that.

And if I got caught speeding, it wouldn't go to court; it would be a penalty for violating the contract between me and then, subject to fines just like late fees for my VISA.


Now, in parallel with that, health insurance isn't like having a driver's license or car insurance, it's like requiring insurance against not just the dings and bumps that damage your car, but broken belts, dead mirror motors, a stuck defrost fan, your fuel filter going bad....

That stuff is the business of the people who own the car. And right there the philosophical foundation of mandatory health insurance rears its ugly head: that the government owns our bodies.

Not driving may always be an option. Not living is... well, not.

 

[Kulindahr]

Kulindahr, if they privatize everything in sight...
....what happens when the company goes bankrupt?

Schools and libraries are sacred cows, in my humble opinion.

Kulindahr, you want to privatize the roads?

<reaches for thhe smelling salts>

It'll hit the poor the hardest, to start with.

There's a place where some other things have to be straightened out first -- like correcting the silly system of private property that we have. In a rational world, the poor would be collecting land-rent dividends, part of which would be from the value of those same roads. So really it doesn't make too much sense to privatize many roads without that.

OTOH, the government should get out of the way of people who want to build private roads. There was a group of businessmen in Oregon a while back who had a plan for a private-sector highway connecting two parts of the state directly as opposed to the round-about route on government highways. Their route would have been like thirty percent shorter than the round-about. It would have had tolls, obviously, but their studies had shown they could expect to begin seeing a profit in a dozen years.

It should have been built. The only reason it wasn't was the government monopoly stomped on it.

Funny thing about government monopolies -- they're forbidden by the Constitution, but we've sure got lots of them.

 

[Jack Springer]

Two years ago this forum was littered with gleeful remarks about the Republican Party being dead.

In politics nothing lasts forever. Democrats win one day, Republicans win another day.

You have to take the bad with the good. Liberals live in a fantasyland where they see themselves as sane, intellectual, progressive, infallible.

We at JUB get the opportunity to hear Democrats and liberals tell each other how wonderful, smart, caring, and intellectual they are every day.

 

[Kulindahr]

Two years ago this forum was littered with gleeful remarks about the Republican Party being dead.

Is is. But when the other choice is something to which you absolutely refuse to give approval, sometimes you have to hold your nose and vote for a corpse.

In politics nothing lasts forever. Democrats win one day, Republicans win another day.

And Americans lose.

You have to take the bad with the good. Liberals live in a fantasyland where they see themselves as sane, intellectual, progressive, infallible.

And what passes for right-wingers live in a fantasyland where real Americans love Jesus and happily hate in His name, where science is a game subject to editing for reasons of doctrine or prejudice.