61–70 of 174 posts
Rebuttal: http://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/report/the-impac...
There are many defensible arguments against government programs from across the social and political spectrums, but they don't come from the Heritage Foundation. They have a severe beyond reason bias against government.
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Getting rid of unions will increase income inequality. Just compare for profit higher education with public higher education. The wages/benefits for workers former very much lag those of the latter. Private prisons pay way less too. But the people at the top get outsized pay. The cost savings to taxpayers are not sufficient to justify this inequity.
Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? The impact on progress should not be discounted as an externality. Imagine if taxicabs or any livery service of any kind had to have a union member associated with it. Would autonomous cars make the same progress (for example, we can have autonomous subways/trains but they have to be "personne…
Unions would've collectively bargained and agreed not to work for companies that abuse H1-B visa farms. And this whole issue would've been resolved ages ago.
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The further those services get pushed down, the less effective they become. With smaller groups to front costs, prices go up and less services are offered.
What supports that conclusion? There are lots of services – most actually, even insurance services – that thrive with voluntary participation. And the prices are driven down by lots of different companies competing for those customers.
Arguably that militates against treating it as insurance as opposed to a straight-up single payer system or Singapore style system (http://theweek.com/articles/684952/republicans-should-blow-e...), but it does mean you can't argue from the success of existing insurance markets.
The problem in Keynes thinking on "social services" is that it's impossible to gather all of the knowledge necessary to ascertain what those would be. That knowledge is dispersed among ~320m citizens (in the U.S.) who each have particular wants and needs. And even if you could somehow attain that knowledge in one place, the likelihood of finding consensus on how a particular "social service" should be offered is next…
Because if you don't mandate insurance, then the entire system falls apart. Sick people need it, healthy people don't want to pay for it. You need everyone to pay to make it affordable.
And is it really affordable, even for the unhealthy?
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Because if you don't mandate insurance, then the entire system falls apart. Sick people need it, healthy people don't want to pay for it. You need everyone to pay to make it affordable.
Affordable for whom? It has become much less affordable for those who are healthy. How do you justify the healthy paying for the unhealthy? And is it really affordable, even for the unhealthy?
Because we live in a society, and in a society people help one another.
The problem in Keynes thinking on "social services" is that it's impossible to gather all of the knowledge necessary to ascertain what those would be. That knowledge is dispersed among ~320m citizens (in the U.S.) who each have particular wants and needs. And even if you could somehow attain that knowledge in one place, the likelihood of finding consensus on how a particular "social service" should be offered is next…
Why don't we just let individuals choose if they want to have car insurance? If they want it, they can have it - if they don't, they don't have to. The same (very good) reason we don't allow that is the reason we don't allow this: a lot of individual decisions have social costs.
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There are many defensible arguments against government programs from across the social and political spectrums, but they don't come from the Heritage Foundation. They have a severe beyond reason bias against government.
Do you think Institute for New Economic Thinking, a think thank founded by George Soros, is any less biased?
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> They get amazing pay Who gets amazing pay? How much are we talking about? I don't know about the USA, but usually public employees don't earn that much (in exchange for high job security).
Employees of the big agencies in DC make very good money from what I know.
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Why don't we just let individuals choose if they want to have car insurance? If they want it, they can have it - if they don't, they don't have to. The same (very good) reason we don't allow that is the reason we don't allow this: a lot of individual decisions have social costs.
What is the social cost of some not having car insurance?
The problem in Keynes thinking on "social services" is that it's impossible to gather all of the knowledge necessary to ascertain what those would be. That knowledge is dispersed among ~320m citizens (in the U.S.) who each have particular wants and needs. And even if you could somehow attain that knowledge in one place, the likelihood of finding consensus on how a particular "social service" should be offered is next…
No, that's the electoral system; it's been empirically studied and established democracies with more proportional representation have much higher satisfaction with government than those like the US with poor proportionality, even though many of them also have much greater levels of public social support.