Mark Cuban: The most patriotic thing you can do is "get rich"

Do you really think government will be able to negotiate the price of basic medicine better than say Walmart/Costco? US have had Medicare/Medicaid for years but that had no effect on price of basic medicines.

Walmart enters the market and voila, you can get 90 day prescription for 10$! You can get similar deals at Costco and Sams Club. Show me one government program which has actually reduced the price of medicine. Walmart opens up clinic at their stores at a low cost so that uninsured people can visit the clinic and actually get basic treatment by paying cash. CVS and other pharmacy stores have followed Walmart's footsteps and started their own clinics program.

As I commented elsewhere, having a school voucher system will ensure that everyone gets education while also letting free market do its magic.

I am from India and we don't have any free health care there. We do have free public school but they are terrible. My father worked hard to send me to private school and I did part time work in college to fund my education.

And I am not suggesting that government should not provide public infrastructure. As I have shown in my other comment, not even 1% of your tax money goes towards infrastructure. Why are you not talking about (outraged about) the immense waste by done by defense/social security/medicare medicaid?

In India, we don't have any department like FDA and it works just fine. The market forces will ensure that only those companies who provide edible food survives and rest are driven out of business. Taking your own example, after Sinclair's book, didn't meat sales fell by half? Did you need FDA to see that consumers didn't eat that meat? Let's imagine that government did not create FDA after that book and meat sales continue to decline. Don't you think that meat companies would have come up with a plan to restore consumer confidence? They would change their practices, advertise the fact that they are not clean and safe. They would have asked independent journalists to visit their facility. And slowly buy surely, consumers would have come back.

Let me give you an example. FDA doesn't regulate coffee temperature. A lady gets first degree burn from McD's coffee. She sues McD and wins. McD (and all other companies who sell coffee) ensures that they set up right temperature for their coffee. FDA didn't have to do anything and still all the consumers are better off than before.

You haven't given me any public studies where it is proven that FDA disapproval saved people's lives. The page you have linked lists bunch of products but nothing else.

You have yourself outlined the biggest problem with FDA. Because FDA is made up of people like you and me and when you give them power, rest assured that the power will be misused. I would rather trust free market's invisible hand do the work for me instead of few hundred government bureaucrats of FDA. Who is responsible if people die because these government bureaucrats are too slow to approve a drug/medicine?

You copied/pasted text from ADL site about extremist groups running the schools. The point of voucher system is that as a parent of a child, you are allowed to choose a school where you send your kid and that school gets the voucher money. I am sure you are not going to send your kid to school operated by extremist group.

Explain me again why one needs to break a monopoly? You have to understand that it's not easy to become a monopoly. A corporation has to work extremely hard and satisfy their customers for a long time to become a monopoly. If a monopoly starts misusing their status and screw with their customers, soon there will be more companies trying to service the customers and it will automatically take away monopoly. For all practical purposes, Google has monopoly in Internet search. I am sure you would suggest that we should break this monopoly. What good this will do for the consumers? And yes, we oppose government monopoly because they become monopoly not by servicing customers, they become monopoly because the law grants them monopoly. Prime example: USPS vs Fedex/UPS.

You also question inequitable distribution of wealth. Let me ask you, how are you going to ensure equal distribution of wealth if government is in charge? How is government going to make sure that wealth is distributed equally? The fact is government doesn't even have wealth of its own.

Here's why I believe in libertarian philosophy. Government is about power and if you give this power to someone you better be sure that this power is not misused. The very power hungry people who are running for the government are precisely the people who should not be given power.

See this video on Greed by Milton Friedman.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A

My choice quote:

'Where in the world are you going to find these angels who are going to organize society for us?' :)

> I fail to see how having a gov't spending our money makes the potential damage worse.

Oh really?

When you spend your money on your stuff, you try really hard to get the best value.

When you spend your money on someone else's stuff, you go cheap.

When you spend someone else's money on your stuff, you don't worry so much about cost effectiveness.

Govt spending is someone else's money for someone else's stuff. Do you really think that that's as good as either of the previous two categories, let alone the first one?

Without entrepreneurship, there would be no Ford, no Microsoft, nor many other "must haves" that we enjoy today. Entrepreneurship created the automobile, the computer as we know it today, the website that we are discussing on right now, and all the startups that Y-Combinator supports.

Allow me to rephrase. Entrepreneurship is what our economy is built upon. Not intellectual freedom. Granted, intellectual freedom created peanut butter, the lightbulb and more. But no one was attempting to create these items for sales purposes initially. Peanut butter was invented by George Washington Carver, not Jiff.

And I wouldnt say that intellectual freedom is what built this county. As so many whom actually put in the man hours, hard work and physical suffering to build this country, did not have any intellectual freedom, and died in the process.

Wasn't trying to completely dismiss Cuban on this. I simply do not see enough wealthy not using loophole that are available to them. This is why I say he's living in a dreamworld. Your right, to fix this, you have to legislate out all the loopholes. And this would take considerable social alignment.