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What Government Run Healthcare Looks Like
We keep having these moments, and the young people in my life keep assuring me I’m just a paranoid old fool.
Published in General
Sometimes we have excellent reasons, not unreasonable, for being paranoid.
There’s no need to be paranoid. The left is out to get us, along with everything else normal and good. In another post on this subject, it took me two long paragraphs to make the same point Michael did in one brief caption. He’s a genius!
How are we out to get you?
Wow was all I could say…….
How about “get control of you” — is that closer?
Total paranoia = total awareness
Parental rights are not absolute. Therefore we need totalitarian control to replace them.
No. At worst, it’s to set bounds upon how you can act, but so what? All government does that by nature.
<sniff, sniff> (Safely Home, Charlie, sweets – watch over your Mum & Dad!) GRRRR! for GOSH and the High Court: What goes around, comes around…Careful it doesn’t bite you in the bum!
You have heard of governments that do it badly, right? That’s what we are talking about here. Is this confusing for you?
If it all comes down to doing things badly or in a better way then it doesn’t sound like there is much disagreement between us, but there is clearly more to it than that.
It doesn’t involve controlling people for the sake of controlling them.
Yes, it does.
Yes, it really does. Why take tax money even if the tax revenues would increase if you decreased tax rates? They don’t care if they get more revenue if it means not taxing people to the limit of them screaming. They want the screaming because they hate the people who scream that much.
That isn’t really true. You can decrease taxes, and then 10 years later get the money back due to low economic growth. The question is whether the tax cuts caused taxes to be higher than they otherwise would have been.
There are taxes, tax rates and tax revenues. Get those straight and then learn about the Laffer Curve and get back to me.
Do you know something special about the Laffer Curve beyond what is said on tv?
Could you draw a Laffer Curve? It’s a simple pedagogical thought experiment and the shape of the curve is simplicity itself. It also imparts great wisdom but Progressives are immune to such wisdom because they seek a higher virtue — that of emotional appeal and grasping for power.
Just because it is simple doesn’t mean that it reflects reality.
This was nothing more than bureaucrats digging in to assert their authority. It requires a certain amount of dignity to be truly evil. This was nothing more than a lesson taught to not just Charlie Gard’s parents, but to the rest of us well. You will do what we allow you to do, nothing more and nothing less. Forced to plead for their child’s life, to no avail. It is not only dignity that must be destroyed, it is hope as well. Take a number, for that is all you are, a number.
I remember back in 1981 when Martin Gardner of Scientific American wrote an article making fun of the Laffer Curve because there was a lot of noise in the data. I was able to look it up and found an image of his version of the curve:
He refuted it by pointing out that there are noise in the data! Well, duh. I suppose that could come from being a mathematician of the kind not familiar with statistical variation, or of the methods needed to study phenomena such as ecological populations or population genetics, or anything involving human behavior, where a lot of the work is in teasing the trends out of the noise. Normally Gardner was the voice of reason, but I suppose it’s easy to get emotional and irrational when your field of work is largely supported by government funding. I see that the article in which this chart appeared was even picked as one of the top ten that were re-published after Gardner’s death in 2010, which probably says more about how popular conservative-bashing was among the kind of people he was hanging with than anything else.
I butted heads with a hospital, doctors, and bureaucrats when my first born was 2 years old. That was in the days when parents were only able to see their child at certain times of the day. They had tested her for cystic fibrosis and by visiting time she was hysterical. I spent the allotted time rocking and crooning to her. She went ballistic when I started to leave. The staff and I got into an argument as to whether or not I was going to leave. Finally I told them I was taking her out of the hospital, they told me I couldn’t do that, and I said, “watch me, because I’m the one paying the bill.” And I walked out of the hospital with her wrapped in her blankie and took her home. I never again left her alone in a hospital. My motto became, “I’m paying, I’m staying.”
That’ll be a good one for use by the next people hauled before the War Crimes tribunal: We were just setting bounds on how people can act. So what? All government does that by nature.
Bravo. It chills me to think of the direction we’re going in.
There’s a reason why in some jurisdictions they make it difficult for you to be the one paying the bill.
?
What does that even mean?
The full quote that comes from Joseph Wambaugh is:
I found that to be true of the vast majority of the people that I arrested. There were a few exceptions.
What data? Absurd to claim there is data on a teaching tool. It’s a theory!
I think he meant that in real life there was a lot of noise in the data, which would certainly be true. There are a lot of other factors that are difficult to control for, for one thing.
But you are right that it was an absurd attempt at refutation. I wonder what the poor guy would do with climate data or climate models (to name another phenomenon with a lot of variability).
(Although there are many references to the article online, I would have to pay money to re-read it.)
Yes, real data always has noise. The real thing to study is does the noise swamp the data or is there a discernible pattern. It’s such a simple concept and it applies to so many things in life that are self-regulating that, in a way, Laffer must have thought it is a trivial display of logic.
Laffer isn’t some great genius who could easily think of some idea and put it on a napkin while all others are in awe and weep at the majesty of his mind. All he did was oversimplify the concept of optimal taxation so that a few politicians could understand.