This is simply ridiculous. The author clearly hasn't filled out IRS Form 1120S lately, or any other tax form that actually might be applicable to entrepreneurs. Furthermore, I don't really care if angel investors and venture capitalists have to pay more taxes on their successful investments. There's a difference between investing and inventing.
In regard to health care, adding more tax incentives (read loopholes), thereby increasing the complexity of the laws, and making the market for health insurance "more competitive," when the lack of competition is not the problem in the first place, will make matters far worse. Health care is not a commodity that lends itself to a market. It's a human right, which lends itself far better to [competent] government.
A while back I wrote about some of these issues here:
Humans are successful because we don't leave our dead, sick, wounded or crippled behind. We won because, instead of doing like other animals and letting the weak or old die alone, we continue to help them and learn from them.
We help other humans who are too weak to be helped. It's part of our primal human nature. When you say that it's not your obligation to make sure I survive, you are saying you want to try it the animal way. The way that failed.
Wrong. Humans are successful (when we are successful) because we use our inherent ingenuity to serve our individual ends and wants without infringing on those ends and wants of others. Maybe these desires include caring for others, which is often the case, but requiring someone to care for another is to strip that person of their natural freedom.
Learn to make distinctions between what is common and what is general.
You have a very fundamental misunderstanding of biology. Really fundamental. You think a desire such as "caring for others" is somehow a personal choice? Or that God implanted it in us? Caring for others is a biological neccessity of our type of animal - it's why we live, it's why life continues.
There is no such thing as natural freedom. We are born in a collective, we die in a collective and we are nothing without our collective. Humans and monkeys are group first, individual second, and have always been that way. That's why people form 'teams' and have a 'group of friends', have 'families'. It's all small groups which together form larger groups, and the overall aim of each group is to make itself survive, but at the very top, the overall aim is to make the entire human race survive.
Don't believe you are special. That you have 'natural freedoms'. That you have some inherent ingenuity. That's just sillyness.
What would you do with all your ingenuity if you were the only person on earth? Humans have this illusion of being individualistic, and that they work for themselves first. It's not true. People work for the entire society, because without other humans, nobody can survive, no matter how 'ingenious' he is.
You think you know it all, but you forget that all you know is one perspective. Have you ever actually walked in another mans shoes? Not observed, but walked.
Being a web developer does not make you intelligent. Insulting people who disagree with you shows stupidity.
You have a lot to learn, but it's only experience that can teach you that stuff.
Rights are those things that are inherent parts of being a human. When something infringes on my rights, the power of the state is used to maintain them. We have rights to represent the minimal amount of state-sanctioned force that is required to keep us all civil.
You cannot have a right to goods and services that somebody else currently owns. Using the power of the state to acquire medical goods and services is not a basic necessity of being a human.
We've lived millions of years without the state caring for our daily health. We can live millions more without the state and we'll be just be fine.
For a constitutionally-trained lawyer to say that is to engage in demagoguery over substance. We have a problem with health care -- some free market principles do not work when you are dying. But cartoon solutions and slogans are not going to fix complex problems. Mark my words: we'll just end up more in debt, more frustrated, and more vulnerable to even more bullshit promises.
If I were to have an accident or to fall sick right now, I'd worry about my health, and nothing more, because I live in a country with socialized healthcare. If this were to happen in the U.S, I'd have tens of thousands of dollars of debt. To work my way out of this debt would make me a slave for years.
Support for social heathcare is to recongize that one day you may be in the same position. In fact, when you are a really old man, you WILL be in that position. You'll be on a pension and you'll have lots of illnesses. I pay 8% of my income so that this never has to be a worry.
Social healthcare may not be a fundamental human right, but it's a hell of a convenient thing!
> cartoon solutions and slogans are not going to fix complex problems.
Good point. E.g.:
"Competition will cause insurance companies to drop price and increase service. Innovation will come to insurance and new and different types of policies will enter the market, making it even more competitive. Consumer behavior will cause people to shop for insurance and minimize costs while trying to increase coverage."
You may want to read Article 25.1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights before reconsidering that statement.
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
You should wash your mouth out with soap for misquoting that. The UN is a treaty body, meant for eliminating global conflict.
That's it. It's not a global government. It has no representation from the masses, it has no balanced system of government, it has no executive to speak of.
It's done a great job of preventing WWIII. Let's leave it at that.
What if the US doesn't make it a right? What is the UN going to do? Write us some angry letters that threaten us with more angry letters? Fuck the UN and their bullshit.
This nation was built on individual liberty and responsibility, not as a nanny state.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
In regard to health care, adding more tax incentives (read loopholes), thereby increasing the complexity of the laws, and making the market for health insurance "more competitive," when the lack of competition is not the problem in the first place, will make matters far worse. Health care is not a commodity that lends itself to a market. It's a human right, which lends itself far better to [competent] government.
A while back I wrote about some of these issues here:
http://www.aarongreenspan.com/essays/index.html?id=11