Good luck with going through your life without any unexpected disasters, Scott L. It almost makes we want to wish you some health catastrophe (and based on my medical training, these can always happen out of the blue) to see where you draw the line on “as much as possible.”

“…Seriously, anyone that gets up on their hind legs and says that ensuring decent health care for every man, woman and child is a Nazi policy deserves not a dressing down by Barney Frank, they deserve to be punted. It baffles me that there are that many truly misinformed people that are even capable of dressing themselves without first donning protective gear.”

Umm…they are proposing punishing people who choose not to get health insurance. Not on the same level as a Nazi, but definitely authoritarian and anti-freedom.

“…I don’t get it, I really don’t. How on earth can people be so angry and stupid that they make such barbaric asses out of themselves to protect a failed system that leaves one and a half times Canada’s entire population with no coverage? Wanna guess why foreigners think of Americans as dangerous buffoons? You actually have people on national TV defending the availability of assault rifles to borderline retards and allowing them to attend political rallies and mass gatherings. When did America get the idea they were in any way more civilized than Libya? That isn’t freedom, it isn’t liberty, it is flat out stupid. There’s no shortage of weapons up here but at least we have the good sense to recognize that there are reasonable limits to their ownership. Waving a flag and demanding a street sweeper will get you nothing but the disgusted looks you deserve.”

Of the people who do don’t have coverage the majority are illegal immigrants and young healthy people who simply do not care about it or choose not to pay for it.

You will never get it. You are totally dependent on the state. Many Americans prefer to stand on our own as much as possible. This might make us barbarians in your eyes, but in ours you just look weak and pathetic.

I disagree with libertarians on a variety of issues, healthcare included, but the objective fact is that when it comes to the drug war, criminal justice, foreign policy, and personal freedom, libertarians are more liberal than Democrats.

This is as meaningless a paragraph as there can be. Well done.

I disagree with libertarians on a variety of issues, healthcare included, but the objective fact is that when it comes to the drug war, criminal justice, foreign policy, and personal freedom, libertarians are more liberal than Democrats.

Of course, there are a variety of libertarians, just as there are a variety of Democrats. I know of many who aren’t against medicare and medicaid or welfare or food stamps. There are many who favor environmental regulations, as well.

This thread (and Sadly, No!, especially) reflects the depth of thinking and intellectual honesty (or lack thereof) one frequently finds at Free Republic.

For my part, I hope Obama keeps beating that drum, and pisses away his party’s control of the congress exactly the same way that Clinton did. In our severely disfunctional imperialist system, the only break we get is when the two wings of the Ruling Party are deadlocked.

So Whole Foods treats it’s employees badly? The environment as well? Were those determined by a relative comparison with the old Union Carbide operation at Bhopal?
If he did not explicitly assign unequal weights to his ‘evil mackeyism mitigating’ factors, why are you doing so?

I don’t agree with everything in his ‘post-script to SN’ but wasn’t his initial point that the reaction to Mackey’s editorial on the proggadiddledoopantsstainedwithrenderedangelwings left was disproportionate to any reasonable conception of what our health care system will actually look like and that boycotting a store which fits the aesthetics of value which aforementioned angel-stained-pants crowd ascribes to without possibility of being dissuaded is just as loony as the non-lib right turning against Walmart?.

I think he’s making a cultural argument (not where I think it may be made confidently) and not a substantive one.

It may come from reading people he would probably agree with on drug policy and punishment, like Mark Kleiman, breathlessly declare his mortal opposition to the fleet of libtardian dreadnoughts filled with artisanal goods piloted by the dread lord Mackey.

It’s always disturbing to see people you see making sense (and yes, i know you’ll snark a prolapsed muse with this sentence) so consistently fall off the analytical cart and straight into kindergarten.

http://www.newstatesman.com/business/2008/10/economy-world-crisis-financial

True dat, Aaron.

Hell, money itself requires a government. “It’s my money” pisses me off to no end. Funny, it doesn’t have your name on it (word to the wise – don’t say this to a live person unless you are pretty confident you can take them in a physical altercation). Libertarians think money is a fixed aspect of the universe, like gravity or magnetism.

It’s funny, really, how much is taken for granted by economic liberarians, either by naivete (well gosh oh golly, no corporation would ever do *that*) or by omission (“Sure, it’ll be dog-eat-dog, but I’m one of the smart ones that will come out on top – I just won’t say that publicly”). The former don’t have an appreciation for just how damn evil some folks can cheerfully be, and the latter are dangerously overconfident as to their ability to survive the aforementioned evil people.

They also don’t ever stop to acknowledge that the existence of a market in the first place is dependent on the existence of some outside authority that permits the free exchange of x for y in the first place. “Free” markets don’t exist without a government (either de facto or de jure) willing to enforce rules about who can participate and how much screwing of the other guy is permitted in the exchange. Witness, for example, the thriving health-care marketplace in Somalia. The only reason there’s a health-care insurance industry in this country is because the government allows such a thing, and if anyone screws with the insurance companies’ right to turn a profit on human misery they waste no time at all running to the government (via the court system) to recover their loss. Libertarians are quite skilled at ignoring the hidden support their cherished free-marketeer banditos receive from the government they (the Libertarians) so disparage.

There are lots of things that the “free” market works just fine for – consumer and luxury goods, for example. There’s a lot of other stuff, though – police protection, clean water, public transit – that the market is poorly suited to provide. Health care is more like the latter than the former.

In other words, Radley, go live in Somalia for six months, then we’ll listen to your ideas.

It’s not jus Balko that lives in that looney-tunes universe. I remember an interview with Michael Moore in which he stated that he recieved all kinds of complaints and objections because of the scene in Roger and Me where a woman is skinning rabbits to provide meat for her family but did not get one comment about the scene where a laid off worker is shot down in the street.

I bet you are.

They do, of course; rabbits are fundamentally amoral, being without souls, while uninsured people are poor, which means they behaved in some improper fashion, moral behavior and a good work ethic being all one needs to make money.

Christ, I hate libertarians.