I expect Obama and his cronies don’t need to read Belloc to understand that. The same idea comes from a source they are much more likely to be familiar with, Vladimir Lenin. “He who does not obey does not eat.” That’s the “Iron Law of Socialism” and, in a complex modern economy with things like health care up for grabs, the principle will be extended to the other necessities of life in such an economy.

In any case we have seen how poorly nationalized health care works in places like Canada and Britain. There is no reason to expect it to work any better here. Indeed, given the importation by the Obama Administration of Chicago Machine political methods and ethics into national politics it is likely that we will get a positively Third World level of incompetence and corruption in any nationalized health scheme here in the USA. I think the Democrats would regard that as a feature, not a bug. It’s wider even than Chicago too. Fannie and Freddie were big cash cows for influential Dems who were given sinecures on their boards and in their managements, who helped bring them to their present status.

““Even if individual economic decisions were entirely rational, which they’re obviously not, when it comes to life and death, the only rational decision is to do whatever it takes to live. That’s an unusual economic decision.””

Is wholesale wrong. This is because the VAST amount of healthcare dollars spent are not based on imminent life and death situations. They are substantively normal consumer decisions… Which dentist for a cavity, which doctor for your checkup, whom to see when you want a flu shot, and the list is nearly endless. Just like the example of food, you MUST buy food to live, yet our daily decisions are not “life and death” in urgency. Instead, we buy what we need in a competitive market.

In the case of health care, the EXCEPTION where extraordinary expenses are involved in immediate life and death situations, this is why we buy INSURANCE which moderates the financial risk of these extraordinary circumstances. Well, that’s the PROPER role of insurance… Instead of buying insurance to pay for ordinary needs, insurance should pay for the emergency type contingency, and we should pay for our ordinary needs by purchasing it in a competitive free market.

Any citation of Krugman lowers the intelligence of both the quoter and reader by at least 30 points.

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And this too:
Um, economists have known for 45 years — ever since Kenneth Arrow’s seminal paper — that the standard competitive market model just doesn’t work for health care: adverse selection and moral hazard are so central to the enterprise that nobody, nobody expects free-market principles to be enough. To act all wide-eyed and innocent about these problems at this late date is either remarkably ignorant or simply disingenuous.”
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This complete absurdity leaves the reader less informed than before he read it. To Paraphrase Reagan… It’s that you know nothing, it’s that you know so much that isn’t so… His words apply to you so incredibly well.

He is, with his crisis-capitalizing cronies, convinced of modern humanity’s superiority to prior generations’ abilities and attitudes, when basic human nature has not changed in the least since that nature emerged either from God’s hand or the missing link’s birth canal. Those from his mold are dictatorial of their own assessed moral necessities. I pray that liberal sycophancts will abandon him if his path becomes even more illegal.

“In the democracies at present, many who sincerely hate all of Nazism’s manifestations are working for ideals whose realization would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny. Most of the people whose views influence developments are in some measure socialists. They believe that our economic life should be ‘consciously directed,’ that we should substitute ‘economic planning’ for the competitive system. Yet is there a greater tragedy imaginable than that, in our endeavor consciously to shape our future in accordance with high ideals, we should in fact unwittingly produce the very opposite of what we have been striving for?”

So by 2020 or so, when Obambi-care starts circling the drain, we’re looking at a federal bailout of the socialized medicine corporation? That shouldn’t cost too much, right?

Your rejoinder is defective. Educate us on your argument. Don’t assume we can’t have a give and take because your information is diffferent than someone else’s. Your position is defective if you can’t explain it clearly.

I also disagree with the quote at # 45 above. We make life and death economic decisions everyday, they are not unusual. Some examples:

1. Auto purchases, home purchases and common carrier use all involve saftey of outcome as prime consideration in the buying.

2.The same is true for purchases of food and other consumables.

3. The purchase of appliances and other consumer goods often involves saftey as the primary concern. Examples would include gas or propane stoves and chainsaws. The consequences of a product failure can be death or serious injury. The same outcomes are probable if you make poor decisions in the purchases of the other items mentioned above. Buying health care is no different.

4. It is a proven fact that state run health care results in state decisions that delay or deny treatment. How does that outcome benefit a citizen?