Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to Oh, Lord...

Okay, maybe if I ignore all the foundational stuff...
TB — (archived)

"Pursuit of happiness" is not a state-supplied guarantee of it. It's just the last of three items in a list where government is not supposed to interfere.

Yes, the U.S. is economically freer than Europe. I'd like to keep it that way.

There's a lot in your post about happiness, and how Europe makes its people happy without worrying about productivity and all those other nasty, rational things.

Assuming we're not talking about Thoreau-types living in a cabin: Happiness involves food, clothing, housing, medical care, and many other things that are only created by human productivity. If your typical "happy" European isn't working for it, somebody else is, and that's getting "allocated" to him. This is not a formula for initiative, and in too many places in Europe, it shows.

Now that I think about it, Thoreau had somebody bringing him food on a regular basis.

Everything you said on mathematics is irrelevant. I'm talking logic and reason, as in the logic and reason that tells me that the numbers don't add up. I've put the numbers on national health care here before. Believe me, you ain't gonna pay for it with higher cigarette taxes (I've actually heard this proposed). Don't know where the hell you get "one size fits all" from what I'm saying, especially considering the whole bloody POINT of this argument is not pushing a "one size fits all" national medical system on the U.S.

As long as you believe the laws of economics are "ideological" in nature, you aren't going to understand the problem.

I noticed a lot of uses of the word "allocate." When something is allocated, who really owns it?

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