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Do some of these dickheads actually THINK before they even suggest things like this?
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/201...age/?mobile=wt
What part of "more pay means more purchases which means more money for the company to pay more so that their employees will buy more so that the company makes more money yada yada yada" don't these fools understand?
Discuss.
Just have to keep the serfs & peons in their place while we work on getting rid of that pesky 13th Amendment.
Hey Ben, it's just socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben in LA
That's the Republican economic model, right?
Or as we called it here in Europe in the Middle Ages, the Feudal System....
http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAaWvVFERVA
Well, good ol' Charlie believes in pure capitalism, unfettered markets. I mean, in absolute capitalism (which we've never had) you can't have anything held in common. Ya know, no public health care etc., etc. And you cannot, if you want a pure capitalist system, have minimum wage laws or even child labor laws. Those two things restrict the free flow of the market.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben in LA
But patents, copyright protection, a public police force etc., etc. also impinge on this utopian theory.
And the theory will never be put into practice. Because the super-rich like good ol' Charlie depend on a powerful state to serve their interests.
Gore Vidal pointed out: it's socialism for the rich and free enterprise for everyone else.
Noam Chomsky described them as a: lethal force.
But they're simply serving their own interests. I mean, it's rational. And, too, it's their value system.
The rich are better than you. They got rich by being better. They're life's winners. You're the loser. They've earned the right to rub it in.
>>>What part of "more pay means more purchases which means more money for the company to pay more so that their employees will buy more so that the company makes more money yada yada yada" don't these fools understand?
"more pay means more purchases"
More purchases *for the particular employee RECEIVING that additional pay* and fewer purchases *for the consumer ultimately PAYING for the employee's higher wage." The consumer will have less money because mandated higher wages must ultimately be paid for by higher prices passed along to him. The higher prices the consumer will pay for his purchases to the "X" company will result in his making fewer purchases to the "Y" company and the "Z" company.
So the *total* number of purchases in the economy remain the same; but the mix, or composition, of the purchases will have shifted from one kind of item to another, or from one company to some other company. That might be politically expedient to help one group of people at the expense of another group of people but it's completely false to claim that it helps the economy overall.
Several years ago, when same-sex marriage was first being debated in the news, The New York Times ran an article about lesbian couples in Massachusetts claiming that recognizing same-sex marriage would be "good for the economy" because lesbian couples wanting to marry would "buy 2 wedding gowns, as opposed to one in the case of a hetero couple." In that writer's opinion, buying 2 wedding gowns apparently helps the economy. It didn't occur to the writer that the purchase of the 2nd wedding gown occurs at the expense of the purchase of some other item (fewer purchases of home computers, for example). Lesbian couples don't increase their purchasing power just because they're allowed to marry; they *redirect* their purchases toward items they would not have otherwise bought. That doesn't hurt the economy, of course, but it doesn't improve it either; it merely sends a signal to companies: "make more wedding gowns and fewer home computers."
"which means more money for the company"
Which company? An employee's wage is a company's COST, just as equipment is a cost, rent is a cost, interest payments on borrowed money are a cost, etc. Would you mind explaining how a company makes more money if one or more of its costs go up?
More to the point: if a mandated hike to $9.00/hour is beneficial to the employee, his employer, other companies and their employees, etc., in spreading "waves of prosperity", then why stop at only $9.00/hour? You want instant prosperity? Mandate that companies pay no less than $900.00/hour to all employees! That'll improve the economy! Just imagine the amount of spending a dish washer at a diner could do if his employer were forced to pay him no less than $900.00 for an hour of his labor!
No serious economist (I'm one) doubts for a second the basics he learned in his training: Mandating that the price of "Y" must go never fall below "$" will always cause a glut of "Y" ("glut" means "lots of 'Y' that no one wants to buy at that price"). The price of labor is called a "wage" it's an unfortunate term, but it's the one we're stuck with for historical reasons. And we have a very special name for the glut of labor the labor that no one wants to buy that always follows a mandated increase in its price: it's called "unemployment."
For more on minimum wage, and basic economics in general, see the works of one of the great TS economists, Deirdre McCloskey (formerly, Donald McCloskey). Her website is here:
http://www.deirdremccloskey.com
An employee is an asset to her employer, providing the labor required to reduce the company's product. Her wage is merely the cost of maintenance of that asset. Skimp on the maintenance and the product suffers, and thereby eventually the company's reputation, sells and profits.
I love it Trish.Quote:
Originally Posted by trish
But I groan inwardly that this thread is an open invitation to the zealot who posted endless screeds here a few months ago in praise of the theories of Ayn Rand.
The Kochs have worked some fine magic in America these past few years. Their pernicious impact is still being seen in the deadlock in Washington.
Edit ->The edited portion is italicized. (Damn I wish there wasn't a ten minute limit on editing one's posts).Quote:
Originally Posted by trish
>>>An employee is an asset to her employer,
Very true. So why would anyone intentionally vote for a law that punished an employer for maintaining her important asset?
Does legal punishment (or the threat of legal punishment) inspire an employer to maintain more important assets? Or fewer?
Most importantly:
Since everyone is unique, why can't each individual employer and each individual employee decide between themselves voluntarily what "maintenance" consists of? Why "one size fits all?" Why must a third party (Uncle Sam) be brought in to make that decision for them?
No one here wants a third party brought in to decide what "marriage" is, or what "a sexual relationship" is; they want unfettered freedom there. But in the economic sphere, they want that third party to tell them and everyone else what "health insurance" is, and what a "wage" is.
Why not unfettered freedom in both economic relations *and* sexual relations?
>>>I groan inwardly that this thread is an open invitation to the zealot who posted endless screeds here a few months ago in praise of the theories of Ayn Rand.
It wasn't I who did that. But my question is: why do you object to having your ideas challenged?
A groan is not an argument.
>>The Kochs have worked some fine magic in America these past few years. Their pernicious impact is still being seen in the deadlock in Washington.
For example?
There can be lots of reasons. At one time in the U.S. some of those assets were slaves. Even after slavery ended many workers were effectively entralled to their employers, laboring eighteen hours days six days a week, paid in tokens that could only be exchanged for necessities and goods at the company store. At one time those assess were very young children! Federal laws were required to thwart these immoral extravagancies of unfettered capitalism. Conservatives since Reagan have been working with corporate interests to dismantle unions returning us ultimately to the days of the robber barons.Quote:
Very true. So why would anyone intentionally vote for a law that punished an employer for maintaining her important asset?
http://www.dailyjobcuts.com
A "fun" site to check once or twice a week.
Over time, you'll see the effect minimum wages and Obamacare (to name but two destructive laws) have on workers.
You can also expect the following:
As minimum wage is increased (which it eventually will, since it's always politically popular), most chain stores that normally employ people at checkout counters supermarkets, DuaneReade and CVS drug stores, etc. will convert completely to automated checkout machines, employing only a person or two to keep an eye on things.
I don't think the people who were previously employed in these places or those who will now remain unemployed because their assets to an employer are not worth $9 or $10 or $11 an hour are going to be thankful for the minimum wage. The reason they won't be thankful is that even with a minimum wage of, let's say, $11.00/hour, it's obvious that $11.00/hour x 0 hours = $0.00.
Minimum wage zealots always forget that they can't force employers to hire people.
The main purpose of minimum wage laws cannot be to help the poor and the unskilled. The main purpose is to help those who propose it and vote for it invariably middle-class and wealthy feel good about themselves.
So anyone holding an opposing position is a zealot?! Now we know where your coming from. People on minimum wage typically hold two or three minimum wage jobs without benefits and their children are raising themselves. If an employer doesn't pay a living wage, he is not likely to get quality labor for his dollar. It will eventually effect the quality of his product and his profits. If a significant portion of the labor force is not paid a living wage it negatively effects the economy and the quality of life for everyone in the nation.
>There can be lots of reasons.
Lots of reasons to punish employers for trying to maintain their assets? If you really liked workers, it would make more sense to ask "What can we do to make it *easier* for employers to hire more people?" rather than "How can we punish employers and make it for painful for them to hire more people?"
>At one time in the U.S. some of those assets were slaves.
But these "assets" were not *employees*, and the people maintaining them were not *employers*.
A "master" is not an "employer" and a "slave" is not an "employee."
>Even after slavery ended many workers were effectively entralled to their employers, laboring eighteen hours days six days a week,
Before slavery ended in the south, there were no employers and there were no employees. There were "masters" and "slaves." The master/slave arrangement is not a variation of the employer/employee arrangement; it's a completely different thing altogether: the first is based on coercion, and the second is based on contract.
>laboring eighteen hours days six days a week,
You hinted that they were already laboring eighteen hours a day, six days week previously as slaves (and under threat of physical abuse, too). After emancipation, they were still laboring eighteen hours a day, six days week, but now they were getting paid for it, there was no longer the threat of physical abuse, and most important of all they could leave at any time and seek work elsewhere (including in the northern industrialized states).
Blacks certainly saw it as a major improvement in their lives compared to what they had previously.
>paid in tokens that could only be exchanged for necessities and goods at the company store.
Many people, black and white, were paid in tokens or company scrip because the original currency of the Confederacy the "greenback" was worthless after the war. Blacks who moved north were paid in US dollars like everyone else.
>Federal laws were required to thwart these immoral extravagancies of unfettered capitalism.
Slavery itself was a product of legislation, not unfettered capitalism, and it was continually upheld by the Supreme Court. After the Civil War, additional legislation was passed again undercutting unfettered capitalism mandating into existence the racist "Jim Crow" laws. In a famous case decided by the Supreme Court ("Plessy vs. Feguson") the racist "Separate but Equal" laws (which upheld school segregation from the Jim Crow laws) were upheld by federal law.
Railroad owners in the south, for example, had no problem with black riders and white riders sitting in the same rail car together. It had nothing to do with their personal feelings toward blacks; they may or may not have been personally racist. They favored letting blacks and whites sit together in the same rail car for a very good reason: it was ***cheaper*** to place one rail car on the tracks than it was to put two rail cars (one for black passengers, one for whites). Yet the law required them to do the latter.
School segregation was completely the result of Jim Crow laws (not unfettered capitalism) and upheld in the "Separate But Equal" rulings by the Supreme Court in "Plessy." Even if someone had wanted to open a school for both white and black students, she would legally be prevented from doing so. This is not an example of "racist unfettered capitalism." These are cases of racism institutionalized by the State, and actually interfering with the voluntary arrangements that people would have made had there been "unfettered capitalism."
"Plessy" by the way was upheld by a predominantly Democratic Supreme Court. When it was finally overturned many years later (by a predominantly Republican Supreme Court) it was a rare case of government undoing something evil and stupid that it had done earlier.
Almost all blacks knew this, of course, which is why until the mid 1960s, most blacks voted Republican. All blacks knew it was the Democratic Party that had supported the master/slave system in the south; all blacks knew it was the Democratic Party that instituted and supported the racist "Jim Crow" laws; all blacks knew the insurgent group calling itself the "Ku Klux Klan" had been started by Democrats*; all blacks knew it was the Democratic Party that supported "Separate But Equal" in the Plessy case; all blacks were aware it was the Democratic Party which supported school segregation; all blacks knew that the white guys blocking the entranceways to white schools so that black children could not enter when school integration began those white guys were Democrats and all blacks knew it!
And that's also why Martin Luther King, Jr. voted Republican his entire life.
Black contempt for the Democratic Party didn't end until Lyndon Johnson became president and implemented a series of social programs called "the Great Society" . . . most of which failed in their stated goal of improving the lives of blacks, but which played an impressive role in helping to break up black families by offering economic rewards for married couples NOT to stay together.
>Conservatives since Reagan have been working with corporate interests to dismantle unions returning us ultimately to the days of the robber barons.
Most of this is pop-leftist-mythology that evaporates quickly on doing a little historical research.
But let's cut to the chase: you don't like "corporate interests" or "robber barons"? Barack Obama is in complete thralldom to corporate interests and robber barons and always has been. Wall Street was the biggest contributor to his 2008 campaign, followed by unions and lawyers. Obamacare, in fact, is best viewed as a big taxpayer-subsidized payoff to the various interests that got him into power: Big Pharma, Big Health Insurance, Big Law, and Big Labor. High quality medical outcomes at low cost for YOU and other individuals have nothing to do with the program. That's just the sales pitch.
You believed all that "Hope & Change" rhetoric? That was simply a slogan a mantra, in fact to get people jumping up and down with excitement; because the more jumping one does, the less critical thinking one is likely to do.
*(The KKK's membership and leadership are still mainly Democratic. The late Robert Byrd, Democratic senator from West Virginia, had been a long-time member of the KKK, and, in fact, held high office in the group: his title was "Grand Kleagle," a kind of senior recruiting officer to bring in new members.)
Slaves were employed the way a miner employs a pick to break rock. But the choice of word is a mere matter of semantics. Slaves were assets whose acquisition involved some overhead but very little ongoing cost once acquired. They are the limiting case of what happens as wages go to zero relative to the cost of living.Quote:
But these "assets" were not *employees*, and the people maintaining them were not *employers*.
So when did this become a discussion of Obama. Stay on target Luke Skywalker.
>So anyone holding an opposing position is a zealot?!
Since when is holding uncritical support of minimum wage an "opposing" position? It's the mainstream party-line.
>People on minimum wage typically hold two or three minimum wage jobs without benefits
And by forcing employers to pay 9, 10, 11, 12 dollars/hour, these people will lose one or more of their jobs, or they won't won't get hired at all. Minimum wage laws cannot force anyone to hire anyone else. As the minimum wage increases, those with few skill and little experience remain unemployed.
In any case, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the majority of minimum-wage job holders are teenagers who still live at home.
Their jobs are low-skill, low-productivity, low-experience, *entry-level* jobs whose purpose is to gain experience. The function of these jobs mopping floors, cleaning dishes, slinging hash, etc. will never be to provide someone with a "living wage" (whatever that is) because those jobs don't produce enough value to the employer to justify her paying someone that high a wage. The purpose of these kinds of jobs is for the employee to gain experience and then move on and move up to a better job. That's "economic reality" and that's the way it has always been. The idea that one can legislate reality away is fantasy. You might as well try to legislate away the law of gravity.
> If an employer doesn't pay a living wage, he is not likely to get quality labor for his dollar.
Better:
If an employer doesn't *offer* a living wage to *potential employees* i.e., candidates who haven't been hired yet but are being interviewed for the job the employer isn't likely to find high quality labor assets waiting in her office to be interviewed. Why would high quality labor assets waste their time sitting in an office waiting to be interviewed for a job that pays crap, right?
The crux is this: does an employer need "high quality" labor for every job duty that needs to be done in her business? Does she need someone with a Ph.D. in finance, or someone with a degree in marketing, or someone with entrepreneurial experience, just to perform a low-skill, low-productivity job like mopping floors?
The employer doesn't think so. She simply needs anyone who can handle a mop without poking a customer in the eye. She needs a "low quality" asset who is simply competent and reliable. That's it.
And if the law forces her to regard a low-quality asset *as if* it were actually a high-quality one, she'll fire the low-quality one, or won't hire him to begin with. That low-quality asset will then be unemployed.
How does any of that help the economy?
You're assuming that if she already has hired a low-quality asset to mop floors at, e.g., $5.00/hour, the low-quality asset automatically turns into a high-quality asset when legislation makes the employer pay him $9.00/hour. Not so. The mopper is no doubt *happier* that he's receiving a higher wage, but that doesn't turn him into a high-quality asset from the employer's point of view.
What makes your support of not raising the minimum wage "critical" and those in opposition of your view "uncritical"?
The purpose of flipping hamburgers is to grill them evenly on both sides, it's not to gain experience at flipping hamburgers. By flipping those burgers the employee provides the product that the waiter shills to the customers. The workers produce the product and collect the revenue from which the employer makes his living and collects his profit. If an employer needs to hire people that earn for him a living income, then they too should earn a living wage. A waiter who is not holding down two other jobs and raising two kids on the side, is going to present a friendlier face to the customers and a chef who is not also holding down two other jobs might not spit in your salad.
>Slaves were employed the way a miner employs a pick to break rock. But the choice of word is a mere matter of semantics.
We shouldn't strive for some precision in language?
>Slaves were assets whose acquisition involved some overhead but very little ongoing cost once acquired.
Well, yes . . . that's what defined them as "slaves"! I mean, the reason there was "very little ongoing cost" once they were purchased was that *they weren't paid a wage*. That's the definition of a "slave".
And to return to semantics to "employ a slave" is not the same as to "employ a cashier", because the first usage implies ownership and use of a non-human tool the way you "employ a pick to break rock."
You're not acknowledging the profound *moral* difference between voluntary actions and coercive ones. Volunteering for the armed forces is voluntary; being drafted under penalty of a prison sentence is coercive. Choosing to live with a romantic/sex partner is voluntary; arranged marriages under penalty of having one's ears or nose cut off are coercive. Contributing to charity is voluntary; paying income tax under penalty of wage garnishment and penalties is coercive. Buying marijuana from a dealer on the street corner is voluntary; being mugged by a heroin addict for your wallet is coercive.
None of this says anything about "happiness". The guy who volunteers for the service might end up hating it, while the guy who had been drafted might have found it a great coming-of-age experience. I'm merely saying that the essence of the moral issue involves whether the exchange came about from the free will of the parties involved, or whether one of the wills or the will of a third party used force, or threatened force, to complete the transaction.
So that means the old-left slogan of "wage-slave" is an absurdity. If you're getting a wage, you're not a slave.
> They are the limiting case of what happens as wages go to zero relative to the cost of living.
Except that under conditions of unfettered capitalism and individual freedom, wages never approach zero; they go in the other direction. For over a thousand years of feudalism in Europe, the highest GDP that an individual ever earned was less than $3.00/day. Then in the 18th century, with the tearing down of privilege and the spread of property rights, free trade, enforcement of contracts in law courts, recognition of intellectual property (e.g., technical inventions) and the rise of the Factory System when labor was free to move around and accept any wage that factory owners bid for it and when capital was free to move around freely, too (e.g., moving from places of high taxes to low taxes; moving from places of bad farming weather to good farming weather, etc.) when all these things started happening simultaneously, wages began to rise. Today, the average wage in the west, stated in terms of GDP per person, is over $100/day.
The capitalist west did not go from a $3/day per person economy to a $100/day per person economy because of legislation. You cannot legislate wealth into existence.
Under British governance until 1997, Hong Kong had no labor legislation at all; none. No minimum wage laws, no laws requiring anyone to join a union or hire union workers. Guess how much unemployment they had? Zero. None. Additionally, wages were not "subsistence", because the way free markets form, there were always slightly more jobs available than there were potential employees to fill them, so employers if they wanted "quality labor" had to bid talented people away from competitors. And since there were no prescribed minimums, those who were not "quality labor" from the employers point of view the least skilled could still find employment because no laws prevented them from accepting a low, entry-level wage.
Today, under Chinese rule, though Hong Kong is still robust, a lot of new labor laws have been implemented since 1997. Result? Unemployment of the least skilled workers, between 4% and 7%.
It's not coincidence, global warming, or George Bush's fault. It's strictly labor policy.
>So when did this become a discussion of Obama.
For that matter, when did it become a discussion of slavery? I mentioned BHO because you previously criticized "corporate interests" and "robber barons" while lauding minimum wage unaware of the fact that one of the most vocal supporters of the minimum wage, BHO, is a lackey of the first and a patron of the second.
a groan is indeed not an argument Mr Clifford - it was a gut response to the poison of Rand's ideas and the notion of unregulated freedom for big business. Capitalism needs constraints. Business needs rules and regulations. Government plays this role.
Regarding the Koch Brothers their role in helping fund and create the so-called grassroots Tea Party is evidence enough of their pernicious influence on US politics and thus by extension global politics.
As I recall this thread was started to question Koch's motivation for seeking the abolition of the minimum wage. It's now gone off on an extended tangent about the limits and scope of unfettered capitalism.
Fine. But to return to the original post, if anyone thinks that the Koch brothers are pursuing the aim of abolishing the minimum wage out of any altruistic philosophical principles, they are simply fucking crazy.
I don't think that's our new man Mr Clifford's intention either, but maybe if we could get back to the point, please?
In terms of the Kochs' intentions, and this is merely yet another manifestation, all they want to do is destroy workers rights and get as close to slavery as the laws will allow.
OK everyone?
Sheesh!
:iagree::iagree::iagree:Quote:
Originally Posted by robertlouis
But the argument about unfettered capitalism is a recurring one here RL... given the huge swathe of support for "government of our backs" among otherwise intelligent people
>What makes your support of not raising the minimum wage "critical" and those in opposition of your view "uncritical"?
Years of studying the subject and debating it, as opposed to repeating what pop media journalists (and even a few, odd, pop Nobel Laureate economists like Paul Krugman) might opine about the matter. (You don't do that, but most supporters of the policy I've met do.)
By the way, I don't "support not raising the minimum wage." I support freedom of contract for the wage receiver and freedom of contract for the wage payer. I don't accept that one group has special rights that the other group doesn't have. We all have the same rights. I support *abolishing* minimum wages altogether as a violation of that basic moral principle, as well as for the usual economic reasons: it creates a glut of unskilled labor (mainly young, and often minority) who cannot find employment at that wage. Their unemployment then becomes chronic. Youth unemployment in the US is now over 16%, yet the recession supposedly ended a few years ago. I haven't the slightest doubt most of that 16% is caused by minimum wage laws.*
You won't be happy to learn that the original purpose of minimum wages in the US was to help labor unions which were uniformly white and male at the time stop blacks and women from offering their labor at competitive rates. The unions feared competition from these two new groups of unskilled labor entering the work force and found a way they could get congress to help price the newcomers out of the market: forbid them from accepting a low wage when it was offered. Though it was couched in "progressive" slogans of the day ("helping the poor live a dignified life", "preventing exploitation of the worker by the employer", etc.) the real aim of the minimum wage legislation was to make the more experienced and more expensive union man look more competitive by comparison. Think of it this way:
The minimum wage does the same to cheap unskilled labor as an import tariff does to cheap imported goods. It artificially raises the price others have to pay for it, in the hopes that people will buy the higher-priced domestic good (or the higher-priced, "higher quality" labor).
So if you want to think about minimum wage in an economically realistic way, without starry-eyed romanticism, think of it as a tariff imposed on cheap, unskilled labor.
>The purpose of flipping hamburgers is to grill them evenly on both sides,
From the consumer's point of view, because that's what he's paying for. From the viewpoint of the flipper with even the smallest amount of ambition who wants someday NOT to be a flipper, he needs to learn some things about arising at 7:00 a.m., donning a uniform, showing up on time, and saying "Yes Sir, Madam Boss Woman! What needs to be done today?" As well as, perhaps, learning some things about supervising a kitchen and, maybe eventually, running a restaurant. Those are all things one can learn as a burger flipper if one wants to, especially if one has even an ounce of ambition as, I believe, most young people who hold minimum wage jobs do have.
>By flipping those burgers the employee provides the product that the waiter shills to the customers.
No he doesn't. The product the waiter brings to a customer is called "a cooked burger"; the flipper only provides the "cooked" part to the final product. He doesn't provide the beef; he doesn't provide the grill; he doesn't provide the utensils; he doesn't bring the food to the table (the service ingredient); he didn't build or rent the space in which the restaurant is located (the mood or ambience ingredient); he doesn't provide the lighting or the A/C; etc. He provides one element in the final product.
And in the opinion of the consumer of that final product the gal eating the burger she might not agree with Washington, DC that the value of "cooked" is worth the additional $x.xx the law will make her pay in order to support the higher wage. She might go elsewhere. She might do her own cooking. She might order the burger and pay the higher price, but order no fries, or no Coke, or no dessert, etc. The extra spending power the flipper might enjoy clearly has to equal the lowered spending power the customer will suffer. Add the two together and they equal: no net increase in spending in the economy.
Lastly, if the consumer is unwilling to pay the higher price to make the higher wage sustainable, the employer who is ultimately relying on the consumer for this support will soon find that for each additional cooked burger she sells to each additional new customer, she is actually losing, or "leaking" a little bit of money to the minimum wage flipper, that she has to pay for personally, rather than out of gross revenues. Will this knowledge make an employer more likely to keep this worker (as well as eager to hire more)? Less likely? Or will she say, "Meh. So I'm losing a little bit of my own money to the flipper with each burger a customer buys. Not to worry. I'LL MAKE IT UP ON VOLUME!"?
*(youth unemployment in Greece, with much higher minimum wages laws and much more intrusion into workplace arrangements between employer, employees, and customers is over 62%. In Spain, it's over 56%. Yet what do you think the left in those countries want to do about it? You guessed it: "We need to raise the minimum wage more! Greek and Spanish youth must be able to earn a living wage!" They never learn.)
>groan is indeed not an argument Mr Clifford - it was a gut response to the poison of Rand's ideas and the notion of unregulated freedom for big business.
I know all about gut responses; I've had many myself.
First of all, I never mentioned Rand, nor is it fair to lump all ideas regarding individual freedom with her particular ideas on the matter. We could all play the guilt by association game, right? For example, if you support minimum wage, I could point out that Benito Mussolini did, too, and that special rights for workers, special obligations for employers, and a special panel of "Wise Ones" chosen by Mussolini (who, of course, was the "Wisest One of All") would decide and arbitrate all matters between them regarding wages, prices, benefits, retirement, so that everything was "fair" and nothing left to the capriciousness and anarchy of the market. Now, would it be fair if I said, "Groan! You're an Italian Fascist Corporatist!"
>Capitalism needs constraints.
Any social system needs constraints, but the point made by free market people like me is that there are different kinds of constraints and different sources for them, not just coercive constraints from government. Free markets already have a very powerful "self-emergent" property that functions as a constraint without necessarily meaning to, but which does so anyway: competition. Competition even the possibility or threat of competition is a very powerful constraining force on a firm's behavior, especially its behavior regarding innovation, quality controls, pricing of products, and yes, wage rates and hiring practices. What ultimately keeps Apple honest is the existence of Microsoft; what keeps Microsoft honest is the existence of Hewlett Packard; and what keeps them all sweating bricks is the fear felt in the back of the neck most strongly by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs that somewhere out there among 315 million Americans, is another young Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who have dropped out of college, said "fuck off!" to authority (including, established Big Businesses), and are busy inventing the next technological and social revolution in their garages; because those are the kinds of people who incite these kinds of upheavals.
>Business needs rules and regulations. Government plays this role.
Granted. But government needs rules and regulations, too. Who plays that role? The reason I'm for small, minimally-intrusive government, is that every time government becomes Big and Intrusive, it's always commandeered by Big Business (and other organized special interests, like Big Labor) for its own purposes. So government is not impartially establishing rules for everyone as you might think; it's implementing rules in a partisan way that benefits some groups (usually the lobbies) at the expense of everyone else.
Big Business, for example, usually lobbies government FOR many kinds of regulation in its own industries! Not against it! Though business will issue press releases and Public Service Announcements bragging of how public-spirited it is, that's just the sales pitch. From an economics perspective, the reason Big Business supports regulation in its own industries is obvious: most small startups trying to compete in that industry cannot afford to comply with the new set of regulations: it requires hiring compliance officers, doing additional paperwork, filing fees, etc. But a big established business has no problem absorbing these costs. Thus, Big Business uses lobbying in favor of regulating itself as an anti-competitive measure; basically, as a socially approved way of lousing up potential competition.
So, though you're sincere in your belief that government plays the role of "neutral rule-giver and regulator" in economic matters, I think it's naive. Government is a kind of sharp tool: it's necessary, it performs an important function, but it's dangerous, especially when it falls into one set of hands to serve one set of interests. Since there's no way to stop that from happening in a democracy especially in one whose constitution permits lobbying ("the people shall have the right to PETITION congress . . .") I see the only effective method as severely limiting the size, scope, and influence of that sharp tool in all sphere's of the individual's life: economic and social.
>Regarding the Koch Brothers their role in helping fund and create the so-called grassroots Tea Party is evidence enough of their pernicious influence on US politics and thus by extension global politics.
But this is precisely what I mean! In fact, who cares if he funded the Tea Party or didn't fund it? The only power the Tea Party could have over you would be the power it wielded from *government*. Shrink government, and the influence of the Tea Party shrinks, too!
In the 1950s, a free market economist once wrote, "I used to have nightmares over the fear that there might be communists in the Department of Agriculture!!! Then I realized, hey, wait! Just abolish the damn Department of Agriculture! Do we need it? No. Does it actually grow more food for more people? No. Does it add valuable things to the economy and to people's lives? No. In fact, it hinders the growing of more food for more people! So if you abolish the whole thing, you get rid of a useless bureaucracy AND you neutralize any supposed power some communists might be able to wield over you by means if it!"
I agree with him. And you should consider his words in relation to any concerns you might have regarding the nefarious Tea Party and its potential power over individual decision making. There's nothing you can do to stop people from voluntarily associating with one another and calling themselves "Tea Party Patriots"; and there's nothing you can do to stop a private individual like Koch, or anyone else, from saying, "Here's some money! Now go demonstrate and march up to Capitol Hill and make your cause known!" But you can make the Sharp Tool of government small enough and blunt enough that it can't do you or your interests any harm. If a special interest you dislike gains controls of a big sharp tool like a machete, beware; but if you do away with the machete and replace it with a nail-clipper, who cares if this or that special interest temporarily gains access to it?
You're afraid of nail-clippers?
>As I recall this thread was started to question Koch's motivation for seeking the abolition of the minimum wage. It's now gone off on an extended tangent about the limits and scope of unfettered capitalism.
Apologies. My own fault. This reply will be my final post on the matter!
>if anyone thinks that the Koch brothers are pursuing the aim of abolishing the minimum wage out of any altruistic philosophical principles, they are simply fucking crazy.
I don't understand what possible difference it makes what anyone's intentions are. Economics is a science. And while it doesn't have the same precision as the exact sciences like physics and chemistry, it's still a science, and you can still, broadly, make confident predictions regarding outcomes of policies. Whether anyone is well-intentioned or ill-intentioned, it doesn't change the fact that raising wages above what the employer and the employee would have privately agreed to between themselves WILL cause other potential employees NOT to be hired. Those "could-have-been-hired-at-a-lower-wage-but-now-cannot" potential employees most likely will be 1) young, and 2) black. Many supporters of the minimum wage didn't take them into account because they are a tacit, unseen effect of minimum wage policies a bit like radioactive "fallout": you see the rain, but you don't see the radiation. You see the lucky employee who gets a 23% increase from 7.25/hr to $9.00/hr, but you don't see the unlucky, less skilled, less experienced kid who *could* have been hired at the original $7.25/hr rate, or perhaps *might* have been hired at $8.00/hr, but now sits home unemployed because no one thinks his particular skills and experience are worth that 23% increase to $9.00/hr.
It's a real effect touching real people, but it generally stays *unseen*, which is why it generally remains *unconsidered* by many when they think about the minimum wage issue.
Whether Alan Krueger (Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors) has wonderfully Christian, big-hearted altruistic intentions in supporting the minimum wage or not, it doesn't change the facts about the fallout of higher and higher minimum wages. And whether the Brothers Koch have mean, narrow, callous, and self-interested intentions in not supporting minimum wage increases, it also doesn't change any facts about the fallout of higher and higher minimum wages. In other words as in any science the effect is independent of the intentions of the cause.
Are you really telling us that an injurious policy becomes a beneficial policy as long as it is implemented with good intentions? Don't you remember that line about "the road to hell"?
>all they want to do is destroy workers rights and get as close to slavery as the laws will allow
Do workers have "special rights" that others don't have? I thought there were only universal rights we each have as *individuals*, not special rights we get if we're a worker, and which we lose if we change from being a worker to being an employer. You mean each special interest group has its own special rights?
Regarding slavery:
Slavery in the US (and in all other countries at all other times, I believe) was not a product of the market. It was a *legally sanctioned* institution, sustained by a network of laws, conceived, passed, implemented, and enforced, by government. The smaller and less intrusive government is, the less it can implement and sustain slavery.
In the past slaves were utilized by both governments and private businesses (to build pyramids, hoist sails and pick cotton). In the Southern states of the U.S. the slave market flourished in part because it was unfettered by government strictures. Southern growers lobbied Washington to keep slavery legal and bring more slave states into the union. I say, "in part" because the other important factor was the market for cotton. If a significant number of plantations cut their costs by the employment of slave labor, then to survive financially the other plantations must too. It's the same argument being used today to pay workers less than the worth of their labor.Quote:
Slavery in the US (and in all other countries at all other times, I believe) was not a product of the market.
Koch and his Buddies know the Bush Party that lasted eight years is O-ver,
and they know Obama and Hillary need them, it's just a question of how much. There is a legitimate question of who steers the ship, Team Koch or Team Obama. The American Dream is a dream with TEETH, and the Koch Bros are living that dream. That's the way it works. You can't ask the Kochs to give up their Championship belt, you've got to take it from them. That's how you spread the money around.
The American dream is sketchy on if you can step on the hands of the people below you on the ladder. I think the real action will happen when Hillary steps in, she's got like a 20 year head start on these guys with their smirking lawyers. Obama will be remembered for Obamacare, he's the Black Jesus. Hillary's going to have an operation to attach Elephant Balls to her Vagina. Obama has to be a Saint because he's black. Clinton is going to have to be a Prize-Fighter because she's a woman. It really takes eight years to figure out what's going on, and Hilary Clinton has been prepping for President since '92.
Every time the subject of raising the minimum wage comes up, we get bombarded with the same old doom & gloom scenarios about how people will be put out of work, or that businesses will fold, or that prices will skyrocket, etc... The debunked Austrian School gets dusted off, amid the hand wringing & whining, & everybody gets buried in long winded diatribes & lists of bullshit talking points.
Time for a reality check:
Despite all the pseudo-theoretical economic caste theology, a raise in the minimum wage has never had any effect whatsoever on the rates of unemployment or inflation. Regardless how well put together the argument seems, I can't think of a single reason to seriously pay attention to prognostications that never pan out.
>Every time the subject of raising the minimum wage comes up, we get bombarded with the same old doom & gloom scenarios about how people will be put out of work, or that businesses will fold, or that prices will skyrocket, etc... The debunked Austrian School gets dusted off, amid the hand wringing & whining, & everybody gets buried in long winded diatribes & lists of bullshit talking points.
No one mentioned anything about the "debunked" Austrian School.
>Despite all the pseudo-theoretical economic caste theology, a raise in the minimum wage has never had any effect whatsoever on the rates of unemployment. Time for a reality check:
Yep. Here goes.
See:
http://epionline.org/downloads/KruegerStudy.pdf
And see:
http://www.economics.uci.edu/files/e...Neumark-08.pdf
"In the end, our view is that the weight of the empirical evidence is generally consistent with the view of traditional economists that the low-wage labor market can be reasonably approximated by the neoclassical competitive model."
[Note that the authors say nothing about Austrian economics; they mention "traditional economists" and the very mainstream "neoclassical" ways of looking at economic data. And what is the "neoclassical competitive model" held by traditional economists? It's the commonsense one that anyone who has ever run a lemonade stand understands: if the cost of one of your ingredients goes up in price, and if you cannot successfully pass along that cost increase to the customer, you'll use less of that ingredient. As far as lemonade goes, that includes water, lemons, sugar, and labor. Substitute any other business for "lemonade stand" and you've got the idea.]
"As a result, we also believe that raising the minimum wage leads to economic distortions and often has unintended adverse consequences for the employment opportunities of low-skilled workers. Of course, as we have argued elsewhere, the effects of the minimum wage on employment represents only one piece of the analysis necessary to assess whether minimum wages are a useful policy tool for improving the economic position of those at the bottom of the income distribution which we believe is the ultimate goal of minimum wage policy. In particular, a more comprehensive review that includes the implications of the minimum wage for the levels and distributions of wages, employment, incomes, and human capital accumulation, as well as consideration of alternative policies, is ultimately needed to assess whether raising the minimum wage is good economic policy."
"Of course, if minimum wages do not generate disemployment effects among low-skilled workers, it is far more likely that they have beneficial effects at the bottom of the income distribution. But given that the weight of the evidence points to disemployment effects, the wisdom of pursuing higher minimum wages hinges in potentially complex ways on the tradeoffs between the effects of minimum wages on different workers and other economic agents, and whether other policies present more favorable tradeoffs."
And see:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...278669840.html
October 2009
"Earlier this year, economist David Neumark of the University of California, Irvine, wrote on these pages that the 70-cent-an-hour increase in the minimum wage would cost some 300,000 jobs. Sure enough, the mandated increase to $7.25 took effect in July, and right on cue the August and September jobless numbers confirm the rapid disappearance of jobs for teenagers."
[I suppose we're supposed to put this down to coincidence? Bad luck? A right-wing conspiracy in reporting the data?]
"The September teen unemployment rate hit 25.9%, the highest rate since World War II and up from 23.8% in July. Some 330,000 teen jobs have vanished in two months. Hardest hit of all: black male teens, whose unemployment rate shot up to a catastrophic 50.4%. It was merely a terrible 39.2% in July.
The biggest explanation is of course the bad economy. But it's precisely when the economy is down and businesses are slashing costs that raising the minimum wage is so destructive to job creation. Congress began raising the minimum wage from $5.15 an hour in July 2007, and there are now 691,000 fewer teens working.
As the minimum wage has risen, the gap between the overall unemployment rate and the teen rate has widened, as it did again last month. (See nearby chart.) The current Congress has spent billions of dollarsincluding $1.5 billion in the stimulus billon summer youth employment programs and job training. Yet the jobless numbers suggest that the minimum wage destroyed far more jobs than the government programs helped to create."
[Remember: the main thing about advocating minimum wage is to feel good about it because it supposedly indicates good intentions. One can always ignore any attempt to closely analyze the effects it might have on groups other than the lucky ones who get the wage increase and manage to keep their jobs by invoking some "magic talisman" names that drive away all skepticism: "Rand!" "Koch!" "Austrian School!"]
I did. Nobody else was sourcing the basis of this bogus economic theology.Quote:
No one mentioned anything about the "debunked" Austrian School.
As for the links:
First one's an Op-Ed. Who cares?
Second is too, but tries to be precise. There's these pesky phrases that keep popping up in the quoted reports to screw with the preconceived conclusions. Things like "imprecise data", or "negligible employment effect", or even "positive employment...", & the models pose their own set of problems. Modeling precise economic segments requires a stable overall economic model to measure against. Doesn't exist. Pinpointing a specific cause for fluctuating numbers in a fluctuating economy is a fool's errand.
Healthcare understood as medical insurance is often independent of healthcare understood as the science and scientific practice of medicine. The best country in the world for healthcare of the latter kind can be the worst country in the world for the former. You got cancer and you have a decent middle range income, you might want to go to Mayo Clinic; no matter where you’re from. It’s not at all surprising patients come to the U.S. for healthcare of the latter kind. They certainly aren’t coming to the U.S. for healthcare of the former kind.
An insurance program pools the money collected by its clients. When a client gets sick, he is given a check for part of his medical expenses drawn from the pool. If every client got sick (or just a number beyond a certain threshold), the company would go belly up, because medical costs are way greater than the amount any client can even afford to put into the pool. So too few clients, the probability that more than the threshold number of clients get sick moves toward certainty.
That is one reason why having hundreds of thousands of small insurers just doesn’t work. A viable insurance company has to have a large number of clients paying into the common pool. Even large companies do their best to skimp on the payoffs and maximize profits. They find ways to drop clients with chronic illnesses, who are aging etc. They refuse to accept clients with previous conditions. Some have tricked clients with long term conditions to drop their insurance and then refuse to renew because of their “previous” condition. Insurance agencies decide which procedures recommended by your doctor will be covered. If you can get by with a less costly more risky procedure, they may not approve the safer, more reliable procedure. These schemes and dozens of others are why medical insurance companies are regulated. The smaller the pool available to a company the greater the pressure to cut expenditures; i.e. the greater the need to short-shrift the client. Selling insurance across State borders is not a way to increase competition; it’s a procedure for getting out from under one particular State’s regulatory regime.
The desire, on the part of insurance companies to make a profit, is one driver to price of medical insurance. Another is the cost of pharmaceuticals and medical procedures. Pricing lists at private hospitals (there weren’t any privates to speak of four decades ago) are essentially constructed willy-nilly, charging ten dollars for a cotton ball one week and a dime the next. Each insurance company insists on its own forms to be filled out by the doctor. Large staffs of people are hired by doctors and hospitals just to fill-out, send-in and file insurance forms. There obviously needs to be more enforced uniformity and more regulation, not less.
National healthcare is for people who can’t afford healthcare. There are lot’s of people in this Nation who put off trips to doctor because the cost of a trip to a general practitioner would wipe out their budget for the month. It can be uniform. It can be simple. It can have the leverage to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies. It can regulate pricing in hospitals. It can have a large pool that everyone pays into. It will answer to the people, not an isolated set of shareholders who were never elected to determine which of your medical procedures will be approved.
>>>Healthcare understood as medical insurance is often independent of healthcare understood as the science and scientific practice of medicine.
Not "often independent", but always independent. Health insurance and health care are two different things. For empirical proof, just ask the poor slobs waiting and waiting and waiting in lines in Canada and the UK. They have lots of insurance (translated as, "the right to get in line and wait") and not enough health care (translated as "treatment for their conditions").
>>>The best country in the world for healthcare of the latter kind can be the worst country in the world for the former. You got cancer and you have a decent middle range income, you might want to go to Mayo Clinic; no matter where youre from. Its not at all surprising patients come to the U.S. for healthcare of the latter kind. They certainly arent coming to the U.S. for healthcare of the former kind.
Except that the former kind is utterly useless in itself: all the best, cheapest, most generous insurance policies in the world won't cure you of your diseases. Only the latter kind of medical care can do that. The purpose of the former is to be able to get the latter. So which is more important: access to a piece of paper called a "policy" with lots of small print on it that says you are "guaranteed" all kinds of wonderful benefits at public expense for every imaginable condition; or the actual care that will treat you, or cure you, of one or more of those conditions?
Most people would say they prefer the latter, especially if they understood that there is no necessary connection between "easy access to pieces of paper called policies" and "easy access to high quality medical care that could actually treat them."
Hint: Britons don't get it. Their thinking goes like this: "Nanny government promises me free care. All I know is that if I get a heart attack, I'm guaranteed at some point to be taken to a free hospital and hooked up to all kinds of tubes." That's all they know. That's all they want to know. If you told them, "But the care you'll get sucks, as proven by your crappy survival rates after a heart attack survival rates that are much higher in the US, despite having no such 'guarantees'". They'll shrug. The shrug really means, "I don't care about survival rates. I care about the fact that the ambulance ride, the hospital stay, and the tubes are free!"
There's obviously no arguing with that.
Of course if you can't afford to pay for a doctor's care, then it doesn't matter how distinguished and knowledgeable he is. Affordable care is what one chiefly needs.Quote:
So which is more important: access to a piece of paper called a "policy" with lots of small print on it that says you are "guaranteed" all kinds of wonderful benefits at public expense for every imaginable condition; or the actual care that will treat you, or cure you, of one or more of those conditions?
People come to the Mayo Clinic because they can afford care that most people cannot. This is not evidence that our healthcare system provides better care on average to the average person.
Insurance has always been regulated. As a system it is almost unworkable if there are no regulations. Before PPACA it was regulated by each state with its own set of laws effecting the risk pooling arrangement. There were laws regulating what providers could participate, surcharges against certain patients to be used to subsidize others, and mandates for community rather than experience rating for certain types of insurance.
Without such regulations the system will tend to fall apart. Although adverse selection is generally a problem with community ratings, where the better than average risks will opt out of the system leaving only the sickest, experience rating is also problematic. Someone who has recently been sick will not be able to afford a premium individually tailored to their risk.
The quality of healthcare depends on issues of access. You don't have a good system of healthcare if most people can't afford necessary procedures or are made bankrupt by illness. I don't care how many wealthy people flock to our best institutions.
>>>Of course if you can't afford to pay for a doctor's care, then it doesn't matter how distinguished and knowledgeable he is. Affordable care is what one chiefly needs.
Quite so. That's why 1/3rd of all poor people eligible for Medicaid turn it down. They know and studies prove that they will have better medical care if they have NO insurance at all, and simply present themselves to a doctor as a charity case. The doctors know this, too, because Medicaid restricts their ability to practice medicine in whatever ways they might deem best for the patient's health.
Another example:
Do you own a car? If so, you have car insurance. When you engage in regular care and maintenance for your car filling up with petrol, oil change, spark plug replacements, tune-ups, new tires, tire rotations, etc. do you pull out your auto insurance card and hand it to the mechanic with the idea that your insurance provider will pay for it? No. Of course not. YOU pay for these things out-of-pocket. The insurance becomes relevant when, God forbid, you're in an accident.
If some weird government program were implemented that required auto insurance to cover buying gas, oil changes, tire rotation, tune-ups, etc., do you believe the prices of these things done by an ordinary mechanic would increase, decrease, or stay the same?
>>>There are lots of people in this Nation who put off trips to doctor because the cost of a trip to a general practitioner would wipe out their budget for the month.
I doubt that. One reason medical care is expensive in this country is that many people who ought to put off trips to the doctor because it's unnecessary, do not do so. The additional demand "pull" on the supply of medical care made possible by bureaucratically regulated insurance policies that mandate coverage for just about everything at taxpayer expense has the perverse effect of raising prices.
Example:
If government decided that all poor people should have the same access to filet mignon as the wealthy, it might implement a program with a taxpayer-subsidized coupon, which a poor person could exchange for filet mignon at a supermarket or butcher's for the additional cost (a "co-pay") of, e.g., $1.00. If filet mignon is $12.00/pound on average, a qualified poor person would get his voucher from a government agency and hand it, plus one dollar of his own, to the butcher, and get a pound of meat. The voucher would therefore be worth $11.00.
Obviously, this has nothing to do with the rich. They still consume as much filet mignon as before, with no problem paying $12.00/pound for it.
But now look at things from the butcher's point of view. He doesn't care who pays, or where the money comes from. All he knows is that before the government program, only the rich were buying filet mignon from him (let's say, 50 customers a week); but after the program is implemented, he sells filet mignon to 150 people: 50 rich people and 100 poor people with vouchers. That's fine for him! But the question is this: what happens to the price of filet mignon when so many more people have access to it? Does it go up? Down? or remain the same?
Obviously, with 3-times the number of people buying filet mignon as before the program, the price of filet mignon goes up! And it makes no difference if the government starts a propaganda campaign about the "greed of the butchers!" The price of filet mignon will rise as it responds to increased demand. Period!
How high will it go? Hard to say exactly. But it will probably go up to the point where it can "level off" of the demand, relative to its supply, so that it will go back to only having 50 customers again! So let's say it rises to $23/pound. The wealthy can still buy all they want; but the poor only have a voucher worth $11.00, so their "co-pay" will be $12.00/pound . . . which is exactly what they had to pay BEFORE the big-hearted, well-intentioned government-run program to give the poor greater access to filet-mignon! Did the program work? No. Perhaps briefly, in the short-run, when it first started. But the long-run effect is zero! Additionally, there's now a big bureaucracy, with big bureaucrats, that have to be supported in the "US Department of Filet Mignon for the Poor" in Washington, DC.
Now, substitute "health insurance" or "medical care" for "filet mignon" and you'll see why government handouts to the poor don't have the effect of the ones intended by their supporters. By inducing people even poor people to use more medical services via health insurance policies, polices AND medical care goes UP in price, responding to the artificially increased demand.
And if you think that government might deal with those nasty, greedy butchers by simply mandating to them that they NOT raise their prices even in the face of 3x the demand for the product one of two things will occur: they butchers will sell out quickly and those showing up a day or two later with their vouchers and a dollar will find that there's nothing left (this is called a "shortage"); or, the butchers might intentionally remove their filet mignon from the shelves and store it in deep freezers, hoping the stupid price-controls will be abolished after the next election. If it's not abolished, you know what they'll do? They will sell it on a black market for the actual market price of filet-mignon, or they will take it home to their families and consume it themselves. Either way: it won't be on the shelves for the poor people with their government coupons and their dollar bills.
Again, substitute medical care for filet mignon and you'll see the effect of government/bureaucratic management as opposed to profit/loss management. In programs that put price controls on medical care or health insurance, there are always shortages of both.
And finally: government might respond to the threat of a shortage by not only mandating a set price for filet-mignon, but mandating to customers how much they can purchase: e.g., only one pound per customer every alternate Monday and Friday if your Social Security number begins with an odd number, or every alternative Tuesday and Saturday if it begins with an even one.
This is called "rationing."
It's completely whimsical and arbitrary, of course, but people will feel "assured" and "relieved" that their government "cares for them" by "protecting them from those greed, graspy butchers."
Replace "filet mignon" with "health insurance" or "medical care" and you've got the idea. I don't see how the inevitable rationing of medical care ultimately provides greater access to medical care for the poor. It's a bit like telling a poor person, "You only have to pay $1.00 + a voucher to a butcher to get filet mignon; unfortunately for you, none is left. But before the program, there was lots of filet mignon available and you had to pay $12/lb. for it! Surely you're much better off now!"
Additionally, much of the increase in medical care costs is a direct result of bureaucratic regulation that requires constant 1) compliance and filing costs on the part of doctors, clinics, hospitals, and other providers; and 2) implementation-policing costs on the part of the bureaucrats who pull fat salaries, pension, and benefits.
I hope you understand that as regulation increases in the holy name of "uniformity", the size of the bureaucracies (and the number of bureaucrats) standing between the otherwise direct economic line of "patient-doctor" grows, often exponentially; and that, furthermore, most of the costs of such centrally-directed systems have to do with the political/bureaucratic side of things. In all nationalized healthcare systems in the world, most of the money from tax revenues gets consumed by the managing bureaucracy . . . the lion's share does NOT go to the patient or the medical care provider.
None of this helps the poor, who are just as interested as anyone in the middle class as getting a cure for their ailments, and not just a piece of paper that says "You have the right to get in line and wait."
>>>It can be uniform. It can be simple.
Simplicity is never a result of government regulation or hampering of voluntary trade in the market, and never has been (and never will be), precisely because nothing the government does is motivated by the need to earn more than their costs. That's precisely why government programs are always so wasteful of natural resources and human labor: precisely because it need not earn a profit, government has no way of assessing whether the economic value of the things it uses (call it the "inputs") is of lower value than the things it provides to the public (call it the "outputs"). Obviously, if an economic input is of lower value than the economic output, then the program is economically successful: it's providing something of higher value to people that they wouldn't be able to get on their own had they simply gone directly to those inputs. Conversely, if the output is of lower value to people than the inputs, the program is wasting resources; it's not directing those inputs to their highest-valued uses to consumers . . . "highest valued" means "most important from the consumers' own point of view," not a nanny-bureaucrat telling them what's most important for them.
There's no way for a government, "non-market" institution to solve this fundamental problem.
There's nothing wrong the simplicity as a value, but I'm no admirer of uniformity. What the poor need more than anything else just like anyone else are CURES for their ailments; and CURES are the result of INNOVATION, not uniformity.
You don't want a healthcare system run like the armed services, where everything is uniform: dress codes, speech patterns, basic training, pay grades, triplicate forms, etc.
You want a healthcare MARKET modeled along the same lines as the vibrant consumer electronics market: constant innovation, intense competition, lots of price wars.
The poor have all the access that everyone else to iPods, iPads, iPhones, notebooks, desktops, smartphones, BlackBerries, etc.
I want the poor to have the same kind of choices and access to medical care as they do to consumer electronics. The way to accomplish this is by structuring the market for healthcare along the same lines as the market for consumer electronics and computer technologies: NO ARTIFICIAL BARRIERS TO ENTRY.
For some reason, you want to structure the market for healthcare along the same lines as the "market" for postal delivery by the US Postal Service, driver licenses as provided by the Department of Motor Vehicles, and the US Army.
Somehow, regimentation in the name of "simplicity" and "uniformity" is supposed to result in lots of choices choice in both quality and price for the poor. But it actually has the opposite effect, as well as stifling the life-blood of medical care which is innovation.