Do people 'deserve' universal health care?

[gagged_Louise]

Most of this isn't going to be directly about health care or health spending but I'm taking the time to reply on some points from -mostly - Thorne's latest post because we're running into issues of social equality and the chances to realize your gifts in a modern society here, and these kind of underpin our reasoning about if public-funded health care.would be desirable or not.

Sure, there are many people who, perhaps through no fault of their own, are always on the bad end of every deal, unable to pull themselves up. And programs which help them, which give them the opportunities to get out of that rut can, and should be, of high priority in any society. But there are many who are more interested in what the government can give them rather than in learning what the government can do to help them build their lives. I have no problems with programs which teach people. I only question the efficacy of programs which give away benefits and priveleges to those who do not want to earn them and who will actively oppose anything which might force them to earn it.

Handing out money on a charity basis or earmarking small sums to be used for rent, food, children's allotments etc - while putting medical and education aid at a bare minimum - is one thing, empowering people to really get gping and kicking off the limitations of living in a chaotic, run-down neighbpurhood or having to accept working for 6 bucks an hour is another. You won't get poor people from the gutter to rise up by handing them fifty bucks a week and then keeping tabs on them every moment and treating them like they're stupids who are liable to toss away the cash on liquor or toys and then just ask for more, like they're children. The trend of policies in Amrica has been to push the wealth to the top - the finace crisis and the recession of late has made that really clear I think. And most American (or European) small businessers and artisans do not earn many hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and are not in a position to expand their firms a lot. Joe the Plumber is not any plumber.

Rockefeller, of course, is one of those who inherited his wealth. While less impressive than someone who's earned it on his own, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Should we force people like that to give away all their money and start from the bottom? That's ridiculous!
But Bill Gates used existing infrastructure, the same kinds of things that anyone else could use, to identify a need, build a product to fulfill that need, market that product and create an empire from it. As far as I know, he didn't have any more to work with than anybody else could have access to, other than his own intelligence and abilities. Shall we condemn him because he was smart enough to recognize potential? Shall we strip him of his money, just because he did something we didn't think of? Also ridiculous.

No, of course Mr. Gates isn't to be stripped of most of his money, it's a more interesting issue if he (or Microsoft) should be allowed always to set their own prices no limits and exploit their advantage - and that's why they got those hefty penalties from the European Union competition overseers.

Bill Gates and his likes were able to concentrate on computers from an early age - to take just Gates, the mothers' association at his school bought a computer for him and he was able to take time off from regular classroom hours getting acquainted with computing and software from his early teens onwards.

At thirteen [ca 1968] he enrolled in the Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school. When he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy an ASR-33 teletype terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the school's students.[12] Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest.

I doubt they'd have done that for a black pupil who was at the school as a free charity guest and whose dad was an assistant plumber. And Silicon Valley or Stanford University aren't places that came into being from a bunch of empty-hands geeks standing outside the fold of the established economy; that's just the legend. To give Gates added credit, I think he's very aware that one can't sit around and wait for the market's invisible hand to do the trick, he made that plain in a tv interview I saw recently.

The internet, too, has been helped massively by public spending both in America and Europe - departments of defense, CERN (where the html language was developed), university pc networks, state telephone companies, the space programmes which freed up lots of resources and forced engineers to take on new challenges of developing faster chips and btter signal capacities, and so on.

I see we're moving onto the "spreading the wealth" tag here. I was trying to avoid any general discussion about socialism, I'm not an ideological socialist and it seems many Americans simply throw together social liberals, social democrats and stalinists. Planned command economy isn't my rallying cry (though it's a delicious irony that the private spending spree economy of the Bush era ended in the biggest socialization moves of modern American history: the buy-up of Fannie and Freddie and the bail-outs of banks, possibly of the big three car companies and then what...)

I'd agree with MMI that the American fear of everything that could remotely be called "socialism" is a leftover from the 19th century, and it's used as a tool by the fat cats who stand to gain from a highly moralizing attitude to money, a belief that society is about the survival of the fittest. Most companies today don't handle their budget planning as if it were a household budget, they plainly assume that they can get money - public money, by loans or from risk investors - if they need to expand. So it's not really about clawing a share of the market with what you got from the start, rather about what you can corner through alliances with other people, other companies. If they'd all started in a garage some of them would have foundered very soon, no matter how good the ideas.

It's an illusion I think that you can have a society that's 85% middle class. Neither the pure free market nor a state bolstered by ebullient welfare programs (which, by the way, isn't exactly how it looks in Sweden these days either) will lift everybody into the gilded middle class where your kids feel they can become anything, you have a year's wages on the bank, a stack of cd's and dvd's and a thriving pensions savings account. You seem to assume that the free market will perform that feat, and if some people don't get into the middle class it's a sign they were soft bags and deserve to be looked down upon or stepped on. Look, any modern society has a large working class, it's just that they don't always work in assembly-line factories or sweatshops..

Sure, it takes more work than starting with money, and perhaps some lucky breaks. But it can be done. But if they're not willing to try, not willing to do the work, they will be stuck where they are, and they will teach their children to accept what they are, rather than work to make themselves better.

Yes, there are leeches in any social class, or simply people desperate to cling to what they have. There's lots of children of the rich who take it for granted that they inherently deserve their handbags and jewellery, their designer clothes and their expensive education because they were born into it or because they think "Dad started from the bottom and now he's a CEO - and I've inherited his stamina so I have a right to that kind of respect". I'll just say Paris Hilton, she truly gave this arrogance a face when she got nailed for drunk driving and was sentenced to a brief prison term. There's many other examples.

George W Bush is reputed to have told a professor at Harvard Business School in the mid-1970s who showed the film The Grapes of Wrath to his students - he did this in order to show an angle of the 1930s depression that he realized many of them might not know from their own home background: "Why are you showing this commie movie? Look, people are poor because they're lazy!" Point taken. Of course the hobos in the film could have cut their beards and got a job, or if it were today, their children could have enrolled with the army and then had some of their college years paid for. So?

Also. I agree that most people don't want to FEEL like they are a drain on society but I think at this point (especially in American culture) there is an entire sect of our population who do not believe that's what they are. You have to first realize that you *are* a drain on society before you can feel some sort of remorse for that.

Excuse me vox, what kind of a height would that kind of condamnation be issued from? "Many people need" to have it rubbed into their minds that they "are a drain on society"?? I don't see what gives a corporate CEO, a senator, a US president, or even a bishop,a wife or a "staid middle American man" the right to spit people in the face like that. And for sure, some of the gist of those words was aimed at people you do not know. Everyone of us has a right to choose whom we want to mix with (though not all are in a *position* to make that choice freely, it's often about money and work) but there's no general right I think to just heave slop on a group of people you don't know.