Recently, Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas took to the floor of the House to talk about Wikileaks, transparency in government, and the case of Daniel Ellsberg, the 
Pentagon Papers, and the New York Times. He spoke about how the Iraq War was based on lies. He asked how the U. S. government should prosecute a citizen of Australia for publishing classified U. S. documents that he did not steal. Paul also said the following: “Revealing the real nature and goal of our presence in so many Muslim countries is a threat to our empire, and any revelation of this truth is highly resented by those in charge.”
Paul posed a number of questions at the end of his talk:
Number 1: Do the America People deserve know the truth regarding the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?
Number 2: Could a larger question be how can an army private access so much secret information?
Number 3: Why is the hostility mostly directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?
Number 4: Are we getting our moneys worth of the 80 Billion dollars per year spent on intelligence gathering?
Number 5: Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war or Wikileaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?
Number 6: If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the first amendment and the independence of the internet?
Number 7: Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?
Number 8: Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death and corruption?
Number 9: Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?
Thomas Jefferson had it right when he advised ‘Let the eyes of vigilance never be closed.’ I yield back the balance of my time.
Source: Huffington Post
– Elaine Magliaro
lol, perfect example – let me try again – “<"
Tony,
Careful using that “” style of bracket. It can generate extraneous HTML code.
Re-post to try again.
@Puzzling: >> Government encourages students to study art history when they agree to lend tens or hundreds of thousands for such a degree in the absence of marketability. <> The result is a U.S. workforce that is misaligned to world job demands. <> This delays entry to the workforce, encourages unproductive debt, lowers lifetime earnings and delays retirement. <<
So what? For a person that claims to believe in liberty and to reject central planning, you have a shitload of authoritarian, totalitarian ideas about engineering society to be "productive" and forcing people to maximize "lifetime earnings" and be educated so they are "aligned with world job demands." You are a totalitarian thinker that doesn't understand that freedom is the freedom to be stupid, misaligned, in debt, and unproductive in the eyes of others, even in the eyes of everybody. When you demand these things or point at them to justify your control of other people, you are rejecting the very foundations of freedom.
If a functioning adult wants to go into "unproductive debt" to get an art history degree and be unemployable, why is that your business? As long as they pay off the debt, why should I care? Perhaps they just love art and the "productive" aspect of the debt is they got to spend six years being fascinated and loving it. I don't know why they do it, that is none of my business, and none of yours.
Wow, I don’t know what I did to turn that thing blue. Sorry.
@Puzzling: >>> Government encourages students to study art history when they agree to lend tens or hundreds of thousands for such a degree in the absence of marketability. <<>> The result is a U.S. workforce that is misaligned to world job demands. <<>> This delays entry to the workforce, encourages unproductive debt, lowers lifetime earnings and delays retirement. <<<
So what? For a person that claims to believe in liberty and to reject central planning, you have a shitload of authoritarian, totalitarian ideas about engineering society to be "productive" and forcing people to maximize "lifetime earnings" and be educated so they are "aligned with world job demands." You are a totalitarian thinker that doesn't understand that freedom is the freedom to be stupid, misaligned, in debt, and unproductive in the eyes of others, even in the eyes of everybody. When you demand these things or point at them to justify your control of other people, you are rejecting the very foundations of freedom.
If a functioning adult wants to go into "unproductive debt" to get an art history degree and be unemployable, why is that your business? As long as they pay off the debt, why should I care? Perhaps they just love art and the "productive" aspect of the debt is they got to spend six years being fascinated and loving it. I don't know why they do it, that is none of my business, and none of yours.
Puzzling,
The discussion so far has been about services directly provided by the government ans student loans are regulated and subsidized by the government, but for the most part not directly offered. I’d say that’s a pretty big difference.
Furthermore, my argument about the “superiority” is in one realm only, access. Let’s look at an actually relevant example in education. Private Vs. Public high-schools. Private schools are free to turn people away, public schools are not. Thus, if a society has a goal that as large of a percent of the general public should earn a high school degree as possible, funding public schools is the better tool for the job.
To repeat: There are some things that a just and well run society gives everyone access to.
The key word is everyone.
Ekerya,
Good thing I’m not Tony C then.
Although, here’s a fun fact for you: The post office would be in the black were it not for a change in the pension structure mandated by a 2006 law. If my interpretation of the following is right, that goes away in 2018.
“The Another key aspect of the law entails funding for Postal Service retirement and health benefits. Each year over the next decade, the Postal Service must pay between $5.4 billion and $5.8 billion into the new Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits Fund. Without this pre-payment requirement, the Postal Service’s operating net income would have been $2.8 billion. ”
http://www.usps.com/strategicplanning/cs08/chpt1_pg7.htm
@Chan: First, what does my profession have to do with my logic? I have no conflicts of interest, if that is your question. As I have stated before, I am a research scientist at a university; I am in an untenured position and I pay my own freight.
Second, I guess we misunderstand each other, because I truly cannot comprehend what you are objecting to. Do you deny in principle that a DMV could charge a fee to cover its expenses? Divide the expenses by the number of applicants; we can guess with pretty high accuracy how many there will be based on the census of 15 year olds and our own past records of expiring licenses, and by looking at our own past records of same-month applicants. A little high school level statistics can go a long way here. Every well run business serving the public does this.
If you want to argue it cannot be exact, I say so what? All that matters is getting the long run average right, and the pricing can be corrected as need be.
To the extent that the post office and DNV and other services ARE subsidized, that is typically a political decision, not a practical one. The USPS is a tightly run ship and knows exactly what its expenses will be, except for energy costs. They know to the penny what stamps and other postage should cost. They have been in operation long enough to know exactly what to expect day by day.
It is politicians that want to avoid being criticized for letting the price of a postage stamp go up, so they funnel money from other taxes into the post office to avoid that public criticism. Or perhaps they are progressives and believe in subsidies to relieve the financial hardship on the poor, I don’t know. But it is a political decision, not an error in management.
This is arithmetic in a governmental philosophy discussion, it doesn’t require any external examples. I don’t know what “facts” you seek.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40654227/ns/us_news-wikileaks_in_security
British judge grants bail to WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange
What Buddha just said…
puzzling,
“When the consumer sees the next drug, medical service, diagnostic, discretional surgery, or simple office visit as virtually “free”, there is less debate on the merits, and more overall demand and consumption. In my analysis, this behavior in a “free system” is the largest single cost driver to health costs.”
This raises another point: banning the advertising of drugs.
That whole consumption/demand model you point to is a direct result of pharma being able to advertise prescription medications. It used to be that someone got sick, they went to the doctor and the doctor suggested drugs if appropriate based upon what you were paying them for – their expert opinion. Now people see a commercial, hear symptoms that vaguely match some of theirs (real or imagined) and then “go in and ask for it by name”. Letting pharmaceutical companies advertise was a huge mistake. It plays off the fears and hypochondria of the generally non-medically educated or plain old uneducated in the general public and contributes greatly to the mechanic you observe(d).
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/14/wikileaks/index.html
“UPDATE: Moments ago, a British court approved Assange’s bail application on several conditions, including his wearing an electronic tag and observing a curfew, though he will be released from prison.”
@ekeyra: >>> Tony, do you meet your monthly expenses and then give the rest away? If not, arent you living in direct opposition to your own ideals of simply breaking even? <<<
My ideal is not to break even, stupid. My ideal is for ***government*** to break even. Citizens can be as rich and greedy (or poor and generous) as they want, I have no problem with that.
My problem is only with coercion. My problem is when commerce strays into the realm of hostage taking or blackmail or oppression of a class of people, or exploitation of a people, or purposeful fraud or similar forms of coercion.
When people cannot walk away (say, because they have been shot through a lung) then they have no choice. A choice to pay up or **die** is to me the equivalent of armed robbery, or blackmail. The same thing goes for pharmaceuticals: Pay or die, that is your choice.
To my mind break-even operations are appropriate as a collective action for critical functions. I think it is wrong for anybody to earn a profit by ***creating*** misery or deprivation for another person. I include in that earning a profit by defrauding or purposely misleading people.
The more consumer choice is limited (as with a power utility or E.R. or a highway system), the more involved the government should be in regulating the industry or just taking over that function and running it at break-even for the good of society.
If some guy can earn millions as an actor, or painter, or rap artist, or athlete, or investor, or chef, I have no problem with any of that. If they are content to earn thousands as a surfer and part-time beach lifeguard, I have no argument there either. I advocate for maximizing freedom and minimizing coercion. I am opposed to defining "freedom" in any terms that permit one person to harm another person for profit.
That does not normally happen in business, and when it does it means the harmed persons obviously had no choice. If that is happening repeatedly the "free market" has broken down for that industry, and it becomes a candidate for either regulation, or if that has been tried and is failing, a candidate for takeover by government, to be run as a break-even enterprise.
Life and death decisions about a citizen, or even life-altering decisions, should not be made by corporations with a profit motive. It is impossible for them to escape their inherent conflict of interest.
Tony C:
“@Chan: >>> Back that statement up with actual facts. <<<
What? It is obvious on the face of it. If you disagree it is YOUR responsibility to prove that what is obvious does not hold, I won't walk you through logic my daughter could follow in the third grade. I mean that literally; are you incapable of basic arithmetic"
I see, you cant back it up so you resort to churlish behaviour.
You have no clue whatsoever but good try at putting the burden on me.
Tony C is a moronic churl, how do I know this? I dont, I just made the statement up and it is so obvious my daughter can follow my logic.
I am waiting for you to prove to me that you are not a moronic churl.
What is it that you said you did for a living?
Tony, you wrote:
Government encourages students to study art history when they agree to lend tens or hundreds of thousands for such a degree in the absence of marketability. The result is a U.S. workforce that is misaligned to world job demands. This means that graduates have to take lesser jobs for lower pay in a position where employers can retrain them, or students go back for even more school, or perhaps spend years entering academia only to train the next round of art history majors. This delays entry to the workforce, encourages unproductive debt, lowers lifetime earnings and delays retirement.
Buddha,
Thank you for the responses. You raise issues with formulary incentives and several other points that I will consider.
I think a key difference in our opinions relates to how well government can control human behavior in the situation where procedures and consumption are virtually “free”.
Today we have today very low co-payments on insurance plans, and ultra-low to zero co-payments on government plans. The behavior of people in this structure drives large amounts of over-consumption, as if health services were an all-you-can-eat buffet if you will. This will be an order of magnitude worse under Obamacare.
When the consumer sees the next drug, medical service, diagnostic, discretional surgery, or simple office visit as virtually “free”, there is less debate on the merits, and more overall demand and consumption. In my analysis, this behavior in a “free system” is the largest single cost driver to health costs. Big cost drivers also include insurance coverage mandates, subsidy of government procedures by private payers in reimbursement rates, defensive medicine (where I do not favor negligence damage limits), and a drug market that is too protected by government, raising prices and limiting options. Administrative and documentation costs are in there, but relatively small in scale by comparison to these other dynamics.
@Buddha: Good posts.
@puzzling: A college student is a free adult that can choose to be educated in any field they want, if they go into debt for it that is their choice (it was mine), I don’t think it is appropriate for government to take the role of parent and tell an adult they are wasting their time and must study something more practical and employable than art history or whatever. Why is that any of your business, what other people spend their money on? I thought you were for FEWER regulations, not totalitarianism.
I am all for stringency in making people pay back their student loans. I think having anybody (bank or government) decide for an adult how they will be permitted to spend their life is a repellent idea.
“Also they print money on cotton, not paper.”
Money is indeed printed on paper. Paper exclusively made by Crane & Co. of Dalton, Massachusetts. It is not “printed on cotton”, but rather printed on paper made from cotton.
That it is paper made of cotton doesn’t change that it is still paper. Paper is an end product – the result of a process – and cotton is only one of the base ingredients that can be used to make it. In fact, until the late 1800’s, most paper was “rag paper” – made with fibers reclaimed from rags, hence the name, or from other plant fibers like flax or hemp. Today, most art papers and fine stationary are a rag/flax/wood pulp blend for the same reason they use cotton fiber paper in currency – cotton fiber (and flax and hemp for that matter) is more durable than pure wood pulp paper because of the way the fibers mesh in the pressing and drying process and is naturally less acidic than wood pulp paper which inhibits the paper from becoming brittle too fast to be of use for a highly handled item like currency. Also, wood pulp papers don’t take watermarks well – a requirement for paper used in currency.
But money is printed on paper.
The value of a semi-education is semi-correct knowledge, McHomeSchooled.
Gyges, tony’s argument was for government services to break even. 7 billion in the red annually is decidedly short of meeting this goal.
Tony, do you meet your monthly expenses and then give the rest away? If not, arent you living in direct opposition to your own ideals of simply breaking even?
You seem to believe that you can simply guess, calculate, or divine your future operating costs in the present to the exact penny. This is impossible. For evidence I suggest you merely look around you. Suppose you use lumber in whatever you are producing and there is a lumber shortage due to increased beaver activity. You no longer can acquire lumber at the same quantity you did before and you have no accrued capital to meet the higher prices for the less available lumber. Do you decrease production and thereby deprive a large number of your customers access to your product? Do you raise prices and gouge your poor customers? You must do one of those two or risk running out of lumber completely and not providing anyone with your product and putting your staff out of work. Sustainability.
Also they print money on cotton, not paper.
puzzling,
What student loans did was provide a chance for a higher education for millions of Americans who would not have been able to afford it otherwise. Before student loans, higher education was the sole province of the wealthy and the lucky. As far as cost containment goes? That falls squarely on school administrators . . . and insurers. I can’t argue that. Every time I hear about a college football coach being paid millions I want to slap the shit out of whoever decided that was appropriate. And I don’t want to hear about how much money is supposedly makes for the schools either. School is for learning. If they want schools for sports, they should be like trade schools. The rest of the education is largely wasted on student athletes. Sure, there are exceptions to that, but they are just exactly that – exceptions. Most student athletes I knew treated classes like they were an inconvenience. If pro sports wants a farm system, they should foot the bill. There is also some actual inflation of costs going on – like modernizing information infrastructure, but a lot of it is pure waste on colleges part. I know from talking to people in academia though that insurance costs and additional requirements they bring – like increased physical security etc. – are eating them alive. Also, if you’ll look at higher education, state schools have done a better job at cost containment than private schools have.
As to health care? Apples and oranges.
1. Repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
Rationale?
2. Allow insurers to create catastrophic insurance plans
For which they will charge catastrophic prices.
3. Allow consumers to shop for plans from any state
Interesting, but why not simply standardize insurance regulation at a national level instead of leaving it to the states? This has long been a reason for disparate costs and coverage that the insurance industry has gamed for profit.
4. Drop employer-issued plan requirements and tax incentives, and create a broader consumer marketplace.
We’ve tried that and it led us to where we were before health care reform.
5. Ease regulatory barriers to entry for minute clinics and other low-cost providers to the cash marketplace.
Do you really see this as an issue? When I was a kid there was no such thing as walk-in clinics for minor injury and ailments. You went to the doctor or the hospital. Now you can’t hardly pass a strip mall that doesn’t have some form of walk-in, relatively cheap services. It’s a good thing, but I really don’t see the barrier to entry you’re talking about.
6. Radically cut provider documentation requirements for Medicare and Medicaid procedures. These were the genesis for endless paperwork now found in the third-party payment system.
Simpler paperwork? That’s a no-brainer. Anything that cuts excess paperwork is a good thing. The second sentence, however, is pure opinion absent proof. The counter argument can just as easily be made that paperwork increases came from for profit insurers creating extra burdens on filing in an effort to discourage their having to issue payment.
7. Substantially raise patient co-payments on all government-administered plans.
Based upon what? Why not extend that option to all citizens and keep lower co-pays by giving greater depth to the risk pool while gaining the other previously mentioned operational and cost efficiencies associated with maximizing the size of the risk pool.
8. Cut back the FDA and allow drugs approved in the EU/Japan to be sold in the United States immediately. Drop import restrictions.
Can’t argue that. While we’re at it, do the same thing for cars. European crash standards are actually higher than ours, but I digress. Instead of simple deferment of the FDA’s role, split FDA into Drug Safety and Food Safety, bolster Drug Safety by streamlining approval processes and allow them to piggyback on foreign approvals by sharing information and research. Bifurcating FDA’s mission would also create operational efficiencies by allowing a drug agency and a food safety agency to have narrower focus. Mission confusion always creates inefficiencies. Both drug safety and food safety are now large enough public issues to merit each having their own distinct regulatory bodies.
9. Broaden prescribing powers among providers, and move as many drugs as possible to OTC.
Not a bad idea, but why not couple it with doing away with insurance formularies. That’s a huge scam that benefits no one but drug companies. I once worked a temp job at a formulary company. It was the biggest paper shuffling bamboozle I’ve ever had the displeasure to work at. Recommended drugs basically narrowed down to who which drug company threw the most money at the upper management and had very little to do with actual medicinal and therapeutic value. Also revise drug patent terms to make generics available sooner. Our patent system in general – not just for drugs – is really broken in fundamental ways. You can see it everything from drugs to IP.
10. Allow providers to counsel realism in end-of-life measures, and legalize euthanasia for patients who seek it.
No issue. The right to die with dignity is basically ignored in this country and it’s 1) sadly inhumane and 2) increases insurance costs by using extraordinary (i.e. expensive) measures to prolong life when the quality of that life is often simply torturous to the patient.
My post above was intended for the Mandatory Health Care Provision thread of 12/13, and I have reposted it there.