Calling All Non-Americans!! Would You Trade Health Care Systems With Us?

[A18]

When a government program is older than you are, it's hard to imagine going without it. Take government schools, Social Security, the post office monopoly, or anti-trust laws. None of these has the slightest justification, but each will outlive us all.

[A18]

But I certainly hope time machines are invented one day, so that those who think the 1800's were the good old days are welcome to go back to them.

To say that government policy in the 1800s was, in some respects, superior to what has replaced it, is a far cry from calling the 1800s the "good old days."

I have no idea what the rest of your post has to do with anything.

[A18]

I don't believe that society was better off in the Nineteenth Century. Living standards were much lower across the board; and even in the policy realm, the picture was, on the whole, much bleaker.

What modern policies would I overturn? Foremost among them would be the creation of a vast and unaccountable administrative state, the American "drug war" and the police-state practices it has given rise to, the enactment of legislation bestowing special privileges upon labor unions, our constant intervention in the affairs of foreign peoples whose circumstances few of us genuinely understand, and the birth of the Modern Presidency (c. 1897).

This probably isn't the place for a full-blown Social Security debate, but with respect to those "millions of American seniors that never had enough to save," I can't help but point out that the payroll tax which finances Social Security has something to do with that. It's also unclear why the "human element" is to be so narrowly defined. Why is the well-being of the elderly all that matters? Aren't there struggling youths, as well?

Your arguments would be plausible enough if we were talking about a program designed to help needy seniors. But Social Security is a program that takes indiscriminately from the young, including the working poor, and gives indiscriminately to the old, including the quite rich. A more arbitrary transfer payment would be difficult to imagine.

[A18]

I of course don't agree that the policies at issue accomplished any such thing.

[A18]

I of course don't agree that the policies at issue accomplished any such thing.

Oh, well, argument settled then.

As any literate person can easily verify, our exchange was not about the merits of particular policy stances. (Nym's own statement was, mind you, every bit as unsupported as mine.) It was about whether those of us who oppose certain Twentieth Century policy innovations, look back on the 1800s as some sort of golden era. Hence, my reply was entirely adequate.