Issodhos @aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 5/20/00 6:54:47 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
>[log in to unmask] writes:
>
>> I am enlightened!
>>  What is your approved hourly rate of pay at which we rabble may begin
>>  "making" babies?
>
>   As I said before, Ken, you are perfectly free to procreate to your
heart's
>content,  But I don't think you should knowingly do so with the
intention of
>demanding that your neighbors foot the bill for raising the tykes.
>
>Yours,
>Issodhos
>
By this reasoning all streets and highways should be privately owned
and there should be no public infrastructure at all. Perhaps a
mercenary army in place of the current military which would answer to
GE and Disney. After all, why should I pay for Issodhos' security
unless he's my slave and I'm simply buying for my own benefit and that
benefit is immediate?
There are at least two issues here starting with economic and
political. A nationalized US health system is politically infeasible
and not economically infeasible just as ending the Great Depression in
the US with demand-side solutions was politically infeasible until WWII
although Hitler in Germany had solved it long before Keynes had even
formulated the problem correctly.
A nation which ignored its public schooling and welfare infrastructure
is England which successfully managed to deindustrialize itself and
become the third-rate power it is today. A byproduct of that process
would have crushed the US South in a recession far worse than the Civil
War which ended the South's role as a British colony in selling raw
materials produced by slave labor. Operations of entities which are
aggregates may be counterintuitive and simply not scale up from the
constituent individuals. Henry Ford's earliest factories experienced
severe labor problems in high turnover. The solution was to raise wages
which not only reduced turnover to almost zero but increased demand for
finished product considerably since the workers could then buy cars.

Now consider the government to be a public bus company which prints bus
tokens and is charged with providing public transportation. Part of its
mission will be to distribute tokens freely and to deficit spend. If it
runs a surplus it'll be out of business since demand will disappear as
the tokens are sucked from the public. If the bus company is short of
tokens it can decide to either print more which will dilute the supply,
or write IOUs. Either of the deficit solutions will stimulate demand
and activity. Now also consider that money doesn't cost anything. It
comes from a tree that grows freely out of the ground or it may be a
temporary magnetic mark on a hard disk which also came out of the
ground. What exactly is the big deal? Is this too much like bribing you
with your own money?