I would suggest that additional gratitude might be appropriate - to those who contributed every single medical advance that made it possible for your parents' family lines to survive and converge to produce you.
If you're talking about the USA, then you declare yourself an ungrateful misfit. Yes we value the individual, but from our very beginnings we have recognized that the price of keeping our ideals is paid _always_ by individuals. The best summation I can think of at the moment is that this entire country expects you to, if the situation ever arose, throw yourself on the grenade that comes through the window to protect those around you. You only seem grateful when there's no cost to you.
From the way you whine, you show that not only do you not understand the magnificence of the gifts you have received - but that you are so clueless and conceited that you actually believe that a single lifetime might ever be enough to actually *earn* all the benefits bestowed upon you.
From the evidence of your words, your "rational individualism" is a delusion in which the only individual to be valued is yourself.
You live like you do today because more people than you could ever count created the global, cultural, societal, and community contexts within which you live your life.
I suspect your contribution is relatively microscopic.
Up to a point, I agree with you. But, looking at it from Tim's extremely warped point of view, everybody who receives that paid for health care is stealing it. As far as he's concerned, they're all low level cheats, drug addicts with AIDS, or hope to live for the rest of their lives on social handouts.
Tim seems to believe everybody in that state is eminently content to stay that way. Let me tell you, nobody wants to live their life that way. Having had a disability for almost thirty years, I can tell you categorically that it stinks. Nobody in those conditions likes it. As a peer support volunteer with the Canadian Paraplegic Organization I know for sure fact that everybody I counselled and supported hated being in that state and most often, did what they could to get out of it.
I hated it so much that I used that health assistance "I stole" to stay healthy enough so I could go back to school with education assistance "I stole". Then I got a job and became a contributing, working taxpayer again. That's the final scenario. Society supported me health-wise and education-wise until I was again able to again become a contributing member of society.
Which scenario is preferable? Supported by society health-wise but also contributing back to society or just subsisting while contributing nothing. There really is only one answer and it certainly is not anything remotely close to what Tim thinks.
My progenitors largely made it to these shores without much, if any, medical care. They survived largely by grit and hard work. As recently as 40 years ago, a regular doctor visit was a dream in the corners of my family's lineage.
However, *I* have directly benefited from those aforementioned medical advances. Funny thing about that medicine - it came from *profit motivated* drug companies and doctors trying maximize their incomes. These are the very things that you collectivists decry, but they are the only mechanisms know to man (to date anyway) that actually work to produce innovation and real human progress.
But, no. We see - in this very thread - intellectual drooling complaining about doctors who make "too much" and medicine become a "business". Yeah, its really terrible. Lifespans are increasing, problems like heart disease, diabetes, many forms of cancer, congenital defects, and a a host of other problems that once killed people in the relative youth are now managed or even cured. But that's not good enough, is it? We have to make sure that the instruments of this progress - the doctors, nurses, researchers, scientists and drug companies are thwarted at every turn. Why? Because they make too much money. The fact that they're smarter, work harder, and are proportionally far greater contributors to all of our lives is
*exactly* what collectivists hate because they themselves are no such thing and are incapable of any meaningful lives in their own right.
I shall do no such thing. It takes a particularly perverse misreading of US political and intellectual history to come to any such conclusion. The very foundations of this nation were built in opposition to the Leviathan of the state and to the promotion of the individual and his liberty. I can provide references if you doubt this. I can even explain the big words.
On this we agree - liberty isn't free and requires free citizens to be prepared to defend it. "No one wants to fight, but somebody has to know how." Unfortunately, it is not the threat from without that dooms us today. It is the cancerous collectivist perversion that characterizes today's political debate that will be our undoing. No terrorist, no armed enemy, no military assault will ever be as dangerous as the citizens demanding more "free" things from their own government. Our founders said as much.
You are deeply mistaken. If and when I were called upon to defend liberty by force or by argument I would do so. And that's what I am doing - the the most evident threat, the collectivist sewage that permeates our culture - needs to be exposed for the fraud and danger it represents to us all. But I wouldn't (and am not) doing it for the collective good you so adore. I would (and am) doing it because it is in my own self-interest to defend liberty. When millions of citizens do this - defend liberty in their own interest - you get a great and prosperous nation. When millions of citizens sit around demanding government rescue them from their own choices, the circumstances of their lives, the misfortunes that befall all of us, you get Soviet Russia.
I have only one lifetime. Whether it is sufficient to "earn" what I was given is irrelevant - I can't - no one can. But that doesn't automatically therefore demand that I sacrifice liberty on the altar of big government, collectivist drooling, and mindless self-sacrifice that is erected as the ideal. The greatest way to pay back my debt and show my gratitude is to leave a free society in my wake, not enfranchise the political classes as they buy votes by handing out money and goods taken my force and theft.
No, "rational individualism" is an individualism that recognizes that all of us cannot be free unless *each* of us is individually free. This means we produce law to thwart fraud, force, and threat, leaving each of us to act "rationally" in our own self interest in all other cases. Part of that self-interest is to *voluntarily* help each other as we are able. It is in none of our self-interest to outsource the job to a overweening government that takes from some to give to others in a blind, mechanical, and often evil way. But that takes brains, hard work, a moral center - qualities that the collectivists despise, because it thwarts their relentless quest for power.
This is largely false. I live like I do today because this is the one and only nation in recorded history that made individual liberty primary, and the state a servant of the individual. All collectivist enterprises throughout history devolved into despotic and oppressive rule by the few - at least the major ones did. It is only because the US was built on the primacy of the individual this has not yet happened here. Sadly, so many beneficiaries of this very system - like you - aren't happy with the results and want to institute the very collective schemes that have destroyed the lives of "more people than you could ever count."
As is yours. As is pretty much everyone's. But - like all apologists for collectivism - you skip to a bogus conclusion: "Since I can only do a very small bit as a free person, I shall sacrifice my liberty on the altar of the collective." The largest collectivist schemes in human history - the grand, eloquent (and evil) plans to collectivize society for the "common good", did not remotely contribute to the human experience what us free "microscopic" contributors have managed to do in something less than 300 years. That won't stop you though, will it? Instead of celebrating your individuality and liberty that makes it possible, you'll focus on your "microscopic" contribution, and decide that it's better to be a slave than to make that small contribution.
You don't like my ideas? Fine. Then you don't much like Locke, Hume, Hobbes, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Paine, and De Tocqueville. They're not *my* ideas. They're the ideas of a bunch of brilliant Enlightenment-era thinkers, who had that bad habit of not trusting government much. That why they argued for the individual above the state, a small and limited government, rule of law, and personal responsibility. It's a modern tragedy that those of you who most benefit from this, dismiss them so flippantly because you need protection from yourselves.
Thomas Jefferson, John Locke, et al did not run around mumbling stupid platitudes like "It takes a village" or "If we can just save one child" or "It's for the greater good". They wrote in some great detail about the nature of a free nation begins with a free individual. Too bad they're so out of date these days ...
Viva La Revolucion Comrade - I hope you get exactly what you (and others here) are demanding - a complete subjugation of your liberty at the hands of the state. Oh, you don't know that's what you're asking for, but it is. I just hope to have checked out by then ...
Still out of ideas I see. I have calmly responded to your personal attack, vulgar language, and hyperbole because nothing flushes out the complete lack of content in arguments like yours more than letting you speak for yourself. Just to help you understand the big concepts here:
1) I made it quite clear that I succeeded by many means, a good part of which were *outside* my own hands. I also expressed my gratitude. Something you did at no point in this debate. Apparently, your fellow citizens *owe* you what you got from them. I'm sure they'd be thrilled to see your deep appreciation for it.
2) I have refused to take your bait and talk about just how much and how I practice charity. It's none of your business now or ever. I do not answer to you in this (or any other) matter and I can't help it if you have such a low opinion of your fellow man that the only way you can imagine good things happening is if you have to steal to get them to happen. Some (most?) of us actually believe that charity is a noble and powerful thing and live our lives accordingly. Oh, and I *never* want to be seen as the equivalent of Jimmy Carter - a man who never met a despotic dictator he didn't love. He is a prima facia example of collectivist political scum.
3) My intellect - however small or large - isn't on trial here. I've not made it a topic of discussion because - again - it is a personal matter that is none of your business. What is on trial is your inability to argue your position without personal attack - a sure sign you cannot defend your ideas with reason and logic. If it makes you feel better ... nobody can ... they're really bad ideas.
4) Does is strike you as even slightly incongruous that you - the self-proclaimed defender of mankind, the downtrodden, and protector of all that is human - is wishing disease upon me?
Like I said, Game-Set-Match - you have lousy ideas, can't defend them, and are personally rude. In short, you are the perfect collectivist...
I'm not sufficiently self-loathing and personally inadequate to require that much approval from others. Your mileage may vary.
I am happy to voluntarily contribute to causes the help the genuinely underprivileged
My highest ideal is integrity. It is dishonest to steal from one citizen and give it to another, and then try and claim some imaginary moral high ground.
Theft is theft. I do not like the idea of profiting from the misery of other and have - even recently -refused to do so.
You are very wrong. I am happy to help those in need.
I went to private undergrad and grad school without taking a dime of tax money and without debt.
I will not discuss my charitable actions because: a) It's none of your business and b) Talking about it takes all the fun out of doing such things anonymously.
I have worked my bottom off to come from poverty to the middle class =================================== When are you voting yourself into sainthood?
Read again. As usual, one of your biggest problems is that you read what you want to see, not what's actually written. You're so caught up in yourself that you're incapable of seeing anything but your own words.
Of course not. You're your own self indulgent cheering section that believes your own lies. It's called self delusion Tim and you're a master at it.
Well, you at least /sound/ like an over-schooled, under-educated navel-gazer who hopes to change what he doesn't like in the world by raving incoherently in a woodworking newsgroup.
Actually the problem goes well past industry greed......standards of care add greatly to the cost as well.....My daughter as a CNA (for several years) while working for a temp service would often be hired to sit with emotionally disturbed hospitalized individuals. The hospital would pay her $15-18 per hour and the temp service markup, simply to watch (all night) these disturbed patients(easier than hiring their own people but not cheaper). While indeed the patient was troubled and/or a suicide risk ......a dollar sleeping pill would have done as much good. Compare $300(12hr shift) for labor or $1.00 for effectively the same care. Naturally the hospital didn't care all that much since they could charge $2000 or so for the bed.
The public and medical employees as well demand new shiny buildings with marble, expensive carpets and often spacious "new" offices. Additional quasi and questionable medical services including chiropractors have crept into many health plans.
There has also been a determined effort via the schools to limit doctors and nurses entering the profession....aside from the public statements made in
1996 by some national medical association about a fear of a doctor surplus and the need to limit entry. My daughter spent 3 years trying to get into a registered nurse program with a 3.5 GPA and three other nursing certificates including a CNA, phlebotomy and ER certification....she finally made it into a program this fall 200 miles away.
Malpractice insurance as well is a serious problem and/or cost and not all that difficult to control...bad doctors get removed and reasonable standards for expected care are established.....8 years ago I was initially diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, after 4 months of extraordinary pain (morphine didn't work much) and multiple procedures they settled on Retroperitoneal fibrosis. By that time I had lost 50lbs and was very near deaths door....much of medicine is not a exact science nor should we expect it to be, incidentally I didn't sue. Rod
Morris, I'd expected better of you than an ad hominem such as this -- as Tim points out, it's a sure sign that you know you can't debate the issue on its merits.
Michael Johnson (a well established musician) and I were driving down the road and he was sharing the joy he was experiencing in life after having come face-to-face with both the monsters of alcoholism (and music industry executives ). He said something to me that day that I have carried with me for those last 20 years. He said: "Robbie, an alcoholic is a megalomaniac with an inferiority complex."
When I read Tim Daneliuk's posts, I am somehow reminded of that. I detect an insecurity wrapped up in blankets of highly skilled verbosity, a serious indication of over-achievement and a deep desire to be loved. Tim feels the constant need to prove something, regardless of its validity. But, as an independent observer and level- headed 'collectivist' (a word which bears much hate, usually used by previous iron-curtain survivors ) I recommend we all give Tim a group hug.
You ought to ponder the notion that because something is incoherent to *you* does not make it generally incoherent. You are also being dishonest. There's nothing I've said that's incoherent, you understand it pretty well. You just don't *like* it, don't have a meaningful counterpoint, and have to resort to school yard dirt throwing.
You're right, I apologize. I read through that part of that post too quickly.
Name a single lie I've uttered here. You manners are execrable. A difference of opinion is not a lie. Demonstrate a single "self delusion" I've demonstrated. A difference of opinion is not a delusion. Identify any self-indulgence on my part. A difference of opinion does not make one self-indulgent.
Face it. You have no argument to support *your* opinions. You have some vague mushy ideas propped up with your touching story of personal achievement in the face of adversity from which you leap to defend the raiding of other people's wallets. When confronted by the essence of *your* argument, you get first defensive, then vulgar, then outright rude. I'm not the one who is swinging blindly with both fists here. You are. See if you can figure out why ...
If insurance companies can avoid that scenario, I see no reason why a government agency can't do the same. I frequently read of someone arrested for defrauding SS or Medicare or the IRS. Of course they don't catch them all, but neither do the insurance companies. But both should be able to hold fraud to an acceptable level.
I also find I have no meaningful counterpoint to those who reject evolution and dismiss every bit of evidence supporting it as God's little joke. I'm sure you won't see the parallel to yourself here, but others will.
I'm going to try very hard not to get drawn into replying to your posts in the future. But given prior evidence, you'll undoubtedly post something so outlandish that I can't resist :-).
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