that change is not always bad and should be embraced as a necessary component of both life 

You hebephiles . . . As a predominantly Pedo GLer, I will always be against change!

The majority of working class people want what the Greens are fighting for: universal health care; a more sustainable environment; free higher education; forgiveness for the massive college debt now plaguing Americans; less police brutality and community regulation of local police forces; social programs that elevate the poor rather than denigrate them; an end to the disparities of wealth that causes so much poverty and crime. 

This is going to be long. Go grab your favorite intoxicant drink.

* Universal health care. Universal health care is either bad or expensive. And either way inefficient.

Universal health care has a very high demand. If you have a "right" to have a doctor's appointment, you'll use it for everything, including things which are not dangerous and your body can fight off, or things which are not even illnesses and just a mood change makes you feel better. When health care has to be paid for directly, you ration it on yourself and don't overuse it, controlling its demand. Remove the price tag and you remove the reason to think twice whether you really need to see a doctor; and if you do, whether to go on with first line treatments or take a full battery of tests... and so on and so forth. Now, with that...

If, as the government provider, you want to control costs, you will probably have to cut on services or on staff. Because the demand will still be high, this will lead to longer waiting times, to scarcity of treatments (not just chemical meds -- also things like hospital beds, tests...) and to (I know you knew it was coming) death panels; even when the decisions aren't directly, or not soon, over life and death, it will be inevitable to choose people over people for prioritary treatment. This is going to be a bad health system.

If you decide you don't want a bad health system and therefore will not cut costs for it, you will end up with an inordinately expensive health system. You will need to divert resources from other uses to provide better health services to everyone who asks for it for about any reason. Doctors will order a thousand tests and will perform many times as many surgeries as actually needed (don't for a moment think I'm scaremongering: this is already the case with C sections and {you knew it was coming too} circumcision). Because this system will require many doctors and nurses and technicians, these professions will have a high demand, including more people more attracted to the money being made than out of a true vocation. In turn, this will cause a glut in medical schools and associated departments (more on that later).

And of course, the price tag for a system both universal and not bad will still be paid for by the citizens anyway. Only instead of seeing the price tag themselves, they will be charged it on every tax season mixed in with the rest of programs. An associated problem is that since government will always keep paying at any cost, suppliers (pharmaceutical labs, makers of equipment) and staff, especially doctors, will always have an incentive to raise their prices. Because they will never lose business over raising prices. So the system will not just be expensive, but constantly becoming ever more expensive, over and above the background inflation rates in the rest of goods and services.

Remarkably, the USA before Obamacare had already managed through private insurance to have the defects of the expensive systems without the virtue of the universal coverage. Because even if not through the government, the introduction of the intermediary with the insurance companies is good enough to mask the price tag to the final consumer. (The best reason to keep everything private or reprivatize it). Obamacare ostensibly popped up to achieve the universal coverage -- it may or may not achieve that, but it already increased the costs.

* More sustainable environment. Translation: those losers in developing countries must be forbidden from using coal, oil and gas to cook and refrigerate their food or light their homes, insecticides to try to prevent insect borne deadly or debilitating diseases or herbivorous insects from eating their crops, plastics to make all sorts of stuff affordable, GMOs to get higher yields from crops in the same soil; and of course, from squatting around large cities in search of a better access to services, jobs, health care and education for their kids. So I can feel better while living in a mansion with god knows how many lightbulbs and air conditioning to keep it cool in summer and warm in winter, flying around the world every few months, and visiting my retiree parents in their Florida beachfront property which aforementioned evil Third World dwellers are going to sink in the ocean with their unsustainable habits!

But remember, it's right wingers who hate the poor!

* Free higher education. Generally, the same problems apply as with health, but worse.

Not everyone is cut out for higher education. Not everyone needs it for their life. Not everyone even wants it. But if you make it free, everyone will enter it anyway. Because it's free.

It can be low cost and bad. It would be understaffed and under equipped. It would be overcrowded and every student would be learning less than they could. That, or there would be waiting lists to enter.

Or it can be good and high cost. And then universities will buy more things, even things which are underused or not necessary (like state of the art sports stadia), and will hire more people (and mostly administrative staff at that, not academic staff). And at some point they will start introducing, like the useless circumcisions on health, useless courses and degrees, designed only so as to have another bill to have someone pay for. And they will inflate the fees over and above background inflation too.

And why do I point at it as even worse than the case of health? Because health can be assessed objectively. Education cannot. There is a single standard of health, against which disease is the one with many forms diverging from it. But there isn't, and there can't be, a single standard of education. If anything, it's ignorance which is maybe more similar to itself. So you can objectively measure if health is being conserved or recovered. But it is not possible to say this with education. Hence the proliferation of junk degrees -- both disciplines without value but with a diploma, and valuable disciplines taught at a substandard level and yet still prized with a degree. (Which is linked to the youth unemployment problem: the more that BA degrees are useless, the more that youths will have to study more to get a job. A degree, from a HS diploma to a BA degree, to an MA degree and so on, is supposed to signal quality. If it no longer signals quality, you have to require a higher degree.)

Another way in which it is worse is that health doesn't directly harm others. And doesn't foster the abandonment of independent thought. Education, meanwhile, is really just indoctrination in most cases these days. And that does harm others through the harm the educated idiot can do.

And again, if all of this is expected with systems where higher education is a "right", America managed to get there, without the government takeover, simply by adding an intermediary to remove the price tag from the consumer. With health that was insurers. With education it's loans. The students may technically see the prices. But since they decide on a degree before they have relevant labor experience, they are unable to calculate fairly whether the price for the degree is fair or is not; whether it will pay itself or not. And this all predictably leads to...

* College debt default. You may be surprised, but I agree with you there. College debt should be subject to identical bankruptcy protection as any other debt and default on it should be legally possible. This would not only allow former students to accumulate wealth rather than see it siphoned out of them as soon as they get a job: it would also incentive universities against tuition rates inflation and against worthless degrees (useless disciplines or low quality degrees on otherwise useful disciplines); and lenders against lending so much money for degrees which won't pay themselves over time. Lack of bankruptcy protects lenders from risk in forms which ultimately punish the borrowers.

* Less police brutality. 1. Who needs police? 2. Ever noticed that police brutality is higher in places where there is greater gun control (look which cities have been under the radar); and in situations where citizens aren't expected to defend, such as burning a baby's face, shooting a family dog or an autistic boy or beating to death a "mentally ill" homeless guy or street cigarette vendor? Now why would that be? 3. Who needs police? Not everyone on a government income is a parasite. Police are parasites.

* Social programs that elevate the poor. Left wingers look at Trump's tax returns and say "nobody should pay that little". Right wingers look at them and say "everybody should pay that little". (This is in remarkable opposition to what happened when Romney mentioned in passing that over half of American citizens don't pay income tax. Indeed, Trump is changing politics forever) There is no better social program than allowing the poor to keep their money in their own pockets.

* End to wealth disparities. Even if this wasn't a religious policy and thus constitutionally illegal (because the Western pursuit of material equality comes from Christian doctrines traceable to Jesus and the Apostles), it is impossible to achieve without a totalitarian government which was close to capable of controlling all transactions of products and services in the economy. This isn't a Hitler or Stalin level; not even a North Korean or Saudi Arabian level. This is a level of control that can only be found in dystopian fiction. Even prisons aren't as controlled as this!

* ...that causes poverty... Pretty sure it doesn't. Poverty is the natural state. Wealth is the deviation from nature that has to be explained.

Still, Haiti is more equal than Chile. Bulgaria is more equal than Britain. South Sudan is more equal than South Africa. Bhutan is more equal than Qatar. Many countries all over the world are more equal and poor; and many are more unequal and rich. There certainly are poor and unequal (Central America) and rich and equal (Japan and South Korea) countries, but they are definitely not all, and overall they must be about the same number which are the opposite.

* ...and crime. I haven't polled every criminal by any stretch. But the admittedly few criminals I've known (and I'm talking real crimes, not victimless crimes like kiddie sex is); I'm pretty sure they didn't commit crimes because of poverty. Conversely the poorest people I know (again, admittedly not in the bottom 1% of mankind) have not been criminals. I keep hearing that statement over and over and over, and even by right wingers too. It doesn't ring any little bit true with my experience.

And frankly, my friend, asking "What true libertarian wants power over others?" is contrary to the economic order that they support, where those more money have tremendous power over those who do not. 

If only there was a way to avoid making them rich... Like, idk, refusing to buy their product if I don't want it.

Hey, that fits government!

Now that I have returned, the libertarians on this board can look forward to me being me and providing massive opposition, alongside Sea Goddess, Rach, and the others who want a world truly free of inequality. I hope you look forward to it as much as I do :-P

I look forward to it. A lot.

No kidding and no sarcasm.

Perhaps with yours posts, other people which I won't give the free publicity to that they crave desperately, will stop saying that GC is a libertarian, conservative and AnCap forum. With Dante out, Joey, Baldur and Chamrin are the only libertarians. With Goethe out; BK, myself and the newbie alt rightists are the only right wingers.

So, really, thank you!

I look forward to pro contact leftists being living proof that you don't have to be on the broad Right to be pro contact.

You're still welcome to my Right Wing Utopia. Without the right to vote. :P





Cuteness is to die for
Cuteness cannot fail
Cuteness knows no limit
Cuteness will prevail