re: #85 Expand Your Ground

I think that is a bit of a false choice.

Education and health care are not (1) a “basic right”, nor a (2) tradable commodity.

First off, almost anything is tradable. We don’t get to pick our parents, and by extension which tribe into which we are born, but pretty much anything we do in our life can be used to trade for something else.

Education is many things - a value, a skill, a gamble, maybe just a waste of time. It’s important not to confuse knowledge and specific skills for a systematic expenditure of time of the young (between the ages of 5 and 18 (or 22).) A great deal of what goes by the title of “education” in this country I assign to a poor use of resources.

Likewise “healthcare” is too general of a term. Are we talking about remaining healthy, or doing emergency repairs on a damage body part? Are we talking about what to do with a 90 year old who can’t walk anymore, or are we addressing a teenager who is pregnant? What’s the difference between a steelworker on a skyscraper having an accident and a 2 year old getting proper nutrition? Let’s not confuse risk management through pricing (the role of insurance companies in the traditional sense) and the functions necessary to build a healthy upright walking primate.

One of my objections to these debates is how very complex issues get pigeonholed into too simplistic talking points.