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yt/DraconianDiscourse/DragonsDesk/2025-06-25 Sowell-Peterson.md

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 4. Again, many factors. Relevant to life expectancy in America is obesity, among other cultural choices and their subsequent consequences, which are tough to correct for. But If you want an accurate example of what universal health care gets you in a mixed economy, look to the NHS in the UK, and Canada's system. The wait times are abysmal, and their pharmaceutical markets produce hardly any of the most essential drugs required by their populace. It's no wonder Canada has been pushing voluntary euthanasia; it's literally more cost-effective than the tax burden it requires to keep a chronically ill or suffering patient alive. This is the reality of healthcare: there are three facets. Universality, Affordability, and Quality. Your political system can only pick two. You can choose Universality, and also Quality, but the tax burden is going to lead to inevitable austerity, and you lose the other two. The balance is tentative, and the only way to keep it is to ditch Universality. What America did was choose Affordability and Quality, and then tried to sneak in Universality. The further that facet is forced, the more the other two wane and wither. The driving force behind this push, and the main factor keeping health costs high, is the utopian sentiment that the moral burden of one's life is the responsibility of the collective, which, in effect, makes one's life, and the triumphs therein, not their own, but that of the collective. What are the consequences? The federal gov't incentivises the States, insurance companies, and hospitals, to weave local networks that monopolize the entire health market. Competition is what drives innovation, which decreases prices. There is no competition in this mixed economy. So the utopians will blame the businessman, pushing the State to bully him into cutting some sort of deal that increases his foothold. Which, in a free market, he would have absolutely no right to. In a free market, if your endeavor fails, it ceases to exist. In a mixed economy, if your endeavor fails, all you have to do is fail less than everybody else, then cut a couple sweetheart deals, nab a couple earmarks, and you can gain a state-incentivised, and often state-funded, monopoly.  
 5. Yes, the establishment clause clearly doesn't state that the nation is Christian, *legally speaking,* and yes, the moral foundations and system of law in America transcend the Judeo-Christian ethic. But that doesn't mean that a Judeo-Christian ethic wasn't required in order to forge her. The Protestant influence was so heavy that Jefferson, arguably the most Deist of the founding fathers, held overtly Christian meetings in the Capitol and the White House. They were non-denominational, but they were going off of the most common systems of worship that were present, which were largely Protestant, albeit a little tangled and confused. The letter of the law is objectively defined, but the spirit of the law is inherently Protestant. I say this with very little personal bias; I'm an agnostic Mormon (thx Peterson).
 
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+Most of the premises you originally listed had a slight grain of truth to them, and I wanted to explore the nuance contained therein, for at least 3, 4, and 5. I didn't outright agree with most of them, but you seem insistant on attempting to force my perspective into your frame of reference on 'conservative dogma' when the bulk of my response was trying to ascertain the truth or falsehood of each claim. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're trying to explore the issues with dogmatic thinking without necessarily attributing it to me directly.
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+1. Reckless spending doesn't disprove the Laffer Curve, it merely destroys its utility. It doesn't matter if you tax at whatever the theoretical optimal level is, if you spend everything you recieve and more, you blow out the deficit no matter what. It seems we agree on this and the semantics are getting in the way.
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+2.   
+> the conservative dogma is really a dog whistle  
+Less buzzwords, please, idk what anyone means anymore with foggy statements like this.
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+I see what you mean; representatives beholden to their constituents don't cut programs when it would be political suicide to do so. You could interpret it cynically, that everyone is just playing tactical games, deflection & smokescreening, etc. But I don't think it's fair to say that universally, those concerned with fraud and waste aren't genuinely concerned with it. It's more productive to take the activism at face value. Would it be dogmatic to say that I don't want my taxes funding foreign propaganda across the globe via USAID? Sure, we shouldn't overstate the issues, but I reckon the less of that that is allowed, the better. Even if we take the Pathologically Agreeable approach that any problems at the individual level are to be solved by the collective. "Our" money could be better spent here.
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+I don't necessarily care how much people *want* the government programs. Far be it from me to tell others how to vote, but I'm not particularly pleased that I was born into a contract that I could never have agreed to, that enslaves me (a % per whatever tax bracket I'm in) towards the end of subsidizing collective irresponsibility for my peers. I don't care how much other people want the fruits of my labor to be spent to achieve their goals, a moral society wouldn't allow for that.  
+3. Unnecessary deaths are the responsibility of the individuals who caused them. Their moral failures are not mine, nor that of other responsible individuals. If dangerous, irresponsible people decide to demonstrate how little they value life, that is their moral failing and theirs alone. It has nothing to do with the means, and everything to do with the culture(s) that encourage carelessness with those means.
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+4. The question isn't so much how much is being spent in total, the question is whose money is being spent without consent. Medicare is very efficient at siphoning *my* earnings via the IRS. I don't care if it would cost less overall, because analyzing this on a collective level is morally bankrupt. The system charges the *wrong people* for the transaction. With anything else that is of value, one is expected to pay for themselves. Yet I am impelled that if I don't enjoy being enslaved to help out strangers, then I'm a bad person. It is not within the legitimate purview of gov't to force me to take up the burden of somebody else's life. I'd prefer to pursue my own rational self-interest, a much simpler goal if not for the utopians determined to rob me blind. I could talk about my financial difficulties but it'd be pathetic to portray myself as a victim.
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+Your point about binary choices is universal to dogma as a category, not just the conservative flavor, just thought I'd point that out. Either way, mixed economies are miserable, and I'd rather we stop pretending the solution to any given problem is to divide the responsibility thereof 50/50 between the gov't and private business. This creates the incestuous, perverse incentive system we know and love.
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+> making decisions for the good of all
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+I don't believe in making top-down decisions from the level of analysis of the collective. If you want what's best for everyone, focus on what's best for the individual first, and it'll follow. What's best for the individual is best for everyone. When you try it in reverse, at best, you forget the individual. At worst, you kill him in cold blood.
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+5. Again, I think you're reading dogma into what I said, because it's the lens by which you're viewing this conversation. I didn't say the U.S. is a Christian nation per se, I'm saying that Christianity's influence on the founding of this country is not to be understated, and that many of the values "universally" held here today were discovered via Christian religious processes. I certainly wasn't being disingenuous about that, even if others are. This ethic is woven into every aspect of American life, whether we recognize it or not. No, it's not a theistic or theocratic gov't, I don't think that's what people mean when they say it's a Christian nation.
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+I'm enjoying this discourse, hopefully not too much.
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