Jake, you're not bursting anyone's liberal bubble. Call it whatever you want to call it. That isn't going to change the fact that a respected, medical foundation took a poll and found that the majority of Americans want ObamaCare. No amount of crying bullshit will change that.

The Kaiser Foundation just did a poll and the results are conclusive: a majority of Americans want ObamaCare. All the talk from the Right about how this is not true is nonsense.

Is that not how competition is supposed to work -- a better product for the same or better prices. That's a mainstay of Republican belief.

I find the assumption that all I listen to or watch are these stations reasonably insulting. I am sure I am as well educated as you are, and I surf the web reading all kinds of things every day. I also read The New York Times, which I am sure you find just too left-wing to stand. Because of what you said, evidence suggests that you are some variety of conservative, whatever conservative means these days.

Yes, you really should have ignored my post. If you have to be insulting, then check the urge at the door. Stay on topic. Respond to the issues. That is the common respect very one of us owes each other.

[quote=FuManChu]3,000 medical people have left the military. You can see the doctor (?) PN (?) on September 15, 2020.


What is your source for this information ?

Here's an article that discusses a bit about Hayek and considerably more about Friedman. It might interest you.


OP-ED COLUMNIST
Milton Friedman, Unperson
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 11, 2013 462 Comments


Recently Senator Rand Paul, potential presidential candidate and self-proclaimed expert on monetary issues, sat down for an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. It didn’t go too well. For example, Mr. Paul talked about America running “a trillion-dollar deficit every year”; actually, the deficit is projected to be only $642 billion in 2013, and it’s falling fast.

But the most interesting moment may have been when Mr. Paul was asked whom he would choose, ideally, to head the Federal Reserve and he suggested Milton Friedman — “he’s not an Austrian, but he would be better than what we have.” The interviewer then gently informed him that Friedman — who would have been 101 years old if he were still alive — is, in fact, dead. O.K., said Mr. Paul, “Let’s just go with dead, because then you probably really wouldn’t have much of a functioning Federal Reserve.”

Which suggests an interesting question: What ever happened to Friedman’s role as a free-market icon? The answer to that question says a lot about what has happened to modern conservatism.

For Friedman, who used to be the ultimate avatar of conservative economics, has essentially disappeared from right-wing discourse. Oh, he gets name-checked now and then — but only for his political polemics, never for his monetary theories. Instead, Rand Paul turns to the “Austrian” view of thinkers like Friedrich Hayek — a view Friedman once described as an “atrophied and rigid caricature” — while Paul Ryan, the G.O.P.’s de facto intellectual leader, gets his monetary economics from Ayn Rand, or more precisely from fictional characters in “Atlas Shrugged.”

How did that happen? Friedman, it turns out, was too nuanced and realist a figure for the modern right, which doesn’t do nuance and rejects reality, which has a well-known liberal bias.

One way to think about Friedman is that he was the man who tried to save free-market ideology from itself, by offering an answer to the obvious question: “If free markets are so great, how come we have depressions?”

Until he came along, the answer of most conservative economists was basically that depressions served a necessary function and should simply be endured. Hayek, for example, argued that “we may perhaps prevent a crisis by checking expansion in time,” but “we can do nothing to get out of it before its natural end, once it has come.” Such dismal answers drove many economists into the arms of John Maynard Keynes.

Friedman, however, gave a different answer. He was willing to give a little ground, and admit that government action was indeed necessary to prevent depressions. But the required government action, he insisted, was of a very narrow kind: all you needed was an appropriately active Federal Reserve. In particular, he argued that the Fed could have prevented the Great Depression — with no need for new government programs — if only it had acted to save failing banks and pumped enough reserves into the banking system to prevent a sharp decline in the money supply.

This was, as I said, a move toward realism (although it looks wrong in the light of recent experience). But realism has no place in today’s Republican Party: both Mr. Paul and Mr. Ryan have furiously attacked Ben Bernanke for responding to the 2008 financial crisis by doing exactly what Friedman said the Fed should have done in the 1930s — advice he repeated to the Bank of Japan in 2000. “There is nothing more insidious that a country can do to its citizens,” Mr. Ryan lectured Mr. Bernanke, “than debase its currency.”

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of debasing currencies: one of Friedman’s most enduring pieces of straight economic analysis was his 1953 argument in favor of flexible exchange rates, in which he argued that countries finding themselves with excessively high wages and prices relative to their trading partners — like the nations of southern Europe today — would be better served by devaluing their currencies than by enduring years of high unemployment “until the deflation has run its sorry course.” Again, there’s no room for that kind of pragmatism in a party in which many members hanker for a return to the gold standard.

Now, I don’t want to put Friedman on a pedestal. In fact, I’d argue that the experience of the past 15 years, first in Japan and now across the Western world, shows that Keynes was right and Friedman was wrong about the ability of unaided monetary policy to fight depressions. The truth is that we need a more activist government than Friedman was willing to countenance.

The point, however, is that modern conservatism has moved so far to the right that it no longer has room for even small concessions to reality. Friedman tried to save free-market conservatism from itself — but the ideologues who now dominate the G.O.P. are beyond saving.

If Washington were not as corrupt as all its players are these days, I think the system would muddle along just fine. But the system now is so corrupt it no longer works. I tend to believe in rather more government intervention than less. If Libertarianism prevailed, OI think the whole government would fall apart -- and I don't want that, though you may (or may not).

And I think this will be, too.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/08/17/212960237/amid-struggle-for-soul-of-gop-libertarians-take-limelight

This should be of interest to you.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/08/17/212729349/rnc-doesnt-focus-on-an-elephant-in-its-ballroom

I don't trust either party, too. I agree that most of the acts you have described represent travesties of the Constitution. They are making me feel disenchanted with Obama, too, although in the past I have been one of his supporters. He has taught "constitutional law," yet seems to me to be violating it over and over. These days I don't see a political party that makes total sense. They are all terribly flawed.

I share the disdain for libertarians because I don't think a civilized society can function according to their principles. (Yes, "civilized" is a buzzword for good, just, and reasonable." It is a value judgement in disguise.)

I will hardly stop my own talk about disenfranchisement and racism on this issue when that is precisely what is going on -- the attempt to prevent minorities from voting in as large numbers as normal because they tend to vote Democratic. You, of all people here, should know this.

Also, it has been shown in a number of states that voter fraud is either minuscule or not happening. It is a straw man Republicans have erected in order to achieve their victories by reducing the number of Democrats voting.

If there is anyone in this forum one can count on to have an intelligent point of view and a willingness to discuss matters without resorting to name calling, it is you. I and everyone else should appreciate that. To you, I give my thanks.

But again, the problem now is that Hispanics perceive, rightly or wrongly, that Republicans dislike minorities. I think they are perceiving what is real, not imagined.

And I really don't believe, given the present attitudes that predominate in the Republican Party -- or for that matter among the general population -- that Paul has a snowball's chance in hell of getting elected to much that is significant. He is too far away from the center. What this suggests to me is that perhaps the values you favor are too far from the center to predominate, too. What do you realistically think about this ?

To your knowledge, have the economists you have mentioned written any books solely devoted to history ? I know I can look this up, but must go off to work right now.

I don't think anyone these days can make a case that The Republican Party is neutral concerning African-Americans when so many Republican states are making all-out efforts to "prevent voter fraud" in ways that seem aimed at reducing the number of Black voters. Nobody has come up with convincing evidence that "voter fraud" is a serious problem. These efforts are transparently designed to reduce minority voting participation.