(10-14-2019, 01:52 AM)Kinser79 Wrote: Most roads, cops, and firemen should be handled on the local or state level. I'd go further and say the same is true of schools and universities.
That is how it is done in practice. Even with the Interstate Highway system (states typically bought the real estate for the roads, but the Federal share was 90% of road-building), maintenance is a state responsibility. Federal roads include the obvious ones on Indian reservations, public land including National Forests and parks, and military bases. Reconstruction of Interstate and near-Interstate highways gets nearly the same 90-10 treatment. But note below.
Quote:The Postal Service is an enumerated responsibility of the Federal government. I'd say that regulation of interstate commerce (IE big oil) and interstate infrastructure would be the responsibility of the Federal government as well.
The Interstate Highway System includes many highways that one best describes as primarily serving one state, as is so with Interstate 96 in Michigan, which is Interstate only to the extent that it leads to a bridge between Detroit and Windsor. It does connect Grand Rapids and Lansing to Detroit, so it does have the traffic. On the other hand, Interstate 70 in Utah is undeniably interstate infrastructure as it goes past no urban areas in Utah and really connects Denver with Las Vegas and southern California.
The federal government has wire fraud, bank fraud, and mail fraud statutes that make many scams and schemes that would not be crimes in states into federal offenses. Depositing the proceeds as a check or money order in one's bank account makes the scam a violation of federal bank, mail, or wire fraud statutes... and I would suspect that many of the people in federal prisons are there for bank fraud, mail fraud, or wire fraud. If one statute does not cover the act, then another one will.
Quote:As for the private healthcare system being broken it seems to me that it is broken more due to governmental intervention, and more governmental intervention is unlikely to solve the problem. That being said, I would support a Medicare for All but with that comes some costs namely much higher taxes (I think tariffs would help a great deal here...but that has more to do with my economic views than my political ones). Needless to say, the solution to healthcare is to make the US system all one thing or all the other. Either it must be totally private or totally public--any hybrid system or incrementalist system will only result in a poorly functioning patchwork.
We have the worst possible system for medical payments in the world -- blank checks for providers, with medical providers having little cause to control costs and patients having little cause to avoid imposing undue costs upon the system. I am on Medicaid due to a handicap, and I got chest and back pains while physically exhausted, usually a sign of a heart attack. Because the treatment for a suspected heart attack is unpleasant, I at least had an incentive to find a conservative measure to deal with the pain, and I got it: physical therapy from which I learned some exercises that undid some of the pain and could ensure that if I ever go to the E/R for a coronary that I really am having a coronary. (My grandfather had a nasty heart attack at the same age as my simulated heart attack, and as you can probably infer for a numbers person person like me, I was scared). Big Pharma is practically an unregulated monopoly, so you can see where that goes. Insurance companies are often for-profit bureaucracies, and they operate on a cost-plus basis that encourages patients to abuse the system unless they are uninsured. We get higher costs per person than any other country in the world and mediocre results at best.
Much as I dislike Fidel Castro and his political legacy I have some good things to say about the Cuban system. It puts the emphasis on general practitioners who can do prevention (specialists deal with crises often the results of such bad habits as alcoholism, obesity, and smoking -- and those habits rarely make people the sorts of patients likely to survive treatment) -- and a secret police that aside from harassing political dissidents can also monitor people on whether they are following doctors' and dentists' orders. The Cuban system works as well as it can with limited resources. Note also that there is no for-profit bureaucracy operating on a cost-plus system, and Cubans paradoxically get medication at something closer to free-market pricing. This said, if you are overeating as a norm, smoking, drinking to excess, not brushing your teeth, and not getting appropriate exercise, maybe you deserve the equivalent of a Comite de la Defensa de la Revolucion hounding you.
All of these things though I would say are not necessarily socialism--ie the means of production being in the hands of the state. Not even Norway or Denmark or Sweden are socialist. Yes they have vast welfare states and highly regulated markets but the means of production are in the hands of private persons.
Quote:What do the Democrats have to offer? Just take a look at the cities that they have run for decades. Look at what California is turning into. Quite frankly I can think of nothing worse than the whole of the US looking like San Francisco or Portland or hell even Chicago.
I could also tell you about parts of Appalachia where the GOP prevails... OK, Democrats made a mess of West Virginia, but I have yet to hear of Republicans making things better there. When West Virginia was run by the Democrats, the Democratic party relied upon the predictable votes of coal miners who did not need much formal education, traveled little, and relied upon a union contract for medical coverage -- and if one is a coal miner one needs really-good medical coverage over one's lifetime. The Government didn;t have to spend much money on education, roads, or public health... and now, without the cash cow of coal mines to support limited government West Virginia must spend real money as it did not before just so that the kids of coal miners can get jobs as the biggest employer in West Virginia (Wal*Mart), perhaps in the nearest town with 7000 people. The mines were spent, and people now must get high-school diplomas to work at Wal*Mart and commute to work. The Missouri Ozarks in places are much the same, except that the mines were lead mines now played out. The GOP is probably even worse at serving poor whites than the Democratic Party is in serving poor blacks and Hispanics.
We all know about the urban blight that was heroin in the 1960's and 1970's... but the worst places for opiate addiction and death are now in largely-white rural areas. Three years ago I went on a trip to Great Smoky Mountains National Park and saw lots of signs in Kentucky advertising treatment for opiate dependency... in this case, opiate dependency may be a consequence of bad medical practice. Opiates are cheap prescriptions, but monitoring their use is tricky. The best control against addiction is that the patient dislikes their effects and tolerates them only for making life as normal as possible.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.