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Even Koch-funded operations not so stupid as to think Medicare For All wouldn't ultimately save money

Actually, universal healthcare has been proven economically, statistically and mathematically incapable of causing overall healthcare costs to go down. Single-payer systems for general treatment that operate as close to at-cost as possible without taking risks of not being able to pay doctors or afford medicines (similar to how the pre-privatization London Underground was run) do cause healthcare costs to be lower than open market healthcare on a case-by-case basis (though I blame this on a lack of regulation, the amount of price-gouging in healthcare is insane), but ultimately cause the amount of money in it to balloon because the number of cases skyrocket after a few decades.

The reason for this lands it firmly in "utilitarians are poring over everything to figure it out and arguing over moral value judgements at all times" territory. Because the reason for the cost of universal healthcare inflates massively is because people live longer and have fewer deaths while young, and those extra people add up. 30 years after it gets set up, you have much of an entire extra generation back to pay for healthcare for, and that costs a lot. A 30% increase in the population of 90 year olds costs a vast sum to care for, and where the argument against it starts to show up is that paying for this may well not be viable, because (most of) those people aren't working, so they're nothing but a net negative, economically.

"Wealth or lives" problems like this are one of the biggest issues to philosophy, particularly utilitarian ethics, because you actually have to decide the monetary worth of a life. When you dig deep enough, you can start to find some reasons to let people die due to poor health care involving population carrying capacities and per-capita resource usage that are more a matter of environmental impact and scarcity than monetary value, but even then, you still have to come back to how much economic weight a non-contributing (in this case retired) life has, because you need to decide how much economic damage a life can cause before you have to give up on it.

Very nasty moral quandry, all around. My own opinion can kinda be summed up as "axe the healthcare once it gets to the point it costs more than the staff administering it, especially if patient is below retirement age and willingly unemployed". And to those who think that a life can't have a monetary value put on it, you sure as hell can pin a pricetag on keeping someone alive and make very good estimates about how much progress can be made by putting that wealth in other places. Especially when a person's got multiple independent medical conditions, thus meaning their one extremely costly to prolong life is directly consuming resources able to prolong the lives of several others.
 
Very nasty moral quandry, all around. My own opinion can kinda be summed up as "axe the healthcare once it gets to the point it costs more than the staff administering it, especially if patient is below retirement age and willingly unemployed". And to those who think that a life can't have a monetary value put on it, you sure as hell can pin a pricetag on keeping someone alive and make very good estimates about how much progress can be made by putting that wealth in other places. Especially when a person's got multiple independent medical conditions, thus meaning their one extremely costly to prolong life is directly consuming resources able to prolong the lives of several others.

Liberalism respects property rights as an offshoot of the social contract theory, that we were all barbarians killing each other, and then signing a "contract" to abridge our freedoms in exchange for security, chief among them our life and health. Property was added as a corollary, because you need property to live. Ergo, liberalism supports keeping people alive before respecting property rights, since property rights are derived from the right to live.

You can see where I'm going with this. If you're letting someone die because it's more expensive to save them then they're worth you're flipping the priority here
 
Actually, universal healthcare has been proven economically, statistically and mathematically incapable of causing overall healthcare costs to go down. Single-payer systems for general treatment that operate as close to at-cost as possible without taking risks of not being able to pay doctors or afford medicines (similar to how the pre-privatization London Underground was run) do cause healthcare costs to be lower than open market healthcare on a case-by-case basis (though I blame this on a lack of regulation, the amount of price-gouging in healthcare is insane), but ultimately cause the amount of money in it to balloon because the number of cases skyrocket after a few decades.

The reason for this lands it firmly in "utilitarians are poring over everything to figure it out and arguing over moral value judgements at all times" territory. Because the reason for the cost of universal healthcare inflates massively is because people live longer and have fewer deaths while young, and those extra people add up. 30 years after it gets set up, you have much of an entire extra generation back to pay for healthcare for, and that costs a lot. A 30% increase in the population of 90 year olds costs a vast sum to care for, and where the argument against it starts to show up is that paying for this may well not be viable, because (most of) those people aren't working, so they're nothing but a net negative, economically.

"Wealth or lives" problems like this are one of the biggest issues to philosophy, particularly utilitarian ethics, because you actually have to decide the monetary worth of a life. When you dig deep enough, you can start to find some reasons to let people die due to poor health care involving population carrying capacities and per-capita resource usage that are more a matter of environmental impact and scarcity than monetary value, but even then, you still have to come back to how much economic weight a non-contributing (in this case retired) life has, because you need to decide how much economic damage a life can cause before you have to give up on it.

Very nasty moral quandry, all around. My own opinion can kinda be summed up as "axe the healthcare once it gets to the point it costs more than the staff administering it, especially if patient is below retirement age and willingly unemployed". And to those who think that a life can't have a monetary value put on it, you sure as hell can pin a pricetag on keeping someone alive and make very good estimates about how much progress can be made by putting that wealth in other places. Especially when a person's got multiple independent medical conditions, thus meaning their one extremely costly to prolong life is directly consuming resources able to prolong the lives of several others.
Citatation please. Literally every nation with universal healthcare spends less than the full-private US per person, AND has better outcomes.
 
Citatation please. Literally every nation with universal healthcare spends less than the full-private US per person, AND has better outcomes.
Yes, but the overall costs of healthcare rise dramatically, especially a few decades after implementation, because everyone's getting it and they're making use of more healthcare per-person. The British public healthcare system has, without fail, always risen in cost every single year since it came into existence. Those higher life expectancies and lower early life death rates mean there's a lot more old people around to take extremely expensive care with late-life conditions. This causes huge amounts of economic damage, because life expectancy rising to 90 years old from 80 with an unchanged retirement age of 60 is a huge increase in the proportion of the population that's a pure economic negative.

You're complaining that I glossed over the lower per capita cost, when I literally said that it's a lower cost on a case-by-case basis, but ends up costing more due to more cases. And I blamed it on a lack of regulations allowing healthcare to be covered in utterly insane price gouging, because... That's the only thing that really fits, given how very nearly every single other thing involving capitalist systems and socialist systems in comparison tends to work out. Even with energy resources, one of the things that governments across the Western world typically get a stranglehold on in some form, directly government-offered tends to have higher operating costs than corporate, the corporate just charges more above cost.

Heck, most of the medical research is done in the countries where there's extremely expensive healthcare. Because that research costs money, and governments have a nasty habit of hating to fund research with uncertain development value, while the health insurance and pharmaceutical companies want to treat as many conditions as possible so they can price-gouge everyone for as long as possible. This is the core of why more economically liberal systems have always advanced faster than comparable social systems with less economic liberty. Because someone, somewhere, will get it in their head that they can make money off of something and work towards it. The fewer barriers in the way of that, the more often it happens, and the more chances you get for real progress. The key the maximizing the benefit of Capitalism is then making sure that the wealthy aren't using that wealth to erect more barriers.
 
Yes, but the overall costs of healthcare rise dramatically, especially a few decades after implementation, because everyone's getting it and they're making use of more healthcare per-person. The British public healthcare system has, without fail, always risen in cost every single year since it came into existence. Those higher life expectancies and lower early life death rates mean there's a lot more old people around to take extremely expensive care with late-life conditions. This causes huge amounts of economic damage, because life expectancy rising to 90 years old from 80 with an unchanged retirement age of 60 is a huge increase in the proportion of the population that's a pure economic negative.

You're complaining that I glossed over the lower per capita cost, when I literally said that it's a lower cost on a case-by-case basis, but ends up costing more due to more cases. And I blamed it on a lack of regulations allowing healthcare to be covered in utterly insane price gouging, because... That's the only thing that really fits, given how very nearly every single other thing involving capitalist systems and socialist systems in comparison tends to work out. Even with energy resources, one of the things that governments across the Western world typically get a stranglehold on in some form, directly government-offered tends to have higher operating costs than corporate, the corporate just charges more above cost.

Heck, most of the medical research is done in the countries where there's extremely expensive healthcare. Because that research costs money, and governments have a nasty habit of hating to fund research with uncertain development value, while the health insurance and pharmaceutical companies want to treat as many conditions as possible so they can price-gouge everyone for as long as possible. This is the core of why more economically liberal systems have always advanced faster than comparable social systems with less economic liberty. Because someone, somewhere, will get it in their head that they can make money off of something and work towards it. The fewer barriers in the way of that, the more often it happens, and the more chances you get for real progress. The key the maximizing the benefit of Capitalism is then making sure that the wealthy aren't using that wealth to erect more barriers.
CITATION PLEASE. You did not provide one, you just kept spouting talking points. Try again.
 
CITATION PLEASE. You did not provide one, you just kept spouting talking points. Try again.
Here's an article from The Atlantic about how end-of-life care is an absolutely massive proportion of healthcare spending and the economic issues caused by that. By adopting universal healthcare, you immediately need to start planning out all this treatment qualification, because in the US, it's nearly a fifth of the GDP at current rates. And universal healthcare without those qualifiers like the UK has means everyone gets these treatments, without exception, and that costs vast sums of money. Combined with the US's existing state of health being much worse, due in part to a refusal to use healthcare services because of the cost, and that refusal won't change overnight. The consumption habits responsible for most of the rest aren't likely to change for any reason connected to universal healthcare.

If you take a look at US population statistics, particularly income by age (I think this is a good graph to illustrate the problem with universal healthcare, demonstrating that it's the 65+ age bracket getting most of the GDP increase, with no similar increase at the border of it), this is not the sort of time to have a huge increase in taxation, as a vast chunk of the tax revenue is going to go up in smoke soon as all the rich old people who reaped the benefits of the postwar economy die or enter actual retirement. Because the income brackets mean that dividing that income between the younger generations will cause a pretty significant dip in tax revenue, and all those old people are in an excellent position to consume a huge chunk of the new single-payer costs.

In the US, we have the nearly-$10,000-per-capita healthcare costs in spite of people constantly dodging appointments to avert the high cost of healthcare. And here's a handy Wikipedia page on countries by per-capita healthcare costs. Defaults to alphabetical order, click one of the years once to get ascending order and twice to get descending order for that year. The following bar chart to the text chart(?), by the way, shows that the US has almost the same per-capita compulsory and public spending as some of the Scandinavian countries. Unless there are vast improvements in the cost of providing, which would likely take years to sort out, going single-payer would cause the tax burden to inflate massively. And keeping it working is likely to be an exercise in futility, given what happened to the Affordable Care Act. American politics are not able to work with something as delicate as single-payer healthcare.

There's a bundle of steps involved in making it actually affordable that are not inherent to the process of going single-payer, because nothing assures that the government will actually get better deals, or that those deals will be good enough to make up for the increase in coverage. Look at what student loans did to college tuition, the government being the one to pay might well just cause prices to rise even higher because they "know" they're getting their money (it's not like colleges are actually investing those rising tuitions in quality education, given the increasingly-extreme and blatant political bias, to the point of having classes that are solely indoctrination into extremist progressivism by any reasonable metric). And now is not a good time to shift what's currently 18% or so of the GDP to government spending, because a huge chunk of the tax revenue is in line to vanish in the next decade while a sizable population segment is set to need all that super-expensive care.

So in conclusion, I appear to have mixed up my arguments or made inferences/conjectures from incomplete data. I think its because I started from a random dive into the world of end of life healthcare and keeping the elderly alive and expanded that backwards without looking up any of the population statistics involved. But there's still several good points to be made that making America single-payer is a bad idea, such as an upcoming drop in tax revenue independent of any policy decisions and possible recession from the current wannabe-oligarchs dying of old age (there's a well-established trend of children and grandchildren pissing away the fortune, which is why "old money" isn't really a thing in the US outside of banker families, which are usually branches of European old money), the fact that those rich old people won't hesitate to siphon every penny from the system they can to live a few more days, the fact that the US has worse health before you account for healthcare differences and fixing that is a different matter from unfucking the insurance scene by going socialist on it (thankfully, middlemen positions have a long trackrecord of functioning decently well under bureaucracy) and the issue of US politics being a psychotic cesspit of trying to set timebombs for the enemy to eat the PR damage from and constantly and forever attempting to undo the other guy's work.

Essentially, the United States has just about the perfect shitshow of factors to make single payer healthcare as impractical as it can be, save that it has the money to hypothetically pay for it. Widespread presence of causes to a number of health problems, a habit of avoiding self-care due to cost, an income distribution that's about to set the taxation rates and possibly stock market into chaos, political friction quite possibly designed to make long-term projects like it impossible... Yeah, the US is a terrible place for universal healthcare at the moment. It'd need to immediately cut healthcare costs by a third to even have a chance of being a net positive quickly enough to actually fix any issues. Because you have no way of any form of certainty that the money to pay for it will be there, or that it won't be broken the next time extremist liberals or conservatives end up having the seats. Even if the overall cost of healthcare halved instantly, it would still require taxation to increase by 9% of the GDP to keep the budget balanced. And good fucking luck making that last, even the Democrats don't even try to pass it. And they love taxing people! It'd help if they, you know, bothered to pay some attention to how much it costs to add what they want...
 
And still no citation that universal healthcare is more expensive. Please concede at this time that it is cheaper, just like all the experts say it is unless you have an actual relevant citation to provide.
 
Gotcha, make sure only white people are allowed to be old
...You fail at reading comprehension, apparently, because the last two paragraphs, and the citations I provided, make it quite clear that rich old people (it doesn't actually matter that they're white, just that they're rich and old) are the problem. Them dying off or retiring means that a large amount of tax revenue, a vital thing to make single-payer work, is going to vanish. Expanding the corporate tax rate is ultimately the only way to make it work, politically, and even then... Well, Republicans repeal. And, contrary to Democrat propaganda, they're not all Rich Old White Men. The most problematic individuals are actually in their 40s and 50s, they still easily have another two or three decades in them, and there's a nontrivial amount of minority senetors (though yes, Democrats have it better off. Both are still disproportionately composed of the uppermost classes, as well as whites and men). Them existing makes the necessary tax revenue foundation of single-payer unstable.

And still no citation that universal healthcare is more expensive. Please concede at this time that it is cheaper, just like all the experts say it is unless you have an actual relevant citation to provide.
I did admit my mistakes. Right here:
So in conclusion, I appear to have mixed up my arguments or made inferences/conjectures from incomplete data. I think its because I started from a random dive into the world of end of life healthcare and keeping the elderly alive and expanded that backwards without looking up any of the population statistics involved.
I then went into things that make for decent arguments against it for the US, in particular, that have to do with a number of factors being absolutely horrible for setting up a form of single-payer that actually works, because it's a system that has pretty hefty requirements. As described in the Atlantic article I linked, the only way the UK manages to get to its quite high cost effectiveness is by having a bureaucracy that decides on what healthcare is acceptable. You need quite a lot of expertise funneled into that system, and it needs to be rather well managed. Otherwise you end up with the nation being incapable of paying for it.

California faced this issue (the article goes further into how it can be financed). It's not as simple as just implementing the system, you have to raise taxes enough to make up for it and figure out how to limit coverage so that you can actually get the savings, because the expanded coverage, as I'd mentioned, raises cases to pay for. If the cost per case goes down by a third, but twice as many cases pop up, you've got yourself a higher pricetag than before. And because most people with healthcare in the US get it from their employers, that means that you face the issue of either needing to pass an increase to the corporate tax rate or make individual people pay for healthcare in its entirety thus raising the cost of living, and the latter is something that is politically impossible because taxing the working class is something the party that supports stuff like single-payer healthcare can't afford the political cost of. And the Republicans would undo the former at the soonest possible moment.

I've changed my mind on the matter that single-payer will increase total costs because, while looking for evidence to support my claims, I found actual evidence contradicting them (no thanks to you, crying for citations while providing none of your own), but there's still the rather significant issue that making it reduce total costs requires good management and denying coverage in some circumstances.
 
Yes, but the overall costs of healthcare rise dramatically, especially a few decades after implementation, because everyone's getting it and they're making use of more healthcare per-person. The British public healthcare system has, without fail, always risen in cost every single year since it came into existence.

No, the overall costs are lower, significantly, that's the point. The US's costs have also risen, only way above that of the British NHS. We pay more for less coverage. To say 'it's constantly rising' is missing the point that it's constantly rising... and still less than half our per-person spending (2016, US: 9,892 per capita, UK 4,192, using dollars for both).

It's not even ambiguous, it is a gigantic gap between what we pay and what other developed countries pay for, again, better results. Single payer systems pay less from taxes than us, in addition to not having the personal bills.


Another fun fact: Making use of more health care ultimately lowers costs, because more cheap preventative and less expensive emergency care.


Basically, just how much more are you willing to pay for worse coverage? There's a whole business- health insurance- paying tons of people basically for the purpose of deciding who gets coverage and how much they'll pay for each one, and that entire layer and all the unnecessary excess steps costs more than just covering everyone.
 
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Dude stop. Hes bieng far more reasonable, articulate, and willing to do the research than any other anti medicare for all person ive ever seen so you can atleast respond with your own well thought out responses instead of taking childish potshots at him.
He's being disrespectful to the other members who are asking him for the things you claim exist but do not.
 
Do you work for Raytheon, @Morphile ?
What's a missile-spamming defense contractor have to do with healthcare?

No, the overall costs are lower, significantly, that's the point.
...Dude. I admitted I was wrong, twice, in posts after that one. Explicitly saying that the overall costs can be lower, with good management. As shown with Switzerland, the savings can actually be relatively small, and my argument for total cost going up is very much a problem to overcome, and US politics make it extremely difficult to make sure that management is able to deal with it, especially in combination with the problem of paying for it. You need to halve costs with doubled treatments for it to break even. You need massive savings to cover the huge increase in coverage that the US would have with universal healthcare.

Read my actual goddamn posts. Don't just jump on one particular bit the moment you see it. I made real points about single-payer being badly suited to the situation of the United States, in particular, because we've got a cesspit of politics that'd be far too likely to fuck it up. You still need to pay for it, and the US has a horrible track record of budget balance because the Democrats give no fucks about the magnitude of their spending and the Republicans give no fucks about the funding issues of tax cuts. As I'd cited, it'd add 200 billion dollars to California's budget up-front, and that's accounting for the fact that they already spend 200 billion on public healthcare that could be shifted to the overlapping universal healthcare. So already, for a neutral tax impact, you need to halve the cost in California before you start adding more cases (which is also pretty close to true of the US at large).

He's being disrespectful to the other members who are asking him for the things you claim exist but do not.
How so? If you're referring to citations supporting a resistance to Universal Healthcare in the US... Well, I've pointed at a decent amount of evidence showing that there's a lot of money that has to come from somewhere to pay for universal healthcare, and pointed out that there's a problem of the wealthiest demographic in the US closing in on death of old age. Which, due to how the US handles income tax, means a sizable amount of tax revenue goes up in smoke. Hell, the UK doesn't actually have universal healthcare, they withhold treatments all the time based on the cost effectiveness. And this leads to a per-capita spending nearly half that of the US, because you have the advantages of single-payer, but then deny expensive, low-impact treatments.
 
Twist, twist, turn, pull, shift...I've seen these type of mental gymnastics before and they don't work on me.
 
Twist, twist, turn, pull, shift...I've seen these type of mental gymnastics before and they don't work on me.
How is it mental gymnastics to accept that I am wrong on a fact (that universal healthcare will increase the total cost), but point out that there's still real problems to overcome? How the fuck do you think the United States is going to pay for hundreds of billions added to its yearly budget (for reference, the federal budget was 3.8 trillion in 2015. California alone would push that up to 4 trillion. Given current private healthcare spending, 700 billion would be after massive savings. As in more than halved costs)? How the fuck do you think whatever is done to pay for it will last in any meaningful way with how Republicans have acted in the past? Can you genuinely trust the Democrats to not racialize the shit out of it like so much other welfare, or utterly fuck the budget by doing actual universal healthcare?
 
How is it mental gymnastics to accept that I am wrong on a fact (that universal healthcare will increase the total cost), but point out that there's still real problems to overcome? How the fuck do you think the United States is going to pay for hundreds of billions added to its yearly budget (for reference, the federal budget was 3.8 trillion in 2015. California alone would push that up to 4 trillion. Given current private healthcare spending, 700 billion would be after massive savings. As in more than halved costs)? How the fuck do you think whatever is done to pay for it will last in any meaningful way with how Republicans have acted in the past? Can you genuinely trust the Democrats to not racialize the shit out of it like so much other welfare, or utterly fuck the budget by doing actual universal healthcare?

Well we're not remotely near the historic tax level high and have a lot of money busy with less important stuff (like, military spending most obviously, we're at one of our highest non-war levels for no real reason), you'd think we were pushed to the edge the way you're talking about... but keep in mind we're already paying through the nose and then some for health care, and the cost of that healthcare is already steadily increasing. So the options are, pay for something to reduce the cost, or.... not.

On welfare, one pointless expense of a lot of welfare is putting in tons of hoops to make sure only 'the deservering' or whatever get it. One of the big ironies of the US's obsession with limiting this stuff is we pay way more on making sure no-one else benefits than it'd actually cost to just deal with not drawing the lines. I find the idea that the democrats are the ones making it a racial thing to be pretty funny, it tends to be Republicans who get up in arms when they find out a program really does benefit everyone. Well, unless by 'racialize' you mean 'make sure it targets poor minority areas too.' In which case, yea, they do that. It's a good thing, and long-term better than the alternatives of not.

You still need to pay for it, and the US has a horrible track record of budget balance because the Democrats give no fucks about the magnitude of their spending and the Republicans give no fucks about the funding issues of tax cuts.

Oh, fun fact, the Democrats actually have a good record with paying for their stuff. The deficit was decreasing under Obama, if it wasn't for the financial crash we'd likely be in the green well before the end of his term, and of course the debt actually went down under Clinton. Our budget problems are much more of a one-party issue. We're actually entirely paying for all this stuff and then some... providing we don't keep on shooting ourselves in the foot with pointless taxcuts to the rich and corporate 'stimulus' that doesn't stimulate (because demand is what drives corporate spending, not tax cuts).
 
Well we're not remotely near the historic tax level high and have a lot of money busy with less important stuff (like, military spending most obviously, we're at one of our highest non-war levels for no real reason), you'd think we were pushed to the edge the way you're talking about...
The military spending is because the US has gotten stuck in the situation of keeping the peace for trade, though it could be cut down because we've got no need of the large land forces we have. Nothing's shown up that shows it vaguely necessary to have tens of thousands of tanks, but we just keep making tanks instead of something more useful, like extra naval forces and aircraft that actually work in the combat situations we keep getting into. The focus of the spending is grotesquely inefficient because ever since the Cold War ended, we stopped having any need for mass deployment capabilities, because there's been no combat where a large mass of troops and tanks is actually helpful. It's all urban combat against terrorists.

Like, there's a point to be made with manufacturing jobs, but then why aren't we using that money to directly pay for the stuff that's actually useful in the combat situations we keep getting into? Such as more aircraft, precision missiles, enlarging the navy that holds the bulk of US obligations because everyone else has more or less let their navies rot due to ours handling all the peacetime naval needs and so on. At the very least, we do not need more tanks, dammit.

Well, unless by 'racialize' you mean 'make sure it targets poor minority areas too.'
Kinda that, the way Democrats tend to go about it tends to be covered in profiling, causing it to be vastly disproportionate in favor of minorities. Because of the heavy correlation. This has utterly fucked the lives of poor urban whites, because the welfare offices are extremely anal about white people proving they qualify (which nothing short of tax and medical records will do) while blacks who just look poor get far fewer questions asked. Could just be an issue with urban bureaucrats, honestly.

The problem there is ultimately that there's a hell of a lot more focus on "minority area" than "poor area", so poor urban whites... Pretty much end up fucked, if there's poor urban minorities nearby. Which is why the Rustbelt went for Trump, because he promised to give a go at unfucking their poor white areas. And actually has tried to bring the jobs back, albeit in a flailing and largely ineffectual manner.

Oh, fun fact, the Democrats actually have a good record with paying for their stuff. The deficit was decreasing under Obama, if it wasn't for the financial crash we'd likely be in the green well before the end of his term, and of course the debt actually went down under Clinton
...Going to need a citation on that, though the succeeding statement about tax cuts is exactly what I was referring to with US politics not being friendly to it, because any tax increases that the Democrats use to pay for it would get axed by Republicans, followed by sabotage of the system so they can gloat that single-payer totally doesn't work. The best we're likely to get is a state-based health insurance company that acts just about exactly like the current ones, but with the goal being to actually provide coverage, rather than profits. Which would let some of the funding be handled by insurance premiums and such, rather than having everything stuck with taxes.

Like the London Underground, before Conservatives fucked it up with rampant privatization.
 
Ah, at last, we get to the real problem: reverse racism
...It's just racism, and it's probably more a problem with the bureaucrats than the politicians. Granted, the Democrat politicians have spent the last few decades supporting policies that are specifically intended to benefit some ethnicities more than others, rather than direct and general anti-poverty measures, but I pin that more on the fact that they're politicians and thus looking to garner votes. It's actually not that I think their discriminating against white people, as much as it is they're discriminating in favor of minorities. Which is, ya know, still racist, and still unacceptable in any meritocratic system. Not all racism is oppression, oddly enough, it can just mean that one group is promoted above others. Which does not mean those not receiving the privileges are oppressed.

Denial of privileges isn't oppression, and most Western welfare systems are very much a form of privilege. It's only oppression if one group is explicitly denied something granted in general terms. Very technically speaking, the limited suffrage wasn't oppression as it was originally described as a specific privilege of land-owning male citizens. Can't remember if "white" was one of the qualifiers or not off the top of my head. Of course, these days, it's generally considered a baseline right of democracies to vote, rather than a specific privilege to some particular class. Though this post-dates the US, and the US actually still enumerates voting as a specific privilege instead of a general right of the citizens.

And do note that this is me explaining why I don't consider the denial of welfare to poor whites to be a form of oppression, not an attempt at re-defining oppression to excuse the horrible things people have done throughout history. I do still consider it abhorrent, but not by definition a form of oppression. Because I have complex views that involve not needing buzzwords to see things as bad, they can be bad independently of any buzzwords. Or at least the typical ones.
 
...It's just racism, and it's probably more a problem with the bureaucrats than the politicians. Granted, the Democrat politicians have spent the last few decades supporting policies that are specifically intended to benefit some ethnicities more than others, rather than direct and general anti-poverty measures, but I pin that more on the fact that they're politicians and thus looking to garner votes. It's actually not that I think their discriminating against white people, as much as it is they're discriminating in favor of minorities. Which is, ya know, still racist, and still unacceptable in any meritocratic system. Not all racism is oppression, oddly enough, it can just mean that one group is promoted above others. Which does not mean those not receiving the privileges are oppressed.

Denial of privileges isn't oppression, and most Western welfare systems are very much a form of privilege. It's only oppression if one group is explicitly denied something granted in general terms. Very technically speaking, the limited suffrage wasn't oppression as it was originally described as a specific privilege of land-owning male citizens. Can't remember if "white" was one of the qualifiers or not off the top of my head. Of course, these days, it's generally considered a baseline right of democracies to vote, rather than a specific privilege to some particular class. Though this post-dates the US, and the US actually still enumerates voting as a specific privilege instead of a general right of the citizens.

And do note that this is me explaining why I don't consider the denial of welfare to poor whites to be a form of oppression, not an attempt at re-defining oppression to excuse the horrible things people have done throughout history. I do still consider it abhorrent, but not by definition a form of oppression. Because I have complex views that involve not needing buzzwords to see things as bad, they can be bad independently of any buzzwords. Or at least the typical ones.
Meritocracy is a myth. The only way to actually have anything resembling one is to take all children from their parents at birth and have them raised by the state. And even that STILL doesn't account for effects of parental health and nutrition pre-birth.
 
Not all racism is oppression, oddly enough, it can just mean that one group is promoted above others. Which does not mean those not receiving the privileges are oppressed..
Actually yes it does. To those of us who actually value life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, not to mention equity and equality, it is.
 
Meritocracy is a myth. The only way to actually have anything resembling one is to take all children from their parents at birth and have them raised by the state. And even that STILL doesn't account for effects of parental health and nutrition pre-birth.
...Meritocracy is defined by giving power and wealth based on merit. It doesn't necessitate any control on an individual's capacity for merit beyond maybe giving a level playing field in educational infrastructure. A meritocratic system can function perfectly fine with a bloody eusocial species, let alone the relatively-narrow-in-potential modern human species, because the only thing that is required to be a meritocracy is that progression be defined by performance.

Equality of opportunity, bizarrely enough, doesn't enter the picture of required traits. At all. Which is why meritocratic systems tend to have a static upper class, because that upper class is consistently high-performing individuals investing their wealth into getting an advantage over the general population. They're still progressing mostly, if not entirely, by the merit of their actual performance. Seriously, one of the definitions Google offers for meritocracy is "a ruling or influential class of educated or skilled people".

Actually yes it does. To those of us who actually value life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, not to mention equity and equality, it is.
No, it doesn't, at least by the definition of oppression I work with. It's discrimination, but oppression, to me, means that general rights are being specifically withheld. As such, the situation of specific privileges that are generally withheld would not qualify under the definition of oppression. The latter is still a bad state, but the exact term "oppression" doesn't apply, because the term, to me, means that there is active detriment, rather than unequal privilege. I'm a bit of an ass with definitions. It's a large chunk of the reason I viscerally despise the progressive left, because they constantly redefine or ignore definitions of words to suit their purposes.
 
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