Topic: Why are people scared of taxes? - page 18. (Read 31541 times)

Define "help people who need it."
Oh, and while you're at it, explain why, if people are so greedy, government - made up of people - is so altruistic that they'll take other people's money to help people.

How else are you going to help people who need it? Charity?..... It doesn't work. People are too greedy for it to work.

I think you had a quote-fail there. Hopefully I got it right but if not, apologies in advance.

Agreed that insurance companies are part of the problem. Not so much for their existence per se but in how they are implemented. They remove the coupling between the paying for and receiving of medical care. In the US, this is largely a holdover from government enforced wage controls where companies had to find a way to adequately compensate employees and health insurance turned out to be it. Now it's an expected part of the employment contract and no one pays directly for what they receive. It's no wonder costs are out of control really. Obamacare is just making it worse unfortunately.

Racist communist Nazis now. Three chuckles.

Haha. We're racist communists now. I guess that rates two chuckles on the chuckle scale. 

How will taking violence out of the equation make things worse?

The effect is quantifiable.  It actually works for precisely the same reason that many alternative treatments, prayer and whatnot works.  It works by the same mechanism as the placebo effect.  Any treatment works very well if you believe it works.  Only a very few people has a rare gene which code for placebo immunity.  There is the Nocebo effect as well -- if you believe something will make you ill, it probably will.  You may look up Confirmation Bias as well.

There is one more reason why private schools achieve better results.  By average pupils at private schools have better educated parents than pupils at public schools, and there is a huge correlation between parents education level and their children's grades at school.

You can choose to spend your money on insurance companies, or you can choose to spend the money on doctors, hospitals and medicine.  The latter will improve your health at a lower cost than the former.  Send the money directly where the money are needed, and don't let unnecessary people and companies take their cut on the way.

Edit: Fixed quoting

I am merely saying that taxation could be used better and that tax itself is not the problem, but how it is spent. But you seem to be in the same boat as the other guy's here who see it is as 'robbery'.

I don't for a second buy into the idea that if you did not have taxes people's charity would be enough to cover the costs of supporting those who need it. As I have said earlier, we have charities today, yet we still have world hunger. To me, it seems fairly apparent that if people are not even charitable enough to stop people from starvation, they're not going to be charitable enough to pay for say, free healthcare or improving a road system that they will never use, but will help society in general.

 So unfortunately yes, people do need to be forced, as I have said earlier, people are too greedy for unforced charity to cover the costs of the needy.


Now this is a very good point, but in a system without tax, the power simply shifts away from a centralised government and more likely than not, into the hands of the big conglomerates (yes I realise this is what we have today anyway). The problem is power corrupts, we all know that, but I don't see how having no taxes would be a step away from centralised power, if anything the powerful would become more powerful and the poor and needy... (well going on how charitable people are) dead or in a worse place than they are now.

I agree with you, on the "Everything will be OK if we can just get the right people in charge *this time*" but what is the solution? I don't see the removal of tax helping the situation at all, only worsening the issue's we all ready see around us daily.

People are stupid, and ideological. They don't want to pay taxes because morons convince other morons that the "others" are getting more from the way taxes are spent than us "good folk". In the US it's blacks, in Canada it's natives... but it's universal. Regional tribalism I think it's called.

Instead of attempting to improve the way our representative systems function, morons convince other morons that any form of society is "niggers stealing our fucking money" and the morons decide that the idea of society itself is the problem. I don't have the answer to this fucked up situation. Morons fucking suck.

I can't imagine the bullshit spewed out in all these pages, and thankfully, I'm smart enough not to read any of it!

People call themselves libertarians and then support Ron Paul... not to mention Paul Ryan's Randian policies. Get a fucking education already. Learn about real libertarianism. It's people that should be free, not capital.

Morons.

Actually, I'd prefer that the government stop stealing my money to pay for other kids' schooling, and just let me pay for the schooling I want my kids to have. How's that for simple?

I almost see the logic here. But then I realize that it's not logic, it's a fallacy. You do understand that cognitive dissonance is not something to be sought, right? That effort justification is a perceived difference, like rating the same wine better if you're told it's $200 a bottle than if you're told it's $20? Whereas the difference between public schooling and private schooling is quantifiable?

You seem to think that expending more money confers some magical quality upon healthcare that makes it better. Yet you also advocate spending fully half as much money on healthcare per capita. You must want my grammy to die!

Yes.  If there is a free option available, the effort invested is proportionally higher.  If you want private schools to come out really badly, try giving people money to send their kids there.  You got the reward, and don't have to justify it by convincing yourself it is a better school.  As for taxes, please google that yourself.

One or two dollars a year, huh?  No wonder the average life expectancy in Britain at the time was 31 years.

At least make it hard to make you eat your words...

Fascinating. Not the articles. That you even know the terms. However, neither of those articles imply any great loss of sense of achievement if no free option is available. And the link to taxes, is of course, non-existent.

We're not comparing treatments. we're comparing healthcare expenditures as a percentage of GDP.
Here, let me help you out: Option e): http://www.freenation.org/a/f12l3.html (though this could be considered a subset of b)

Do I?  If schools which are run for profit and don't get any public funding aren't actual private schools, which schools are?

I believe it is a case of Cognitive Dissonance and more specifically Effort Justification.

I don't have comparable numbers from different countries from decades ago, and I have no idea what the health systems in different countries looked like back then.  I don't know how relevant the numbers would be either.  Medicine has made a lot of progress the last few decades.  The odds of surviving many diseases has become much better due to better treatments.  Some of the new treatments are very expensive, and it is hard for one normal person or family to afford it alone.  A few decades ago most cancer diagnoses came with a very short life expectancy.  Nowadays most people get well from cancer, but the treatment is far from free.  Your alternatives are a) have a free public health system or b) a good private insurance or c) be very rich or d) die.

What is a government without tax? What is a tax without a government? Can you really separate the two?

You either have some arbitrary power deciding what good cause to spend other peoples money on, or you can have each individual deciding for themselves what good cause they wish to support with their own money. If it really is a good cause, you don't need to rob people to pay for it. The end does not justify the means.

And yet, you refer to the faux-private schools, and not the actual ones.

[citation needed]

All right. Now compare that to a 100% free market medical system (Hint, you'll have to go back a few decades).

Yes, there are some schools which are run for profit, and don't want to keep their fees below the limits for public funding, or wants to have very different standards (not fulfilling all of the minimums, e.g. so their pupils will have to go an extra year to qualify for higher education).  A couple of those are popular among dropouts who want to pull themselves together and study intensively to qualify for higher education.

No, it is an argument for sending your kids to an expensive private school.  Most of the effect vanishes when there is no free or much cheaper alternative.  Like taxes.

In terms of USD corrected for purchasing power, Canada is on level with Europe.  Canada spends 55% of what the USA spends per capita.  Average life expectancy at birth is 81.38 years in Canada, 78.37 years in the USA.

Just for the record, I'll give up that American's health system does have very big problems. I'll even agree that a single-payer system would likely be more effective and efficient than what we have now (especially with what Obama has done to it). I just don't agree that that's the best way to go and believe that a truly free market system would provide a better solution.

There seems to be a mistake in terms. If your "private" schools are getting government funding, they're not private schools. They're public schools that also charge their students. You see "real competition" between the "public" sector and the "private" sector, when, in fact, you don't have a private sector.

Seems like the best argument for a totally private school system I've heard yet.

Those are all European countries. How's Canada doing?

Subsidies tend to push the price up. This can be easily seen in the US higher education system but also in things like digital converter boxes which the government subsidized by $40 and what should have been a $20 box was being sold for $60.

Fascinating.  In my country private schools will get almost the same amount from the government per pupil as public schools, provided they keep their fees at a reasonable level and comply with certain quality standards.  Same with private hospitals, btw.  They will get the same amount per patient as it would cost to heal them in a public hospital.  There is real competition between the private and public sectors in areas where the population is dense enough, for specialized services like heart surgery, and for boarding schools.  If the private sector can provide a better service at a lower cost, the private sector will win.  For some reason the private alternatives almost always cost more.  I.e. the sum of user payment and public refund is higher than the cost of the same in the public sector.

Show me one country which is satisfied with their public school system.  This is a matter of basic psychology as well.  When you spend resources on something, you expect a reward.  People who pay for something are therefore more likely to feel rewarded afterwards than someone who get it for free.  If you got a tax break for sending your kids to a private school, it is in fact less likely you will think it is good, because you already got the reward.  It is also less likely that you will make the most of it, because your net investment is lower.

Many factors determine the cost of the health system, but public spending per capita is approximately the same all over Europe measured in % of GDP.  In the USA it is almost twice as much.  All are different countries with different demographics and population densities.