Once upon a time, an eminently sensible earth pony named Clyde wanted to establish a rock farm, but lacked the lands and the funds to do so.
One day, he found a rich pony named Smart Cookie, who was looking for a pony like him.
"We can do business together," Smart Cookie said. "I have a good, solid plot; perfect for a rock farm. I can lend it to you for a season, and give you the funds you need, as long as you give me half of the rocks you harvest."
"Very well," Clyde said. "Which half of the rocks will you want? Divided by weight, size, sedimentary and meta-"
"To be frank with you, I don't know anything about rocks. That's why I am looking for a sensible pony to farm my lands. Just give me the rocks above the ground, and you can keep the rocks under it. That way, I can know with just a glance how my part of the rocks are going."
"Good enough for me," Clyde said. And they wrote and signed two copies of the contract as sensible ponies often did.
Clyde worked, toiled and moiled, and when the time of the harvest came, he had ensured that the rocks above the ground and the rocks under the ground were worth about the same, so everypony was happy with the division.
Because of that, Smart Cookie kept leasing his lands and his funds to Clyde, and they became steadfast friends.
Moral: Cheating might lead to quick riches, but fair dealings lead to repeat customers. And if you can afford to trust someone, it can very well be worth your while.
I love these, thank you for not disappearing off the face of the earth.
Man, I wish companies in the real world could figure this out.
To be fair, given that in the original version(s-there actually seems to be multiple different takes on this story in different places) the one the farmer strikes the deal with is an unsavory fellow(like a/the devil) so they don't want them as a repeat customer. And usually it's because the devil or whatever comes to them first, rather than the other way around.
For the curious, the original version(s) this was based on-
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type1030.html
6079853 What about England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark Sweden, Norway and Finland?
The issue of those problem-states was not primarily overexcessive social care, but overexcessive everything. They build large highways with lots of bridges and tunnels where the weren't needed the slightest. They held lot's and lots of highly payed public officials that weren't needed. Nobody made sure that the taxes they claimed were actually payed. Yes, they also gave away way too much social care, but that's just part of a larger problem.
6105510 Well I don't know enough about Obama's proposal to know whether or not it would have those negative effects. It is fact thought that compared to most other western countries America is seriously lacking in social care.
6105510
Speaking as someone previously employed in the health care industry, I can say that Obamacare did make health care more affordable for some people. (And not specifically for the 1% or anything like that, the answer is more complicated than just who has money already.) But more importantly than making health care cheaper or not, it made health care available to (some) people who had little to no means of obtaining health care previously at all. Personally, I count wider availability as a win.
6107374 Great, and people are flocking the emergency rooms anyway cuz no one wants to accept anyone with Obamacare because it reimburses at such a low rate.
Not to mention most people on the cheap plans still can't afford the high deductibles... but they also can't afford the premiums of the higher-tier plans. So they have insurance they can't really use.
What NO ONE is looking at or asking about is 'WHY DOES MEDICAL CARE COST SO MUCH IN THE USA?'. That's the root cause of ALL the problems! Nothing's going to get better until that's dealt with.
Medical school costs far too much, medical supplies cost too much, malpractice insurance costs too much, there are far too many frivolous lawsuits clogging up the courts, Medicare and Medicaid are rife with fraud costing between $50 and $100 billion per year... the list of major issues everyone's been basically silent on is titanic and likely raises the overall costs of medical care 5-fold or more from what it should.
Not to mention, now Obamacare has ramped up the bureaucracy beyond belief.... which takes a lot of time... and thus even MORE money.
I work in CHOP in Philly. I know these things because I SEE THEM EVERY DAY. I'm living the reality of this abomination. It's very hard to lie to people in the middle of the storm and tell them the sun is shining.
Clyde blinked in shock as he interjected, "Whoah whoah whoah! I ain't plannin' on openin' a whorehouse!"
(Heh heh heh. Plot jokes.)
6105935 I notice the debt of those nations has been exploding...
Ah, who cares! Just print more money! Spend your way out of debt!
Oh, I'm going to be laughing so hard so very soon...
6115392
More than the debt of the USA? I doubt it.
If you take the government debt level by percentage of the GDP there are only four European country's before the USA (Greece, Italy, Ireland and Portugal)
The nordic countries which are known even in Europe to have a ridiculous amount of social care don't even have half America's percentage.
Sure, I believe you right away that in a few years most western countries will get a problem with their huge debt level, but there is no outright statistic correlation between debt level and amount of social care.
6116679 The Nordic countries benefit from having a tiny population and quite enormous and valuable resources.
However, several of them, especially Norway, are HEAVILY invested in the markets... a single major crash could now wipe out half their economy.
Frankly, the world markets are all dangerously invested in each others debt loads. The Roaring 20's, preceding the Great Depression, boosted the stock markets on speculation as well, and not even close to this scale. We are truly in the position of Mutually Assured Economic Destruction, where a single partner's crash triggers a catastrophic domino effect. That's the primary reason I believe Greece is still around. Were all other nations in solid financial shape, they'd have cut Greece loose instantly and let it sink. As it is, the bond markets are too intimately linked. All those bundled securities (exactly like the mortgage securities market in 2007) will begin to unravel simultaneously as one default triggers another and another throughout the heavily leveraged global system.
6118010 All of that is very true.
I don't really know when our current system will collapse, but it will. It might go down in the next ten years, or sill have a few centuries left, but it is impossible to go on forever.
Even if things are salvageable right now through the right measures, those won't get taken, since everybody is just focused on pushing the event further back so that his successor will have to deal with the problem.
However, what I disagree with is that social care has much influence on that development. The fact that the total debt level -be it private or public- is constantly rising is hardcoded into our monetary system.
Social care might put a slight damper on economy temporarily. If it is done rightly, it might also not affect, or even revitalize the markets. Regarding the whole debt problem this is rather meaningless though.
Firstly the effect it might have is way too little to affect debt level all that much. Secondly a fluid economy will not save the USA or any European country from financial collapse, once things unravel.
It might help staying afloat a bit longer, because economically weaker countries like Greece will falter first that way, but as you said, everything is connected.
Once the weaker states would be out of the game, the more powerful ones would not be able to keep up their current prowess, because their economy depends on those states buying their goods.
When it comes down to what you think of social care it's much more a question of what you believe to be fair than of economy. And I don't believe it's fair to leave people dying just because their jobs don't pay enough for a proper living.
6119274 Unfortunately, social welfare programs make up fully 2/3 of the US federal govt. budget. The welfare programs are staggeringly titantic... and I can hardly imagine the chaos when all those dependent on welfare are left in the cold when the money dries up.
It's why my primary focus has been debt elimination. Getting myself in the black is the best position I can be in.
6119773 I don't believe that will help a lot. Our whole monetary system is based on the idea of debt. When say the dollar was introduced there were way less around than there are now. This is not only because America printed money, but mainly because companies loaned money from banks to make investments. The problem is that for the slightest bit of debt anyone has, money gets taken out of the system in form of interest. If I loan myself 100$ for a month I have to pay back more, let's say 120$. The only way I can get those extra twenty dollars is by getting them from someone else through some kind of deal (be it trade, a job, or some other way of acquiring money.)
But if I have twenty dollars more that means that someone else somewhere will have 20$ less. No matter who that, is, at the end of the month the whole system will have 20$ less. Well not completely. The bank will use a bit of the money to pay for their infrastructure and personnel, but it won't be all of it. For each dollar of debt somebody makes somewhere, someone will have to make more debt to pay the interest.
If a country like the USA don't want their citizens to make debt, they have to push money back into the system by either printing it or making debt themselves to pay for let's say infrastructure or through social care.
Now, if a country is exporting lots of stuff and financial service to other countries they will have a constant money inflow, thus if they operate economically they can theoretically avoid debt altogether - at the cost of other countries who have a constant money outflow and make even more debt. And once those break under their debt, the exports and thus your inflow will cease, thus opening the problem once more.
The way things are done right now making debt cannot be avoided, no matter how economically everyone behaves.
You know what would be really awesome? If all of you would take this pointless political stuff and continue it with private messages. Seriously none of this has anything to do with the story in any way, shape, or form. I like going through comments since there's usually good and funny ideas. At the very least, they are related to the actual story.
6124303
So much this.