The X-Men Series Portrays an America Which No Longer Exists · 12:45am Aug 27th, 2018
I liked Logan. I loved Deadpool 2. But these movies' portrayal of present-day American society as it relates to mutants is dead wrong.
When X-Men #1 was first released in 1963, it was a powerful statement as to the problems of 60's American society. The comics portrayed super-powered mutants who had to hide in the shadows, and implicitly drew similarities with racism, sexism, anti-homosexuality, disability, mental health incarceration, etc. Back then, there were big problems with how if you weren't the "ideal man," you were somehow inferior because the ideal man said so. Naturally, the ideal man's authority on such matters is why he is imminently qualified to be the ideal man. It was retarded.
Because our society was founded on the constitutional principle that all men are created equal, we realized this blatant contradiction in how people were being treated. We fixed our mistakes. Hell, we OVER-fixed our mistakes. We live in a hypersensitive society where even the imagined presence of discrimination gets millions of people outraged, some of them enough to riot.
In the year 2018, as Deadpool 2 shows, mutants are locked up in a Siberian gulag, the conditions of which are those usually reserved for hardened violent criminals. Mutant children are put into homes run exclusively by pedophiles. In 2029, when Logan is set, things haven't gotten any better. Mutants have been secretly sterilized through the drinking water. The government sends drones to kill mutants because they're sitting in a treehouse in Montana not even hurting anyone. In an illogical contradiction to this, superheroes who weren't born with their powers are celebrated. Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, etc. are not considered objects of derision because they obtained their powers through "natural" means.
This would never fly in the America that I know.
If there were mutants in real life, and they were abused and genocided to the extent shown in the Marvel movies, the public outrage would be so great that such conditions could simply never continue. A presidential candidate, and many congressional ones, would run on a platform of ending mutant discrimination and allowing them to participate in the larger society. It would be a bi-partisan push, the same as medical marijuana has been. Decent, thinking people on all sides of the aisle would never abide such a tyrannical political system... at least in the west.
Say that such change couldn't be achieved politically? Then it would still be achieved, by violence. You think Antifa is bad now? Imagine if they actually had a real grievance instead of a pretend one. They would be rioting in Washington DC every day, and not even a single window would remain unbroken, not a single car would remain untorched. Cops would be getting shot every day.
The right would join in as well. If the 2nd Amendment protects the right to bear arms, then a lot of constitutional conservatives like myself would intuit that it just as easily should protect the right to have superpowers that you're born with and can't change even if you wanted to. While I myself would never resort to violence, all sorts of militias would be storming compounds where these mutants are held and freeing them. Hopefully without firing a shot, and they'd try not to be violent, but if anti-mutant scumbags fought back then they'd be killed.
The dogs of hellfire would be unleashed until something changed for the better. In real-life America, the mutants would've been liberated decades ago. The entire premise of the X-men would collapse.
The only reason that the series in its present capitulation still exists is that it's running on fumes, it's skidding across the sand by the power of its former inertia. While I'm sure that there are some (mostly on the left) who watch these movies and say, "Oh, well that's how LGBT or [insert group] people are being treated today," and it appeals to them, I think they're probably in the minority. Or maybe not. Guilt is a huge industry. The Union soldiers who actually fought and lost brothers and comrades in the civil war didn't think it offensive that the South be allowed to honor their dead, erect statues in their honor. They occupied the south for years during Reconstruction and did nothing. But we, a century and a half later, who lost none of our own, who never knew a legally-kept slave, are so hypersensitive that we tear it all down. What unwarranted hubris we have. Hubris, yet also guilt.
Hollywood can't come up with anything original. The city is filled with Leftists who don't have a single creative idea in their head other than to make politically-motivated tripe. They resurrect series like Ghostbusters and Ocean's Eleven only to shove their agenda into it and watch it fail. They'll milk their moo-cows until they die of old age. So perhaps in the immediate years to come the X-Men series will still be successful despite its fantasyland America premise.
That is, at least unless Fox's new rodent-leviathan owner, Disney, runs it into the ground like they did with Star Wars.
4926276
Obviously superheroes and mutants don't really exist. That was never in question. What I am saying is that the X-Men only made sense in the context of an America in which discrimination based on immutable characteristics was okay. That has changed.
In other aspects, the Marvel Universe has changed with the times. They all use new technology, for instance, and it's not like the Black Panther is looked down on by his peers or the general public because he's black. So what's with the bigoted America as it applies to the X-Men?
4926283
Sure they can. How about make a comic where the mutants are free to exist as they are, and there is no legal discrimination against them, but they still face a lot of issues. Sort of like stigma around mental health, which does still exist. Perhaps there's still some mutant related stigma left over from the 60's. Maybe not everybody even understands what it's like to be a mutant and a lot of people are just misinformed about them. How about a story where a mutant could attain a high position in a Fortune 500 company and everybody's wondering if he got that because he used his powers to attain it. Perhaps the police start hiring mutants on the force who have, for instance, X-Ray vison or mind reading powers. Then there is a debate on whether or not that violates the Fourth Amendment. And that's just what I came up with in five minutes.
Marvel movies without the X-Men perform quite well and there's like, three of them a year. Maybe the X-Men can attain that level of popularity too if they update the plot a little bit.
What has President Trump done that even remotely compares to committing literal genocide?
4926289
I think Marvel felt like they had to stick with the universe that they created, which was fine for the regular cast of superheroes. They were never really hated on in the same way as the mutants because there's kind of been a barrier in their universe between the X-men and regular heroes. So those films don't feel outdated. I guess with X-Men, they figured that if it worked before, it'll keep working in the future. Big companies are like that, they stick with what makes them money. And if in real-life 2029 people are still watching X-Men films, so be it. If not, then maybe they could update their storylines slightly. I'm not really talking about this from a marketing perspective though, more from a storytelling angle. Thankfully for me all of my stories are in alternate futures, different worlds, or they're MLP fanfiction, lol.
Lord knows that I've portrayed alternate versions of Equestria before that don't jive with what we see in the show
Yes and no. Currently, the liberals use identity politics to break up populations into fractions based on minority status of race/gender/sexual identity/disabled/whatever, then to proclaim that the fraction defined is discriminated against, has been historically discriminated against, and thus deserves a certain class of preferential treatment. Conservatives have been using a us/them division, law abiding citizens vs lawbreakers, hard-working people vs freeloaders, free people vs people who want to control your every action.
Mutants drop right into the middle of that. They are a minority, BUT are not a historically discriminated minority, so they don't have that 'cred' to their names. In fact if statistics hold out, the vast majority of them in the US will be straight and a variation of white. Certainly, a mutant with an offensive blasting power could get arrested for carrying a concealed weapon without a permit (In Jersey, at least). A mind-reading mutant would be under constant legal threat from idiots who claim their tiny minds are being read. And God forbid any mutant shows any sign of an ability to control a mind, or every nitwit who goes on a shooting rampage has an instant scapegoat.
In the end, my best guess is they would just be people, with some going left and some right and the vast majority just playing turtle and trying not to be noticed.
I think the rise of fascists and white supremacists is a pretty real grievance.
4926299
I think that those scenarios you described would make very good stories! I haven't read the X-
Men comics so I don't really know if any of that is addressed. I'd like to think that in over 55 years they've done something like that, but you never know. There's almost unlimited stories you could do with how many different super powers and scenarios there are. That said, when the entire mutant population is heavily discriminated against, then you are limited in what you can write.
Both the left and the right are "guilty" of breaking people up into groups. Groups are only really useful to describe a certain number of people who have something in common. That said, even outside of politics they're used... marketers group people into "demos," car insurance costs different based on sex, and you need to earn a high enough income (aka work hard enough) to qualify for a loan. I don't think that grouping is an escapable part of the human nature. The best thing that we can do is to not assume that any particular individual who is a member of a certain group shares another, different characteristic that wasn't used to define the group in the first place.
You have a good point, although in this case I'm willing to give it a pass in the same way I give historical films a pass. For all the superficial updates, all these stories are really decades old comics being turned into films at this point so I think it's most fair to look at them that way. I think that window into the past is also helping movies like Deadpool survive Hollywood because it appeals to their political stupidity without needing to be forced in the way they do with other movies, so all in all I'm fine with it on the film front.
I'd definitely agree that it's a problem if it was still how the comics were being handled, but I don't follow them so I can't say if they are moving on or not there. If they are we may see that flow into movies in a few years/decades (because if there's one thing Spider Man shows us, it's that they're never going to stop), so we'll have to wait and see what happens once this round of political stupidity breaks.
4926289
You are, but don't feel bad, they got a ton of people with that one. Scott Adams rated that attack on Trump as the single most powerful persuasion play of the entire year, and considering he was able to use his assessment of persuasion to predict a Trump presidency back in 2015 before he was polling significantly I'd say he's definitely worth listening to on this kind of thing. Here's his blog post describing it so you can inform yourself:
http://blog.dilbert.com/2018/02/14/charlottesville-fake-news-best-persuasion-play-past-year/
4926335
Sorry... I don't plan on getting involved in a debate about Antifa and whether or not they have a legitimate grievance. Their violent actions and rhetoric speak for themselves. That's another blog post entirely.
My point here is that, if a group of people in America were treated as badly as mutants, Antifa would never live it down, and they would cause the government significant problems.
4926335
As someone who's studied quite a bit of history including the rise of Nazi Germany, there's no question that antifa is much closer to them than anyone else at the moment.
4926357
How so?
I agree man. Anything that happens today which people in general don't agree with are immediately in the conversations of people from Twitter to YouTube and many other parts of the web to the point where you'd be hard pressed to get away from their opinion, even if you yourself weren't agreeable.
I see the same thing happening with Harry Potter to be honest. Yea there are a lot of groups that would declare it evil, but I also think there are a lot of people who would want to know more. There are a lot of people that would be more curious about what can be accomplished by magic than fearing it.
In large groups though, people are stupid. The horde mentality is real, and we are prone to panic; it's survival instincts. Sometimes you don't have time to think and reacting with the crowd can save your life. That's where it gets tricky. If you interview people individually, you may bet varied reactions, but only in rare cases would you get outright hostility or even violence. If you do a reveal on a public stage though, only one person panicking and attacking can initiate a panicked riot that leads to murder of the individuals that are feared.
4926365
Properly explaining it would take a lot more time than I can put in right now since I'd have to go through quite a bit of history and the details of who the Nazis actually were which would in turn entail a lot of fact checking. An easy place to start is by reading their 25-point program which is posted on Wikipedia in the link below (and I verified hasn't been tampered with), although I wouldn't trust Wikipedia for the most part these days because the nature of the site makes it very vulnerable to the highly political tech companies trying to warp people's perception of history in order to cover groups like antifa and attack moderates like Trump (he took a lot of flack for not being particularly conservative in the Republican primary). Unfortunately I'm not sure where to find a good unbiased history online at this point (I did most of my research circa 2010 when no one cared so it wasn't hard to find unbiased information), but the long and short of it is that they are a violent extremest group and thus their behavior shares a lot of similarities with the Nazis because violent extremest groups tend to follow similar behavioral trends regardless of their beliefs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Program#The_25-point_Program_of_the_NSDAP
4926354
And that's why I still enjoy the movies. I think that they tell a good story, and when I'm watching them I try to ignore their out-datedness. The movie Logan has no excuse, though... it takes place in 2029 for goodness sake!
4926354
The infestation in comics is worse than film and gaming combined.
I think its less "hypersensitive" to Confederate statues, and more they weren't actually built for honoring in the first place, and was contracted years after to glorify them. And people starting to think that the cause they fought for was just.
4926409
And yet more and more people have allowed themselves to be manipulated by them. Ethnostates, antisemitism, extreme social conservatism, sexism, violence, eugenics - the ideology is stronger than it has been in decades, provably so, thanks to social media. I wouldn't call it Nazism, because the historical paradigm is so different, but it exists, and thus it's "counter culture" exists in the form of Antifa.
Be that as it may, I agree with you, or more specifically, I agree with the horseshoe theory. Expecting sense from two diametrically opposed viewpoints is not logical. I'm sympathetic to neither, but I wouldn't call one worse over the other. They're both a cancer on society. Don't fall for the right-wing strawman any more than you let yourself fall for the left-wing one.
4926533
I don't understand what you mean by infestation.
Infestation of antifa? Yeah I've heard of a lot of new comic storylines being influenced by PC and SJW. They should just stick to writing exciting things. Anymore, I try not to let my own political leanings slip into my writings, because I'm writing a story not a political tract. I'm not perfect, but I do try. I guess in defense of X-Men at least, their premise has always been somewhat political to start with. As are my biggest stories... LOL.. in that case I try to portray both sides fairly, right and left. I doubt these comics have paid Trump supporters the same courtesy, and I'll bet they've resorted to strawmen that require all the hay in [whatever place grows a lot of hay.] Did the MLP comic about the Ponyville election treat both sides fairly? Haven't read it yet, would be curious to know.
4926645
Some statues were built right after the war, as were memorial parks. You are correct that the statues continued to be built throughout the 20th century on a large scale and, to a much lesser extent, in the 21st century. That said, people still get upset over a statue that's sitting in a town which has already addressed its racism problems, as 90% of towns, even in the South, have done. Trust me I lived there. These activists are over-sensitive. Especially when there are larger racial issues to worry about than some inert statue that's just sitting there. Crime and poverty in the black community, particularly the cities, comes to mind. Of course these activists have the right to be upset over statues, I'm not pulling a fallacy of relative privation here. I just personally can't fathom why somebody gets upset over something so petty. Perhaps because lifting blacks up is harder than tearing a statue down.
[Warning: Large response incoming!
]
The southern states refused to accept the possibility of Washington DC outlawing slavery. They argued that, as former independent colonies, they gave up no rights by joining the Union. Thus, they argued, they had the right to keep slavery. If they couldn't, they claimed the right to secede. This was a constitutional crisis which pitted those who were in favor of stronger federal powers, against those who felt that the states should have the powers reserved for them under the 10th amendment.
The issue of states rights vs. the federal government is a valid issue. But slavery was the wrong hill to die on. The repugnancy of slavery is so severe that, for most of the historically-uninformed public, it overshadows every other travesty that happened during the war. I acknowledge both. This includes Lincoln's constitutional violations, most egregiously his suspension of habeus corpus, and his executive orders to wield legislative power to take sweeping federal actions. The Emancipation Proclamation was one of them, and though it was to an imminently good end, that does not justify the means. Also, there were the war crimes that the Union committed that nobody cares about because history is written by the victor. Sherman's march to the sea is the most heinous of these war crimes.
To Lincoln's Credit... He knew the sharks smelled blood in the water. Spain, France, England, all of the other colonial powers were just waiting for us to fall so that they could control whatever ashes remained. He knew he was on a timetable. Perhaps he did the best he could. I don't think he was a bad president... merely that his policies led to bad results further down the road.
Hyper-federalism won the Civil War. Its legacy is the massive federal government that we see today, which has assumed many of the powers originally intended by the founders to be wielded by the states. Obama's executive orders, Trump's executive orders, all wielding the power of the legislature into one man. The sweeping proclamations of the Supreme Court, a legacy of FDR's packing it with his judges, who stood on the shoulders of Lincoln. The very thing that the South warned about has occurred, but anybody who proclaims the virtue of states' rights is dismissed as "some sort of racist" or an "anti-federalist."
It's just fine to be anti-slavery, but to also acknowledge that the end of the Civil War left America with a massively bloated behemoth of a federal government. A government which is now trillions of dollars in debt, with hundreds of trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities, which will bankrupt us and leave China holding the claim to our assets. A government which has a larger military than the next ten nations combined, including our "enemy" Russia that we somehow fear in this new witch-hunt of our over-reactionary, hysterical society.
Well I've almost written another blog piece, so I'll stop for now.
4926415
Yeah, we're definitely on the same page with this stuff, and I wasn't a huge fan of Logan either. That's not to say it was bad, just underwhelming and not particularly well thought out in a lot of ways which left it weaker than most of the others.
4926533
...Fun.
4926765
Oh believe me, I don't fall for either straw man. It's just that the actual white supremacist groups in the US are so vanishingly small and universally laughed at that they are irrelevant. The only reason they are getting any attention is that the media is using them to justify the blatantly supremacist positions that have taken over the Democrats lately, and to a significant extent inventing them where it's blatantly obvious they don't exist. I think the best example of this was back during the election when there was a massive push to claim Trump is antisemitic in spite of the fact that his daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared are both Orthodox Jews.
This stands in stark contrast to groups like antifa and BLM which are large and have real political backing which makes their racism legitimately dangerous to the country. This is even more true due to the media's overt support of them as seen with the Charlottesville propaganda I mentioned earlier. That gives them functional legitimacy, and that is why it is essential to oppose them and point out the truth wherever this kind of shit pops up.
The good news is that they seem to be dying, but the bad news is that there doesn't seem to be any real opposition to them from within the Democrat establishment which makes it hard for them to actually disappear like we saw with the christian extremists in the Republican party. I was hoping Sanders would be the answer to this back before he endorsed Clinton and flushed his legitimacy down the toilet, but at the moment I don't see any answer which is a serious problem. The closest I've seen is some hints of possible successors after a total party collapse, but at this point I think it's way too early to say anything for certain. The upcoming midterms might give some clues to the path forwards, but I wouldn't count on seeing anything concrete until the 2024 presidential election.
P.S. Quick communications tip: you came off as being more confrontational than you really were with this post because you started off sounding like you were totally bought into the media's bullshit. That wasn't a problem with me because I'm an independent and pride myself on adapting my views to changing circumstances and data, but an actual hardcore Republican would have seen that first sentence and basically ignored everything you said from there because of the way they label you. In that much more common case, you would have been much more successful if you had opened with the more moderate stance of agreeing with the problems and then transitioned into pointing out that groups like the KKK are bad too because it would have established a point of commonality to build on rather than entrenching yourself as the enemy and trying to recover from there. You can see how I did a similar thing in my reply to The Dark Nightmare, and while I can't say anything for certain without a reply, based on the lack of a thumbs down and what I've learned about psychology from Scott Adams I think it worked.
4926865
It's also worth pointing out that there were a number of other important factors like economics tied up in the cause of the Civil war as well. I'm not going to even try to go into detail because I'm fairly sure people have gotten PHDs on just this one topic, but the long and short of it is that while slavery was a factor, it was far from the only one.
Also, since you brought up the national debt, I want to point out that contrary to what economists claim, it's functionally irrelevant for the US for one very simple reason. Money isn't power, force is power. Money gives an advantage because it can buy force, but at the end of the day the US military is the final word and makes all the economic bitching irrelevant. Economists may claim that China can cause a disaster with that debt, but if they tried the US would almost certainly declare it an act of war, declare everything China did null and void to fix the immediate economic problem, flatten China, and leave them with the bill. That means China can't actually do anything with that debt, so holding it doesn't give them any actual power and is functionally meaningless.
P.S. I'm fairly sure what xoid was talking about is the extreme politics infesting the comics and making them suck.
4926403
I actually did a Reddit post a while back arguing the same thing, that the wizards from Harry Potter really don't have anything to fear. I can't find it or I'd post it here.
Funny enough, much of that environment has been cultivated by the Harry Potter books themselves! Back when the books first came out, lots of conservative Christians, overprotective parents, or just plain idiots would hold book burnings of them. Because witchcraft was seen by the general public as akin to Satanism.
Harry Potter's popularity steamrolled all of that. Book after book, movie after movie came out and there was no mass epidemic of satanism to be seen. So that put a lot of the anti-Potter folks at ease. Maybe some of them even read the books themselves. I personally don't know a single person who says "OMG witchcraft is evull!"
Magic the Gathering might've had a lot to do with it, too.
That's probably why wizards would want to come out of the magic closet slowly. Probably by setting up interviews like you said, perhaps somebody shares an anonymous YouTube video of magic being done so that muggles know it still exists.
4926851
Like 4926872 inferred, I was referring to the infestation of S.J.W. grievance‐mongers… though there are a couple of scumbags within that lot that are engaging in political terrorism. There have been actual conspiracies to assault prominent detractors of the comics industry exposed. This isn’t hyperbole and the proof isn’t circumstantial; comics pros. had their own Games Journo Pros.‐esque list and whistle blowers came forward with evidence of these insiders conspiring to manufacture a legal pretext so they could physically assault their largest detractor. (Awhile later a friend of said detractor, himself a critic of the S.J.W. insanity that is gripping comics, was harassed near his own home in an attempt to provoke a confrontation; a near facsimile of the same plan that was exposed earlier.) An industry heavyweight intimidated a publisher to stop the industry’s largest detractor from getting published. The defamation has been nonstop and makes GamerGate look like a storm in a teacup in comparison — both the industry and the detractors are orders of magnitude smaller in number compared to GameGate yet the vitriol, the lies, the collusion… all of that is at least as bad if not worse than it was during GamerGate, and it only seems to be ramping up. About the only thing from GamerGate that was objectively worse would be the threat to shoot up a talk where Anita was to appear that the F.B.I. found non‐credible.
I don’t actually follow the M.L.P. comics, but I.D.W. is suffering from a less severe infestation of S.J.W. ideologues than Marvel (or even D.C.) so it may be tolerable or even free of blatant partisan bias.
4926872
Perhaps. But that doesn't change the fact that fence-sitters have flocked to them in droves. Today's propaganda is subtle, and frankly the right is far better at it than the left has been, at least for the last decade or so, because people are pissed and have been pissed for a long time. Emotionally driven narrative is at the center stage of political discourse more so than it has been in a long time, which is why we're saddled with this cancerous "you're either with us or against us!" -ideology.
Let's try to remember that BLM has had thousands upon thousands of protests and a small handful of them have devolved into rioting and violence, provable by statistics. They started a national conversation about black issues, most notably their unfortunate relationship to the police and the disparity that affects them as a group in the criminal justice system. I think that's a good conversation to have because it's a tangible real world issue. I won't deny that they do shelter their share of closet supremacists, but that doesn't mean I would paint them with a broad brush and call them racist.
I think that criticism works better for Antifa which is legitimately an extremist organization.
This appears to be supposition and I can't find credible sources that back this statement. Embracing an extremist organization like Antifa (which is generally regarded as anti-American, anti-liberty, anti-market and anarchist) is a lot different than embracing a movement that spawned to specifically raise awareness about black issues in the US. Sure, there are some bad apples in the bushel but BLM is so decentralized it's more of an ideology than it is a movement, and the ideology aligns with a lot of the principles Democrats hold about things like racism and unequality, it's no wonder why so many of them seem to have thrown their lot in with BLM.
I agree. Unfortunately Sanders realized far too late that you need to play the game to win at the game. Sad, isn't it? I admire his idealism, even though I heavily disagree with his fiscal positions.
This is going to sound cringy as fuck my dude but I purposefully came of as confrontational at first because I wanted to gauge if there was any point to having this conversation. Unfortunately, due to the way media and social media work, there is a lot of "headline outrage" these days. By this I mean people don't really care about the meat of their opposition's argument; they just find something that sets them off, like a news headline, a stupid tweet, a statement, a paragraph, even a word; and then strawman that snippet as if it constitutes the whole of the argument. A lot of the "skeptic" YouTubers have built a career out of this, but honestly this happens indiscriminately on both sides of the political spectrum and it's one of the worst things that has happened to political discourse in the last few years. You said it yourself, if you had been a hardcore Republican I'd have no hope of convincing you, as you'd have no hope of convincing me if I was something akin to an SJW, or worse. I tested you, and for that I apologize and thank you for taking the time to actually have a conversation, even if I disagree with you a bit more than I agree with you.
I appreciate anyone who thinks for themselves.
4926877
...You are giving way too much credit to Harry Potter here. First of all, magic has been part of entertainment since long before Jesus was born and as such has been used by everyone in every way in basically every culture. Second, while this subject is out of my range of historical knowledge, at the very least both the Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia were both very popular and predate Harry Potter by nearly half a century. Third, while I don't have knowledge of the details of those book burning, I think they are massively overinflated because the timing on that would have been around when Bush 2 was rallying/making prominent those extremest Christian groups who swept him into office, the media was probably drumming it up for political reasons just like they are doing now with the KKK, and it's well known that controversy boosts sales so the publisher would have been financially incentivized to push that narrative.
4927028
First, your use of "them" is ambiguous here so I'm going to assume you're talking about Trump rather than groups like the KKK here because that seems more fair and logical to me.
Second, I think it's more fair to say that it's less people flocking to Trump and more people abandoning the establishment. That's why Sanders did so well in the primaries, and at the end of the day I think a lot of what got Trump into office was people who had no idea what to expect from him deciding to roll the dice rather than accept more of the same because those were their only two options (largely thanks to the green and libertarian parties going out of their way to find even worse candidates). It's also important to remember that this isn't necessarily an emotionally driven decision because the establishment was doing a terrible job in a lot of ways, so there was a real argument to be made that rolling the dice was more logical than more of the same because there was a chance at success that way even if it did come with a risk of disaster (for the record, I'm simply stating that this argument existed at the time, not expressing my current or former opinion). To be fair, this really is a very complex topic and can't be properly discussed without also considering Clinton and her statements like the infamous "basket of deplorables" and effectively saying she wanted to start a nuclear war with Russia (this would have been by far the most likely outcome of her no-fly zone over Syria) in one of the debates, but I felt like it was important to point out even if your statement about the obvious prevalence of emotions is at least superficially true.
Third, a lot of this actually has nothing to do with politics, but is actually a symptom of our failed education system. I have more awareness of this than most because a friend of mine is wants-to-write-a-book levels of into it, but the short version is that school actually beats complex, rational thought and creativity out of students which is what really creates that hyperpartisan binary insanity. I was lucky enough to dodge this, but my brother went through public schools and looking back on it, I can say with certainty that he is dumber and more childish now than when he was a little kid.
Read this:
http://quillette.com/2018/05/14/the-racism-treadmill/
We can discuss this topic more after you do because it provides foundational insight into this topic.
That is correct, I unfortunately do not have an analytical source for it. It is based on observation and is talking about the larger insanity in relation to national culture, not a specific facet of it like BLM or antifa, so by its nature as a sense of current culture it is hard to directly measure. My impression is that a few years ago the insanity was in full swing and able to dictate basically anything its advocates wanted by destroying anyone who got in their way and many people on the sidelines would at least nod along, but now the general public has gotten fed up with their shit and pushes back on them hard which has sapped both their power and numbers. That's definitely not to say that they are gone, just that they are on the decline now even if they are still a threat. The fact that we are having this conversation in a publicly visible space should be proof enough of that, because I distinctly remember a corporate "ethics" training in about 2015 where they basically said the lynch mob mentality was law and we could be fired if someone overheard something and misconstrued it as offensive.
Yeah, definitely. I was honestly hoping he would jump ship and sign on with Trump because he probably has more in common with Trump than the democrats when you add it all up. Trump also would have moderated the less well thought out parts of Sanders' economics while still allowing a few key points like universal healthcare (for citizens) through, and the result would have been a truly spectacular demolition of the political order. As is, Sanders has basically removed himself from politics at this point, and I think most of his old supporters have seen that similarity and jumped on the Trump train.
That said, the primary was exactly the time to buck the system so I won't fault him for that. I think he probably would have won the primary if it wasn't rigged against him, although I agree with your assessment about his inability to compromise and think it probably would have cost him the general election since I doubt he would have shifted more moderate like Trump did. That probably would've put the democrats in a better position in general since he would have come out with a lot of power to reshape the party, but there's no way to know.
I can definitely see where you're coming from on this, and I honestly used to be more similar. The biggest difference is that since I've been following Scott Adams for a lot of years now I've learned a lot of psychology and persuasion tricks I can sometimes use to break people out of those more extreme positions. I'm certainly no expert, but I know that it's a powerful skill and try to practice it when I can to make myself more effective and successful in everything I do. If there's one thing I'd like you to take away from this, it's to pay close attention to him because he is a very smart, skilled, and insightful man who's willing to share the keys to his success, so you should make an effort to learn everything you can from him because it'll pay off big time no matter what you want to do.
Also, I suspect we agree on more points than we disagree on, but it's much more interesting to discuss points of disagreement because that's how we learn new things and improve our positions on topics.
4928280
Yeah I might be. I seem to remember outrage existing, but it was probably amplified by the media, as it always is.
But your comments actually reinforce my original point, wherein I agreed with another poster that people would probably not want to just burn all the witches if it was revealed that some of them actually did exist. You are assuming a more tolerant society than the one that I was assuming. I think we'd both agree that the public would be tolerant if actual magical people existed?
Government-mandated universal healthcare has never worked, and it's more accurately called socialized medicine. That's because it's possible to achieve universal coverage without massive government intervention. Namely, by repealing regulations which have caused the cost of care to skyrocket over the years, which would make insurance affordable to families for maybe only a few hundred dollars a month, lower for individuals. Medicaid would exist for its original intention of covering people who are barely scraping by. Then we'd achieve universal coverage. But if we just pour money into an already costly system, it would cost us many trillions of dollars every year to cover everyone.
It has been argued that the cost of healthcare would actually decline under socialized medicine due to lower administrative costs, gained efficiencies, and government bargaining power. However, in no country in which a government system has been implemented have the costs gone down or even remained steady in the years after its implementation. Proof in point, this chart:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/Health_care_cost_rise.svg
Most countries with socialized medicine saw growth of about 5% or more in healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP. Moreover, all of these countries had socialized medicine before the 70's when the graph starts. Some of them well before, such as the UK (1948) and Germany (1880s). The United States in the 1970s had healthcare costs which were more in line with those countries. Then our costs went out of control. So you can't blame the United States' higher costs on us not having socialized medicine, otherwise we would've had much higher costs than the UK and Germany from the very beginning, not just starting in the 70's.
What changed since the 70's was an ever-increasing regulation in the United States that those same European countries did not have. These regulations include restrictive drug patents, malpractice laws, defensive medicine, limitations on the number of doctors graduating per year, crackdowns on independent clinics, proliferation of illegal aliens getting healthcare for "free," the list goes on and on. Then we also have major health problems that other countries don't have, such as the world's highest obesity rate and unhealthy eating.
Finally, the American population is generally richer than Europe and many, particularly elderly people, are willing to spend hundreds of billions to extend their life even only by a couple of years. The last couple of years is when 80% of the money the patient ever spends in their lives, is spent. In Europe they'd just have a government bureaucracy decide how long you're "allowed" to live. Private insurance is available in most European countries, but it's largely out of reach. The UK for instance has a PPP adjusted income per capita equal to that of Alabama so there aren't as many billions to pour into life prolonging. So that is part of what the rise in the graph represents: the baby boomers' Medicare and out of pocket expenses.
To end, I think we need to achieve universal coverage by getting the government out of the way, not by expanding its budget to throw money away into a system that's already broken due the the same government in the first place.
4929776
Without a doubt. Sure there'd be some spectacular freakouts, especially in the short term, but I don't see there being any serious problems.
Not true. There are a number of countries which are currently making something along those lines work to varying degrees, and the US already has fully government funded healthcare for veterans. I don't have the expertise to assess any claims on this topic and I highly doubt you do either because of the highly complex and technical nuance of the topic (which extends beyond the actual healthcare system and encompasses impacts on other areas like the impact of malpractice lawsuits on the courts), but I've repeatedly seen the claim that the net cost of a socialized healthcare system would be lower than the net cost of the current system.
Moving on to your graph, I want to state up front that I don't have the information to validate it and confirm that it is comparing like costs which is critical because that is a common failure in these kinds of highly political topics, so I'm taking it with a grain of salt. It's also important to remember that what constitutes healthcare now is much more complex and effective than it was in the past, so cost increases are expected due to the additional costs associated with those improvements. Remember, the cheapest system is no healthcare of any form, so if all you look at is costs and not benefits (e.g. life expectancy, infant mortality, outcomes of injuries) you are missing half the picture and can't form a meaningful conclusion. Now, with all that said, your data does seem to support the assertion that a socialized system is cheaper than our current system and certainly fails to demonstrate an economic failure because the socialized systems were roughly even or slightly cheaper at the start of the graph and are much cheaper now. According to that data, the expected outcome of a switch to a socialized system in the US would be a very rapid drop into line with other countries which is simply not something it can show for deregulation. If you have better data or an article rooted in facts that attacks this position in a mathematically robust way I'd love to see it because I've never been able to find a substantial argument against socialized healthcare, but as is all the data seems to show that it is the more economically viable model which is why I'm willing to defend it.
Note that that doesn't say there are no problems in the regulatory structure and no savings that can be generated there without undue risk (Thalidomide is the classic example of why we have those regulations, although that was about a decade before the start of that graph so it doesn't affect the data), just that the evidence presented does not support the claim. If you wanted to approach regulation reform in a meaningful way, you'd have to do it on a case-by-case basis by assessing the costs and benefits of each regulatory component along with possible modifications so an informed conclusion can be reached on that piece of the puzzle. In all honesty, I think this is really a weakness of Congress because they usually don't circle back to assess how laws they passed worked out in the real world and tweak them to make them work better, but the same doesn't necessarily apply to the bureaucracy because I know the military at least is usually good about reassessing things and making improvements (although Congress can be an obstacle) and I'd be surprised if there aren't at least some other organizations which also do that reasonably well.
Also, one important thing I'd strongly recommend is watching this interview through because it provides some intriguing insight into an aspect of this I had never heard of before which describes the problem not as regulation, but "legalized corruption". I don't know enough about the history and details to say with authority how that fits into the graph and I also lack the expertise to assess the real impact of it, but it definitely sounds like a serious issue that needs to be considered.
I've noticed that you tend to fall into the "capitalism is magic/government is evil" trap sometimes, so I want to lead off by reminding you that that is just as invalid as the inverse "government is magic/capitalism is evil" trap that other people sometimes fall into. As with most things, the reality is more complex. There are both advantages and disadvantages to both the free market and regulation, so you need to seriously assess how to take advantage of both to get the best possible outcome. Based on what you've already said I don't see any need to go into the advantages of the free market, but there are also some serious fundamental failings of capitalism that absolutely must be considered in this context.
First, you need to remember that capitalism is built on maximizing profit, not reducing costs. We've generally figured out how to make it reduce cost in a lot of areas (e.g. the grocery store), but there were definite pains along the way in the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries which you cannot disregard. This obviously isn't a specific reason on its own, but everything else builds on it so I felt it was essential to lay it out to remind you to check your cognitive bias before heading into the actual reasons.
Now, let's start with the inherent lack of competition. One of the big costs in medicine is emergency care, and its nature makes patient choice and competition impossible. If you get hurt in an accident, the ambulance will show up, take you to the nearest hospital, and they will do what they need to do to take care of you. You get no say in any of that and may not even be fully conscious so you probably couldn't complain if you wanted to. That means you have no choice in the matter and will have to pay whatever price they dictate so there is no real competition even if there are multiple hospitals in the area (which is definitely not a given). Furthermore, there are many conditions which require highly specialized care and can leave you with no options because there is only one facility or sometimes person who can provide that care. Once again, there is no competition, so the price is simply set by the functional monopoly. That makes capitalism a terrible option in these areas because the owners will push prices through the roof since people will have to pay it no matter what. Government operation naturally avoids that problem since they aren't out to make a profit, although there are obviously other pitfalls that would need to be dealt with when setting up the organizational and incentive structure.
Next is the advantage of a single buyer. Drug companies can get away with charging insane prices for drugs because they know someone will pay when they are selling to the market, but in a socialized system the government becomes the sole buyer and actually has the most power in the negotiating relationship which allows them to get drugs cheaper. The government can simply say no to a price and effectively make the drug worthless since it can't be sold, thus forcing the company to bring the price down, or, in exceptional circumstances, force the company to accept the price the government decided on.
Next is complexity. One of the big requirements for the free market to function is for consumers to be able to make informed decisions. The healthcare system is by and large too complex for most people to make a meaningful cost-benefit analysis, so companies can take advantage of this to dress up terrible deals and screw people out of tons of money without them realizing what's going on. Another important aspect of this confusion is that companies can use regulations as an excuse to jack prices up because the public won't be able to tell what complying with the new rule actually costs. On the flip side, if the government is making the decisions, they will put together a team of experts who will be able to understand the complexity and remove this issue entirely.
Now for the big one, insurance companies. This is too big a topic to go into detail on, so I'm just going to briefly go over what their actual incentive structure is to show why capitalism breaks down badly here. First, their fundamental objective as companies is to maximize profit which entails maximizing income and minimizing expenditures. That fundamentally translates to an incentive to exploit that complexity I just mentioned to charge as much as possible while giving as little as possible. That means insurance companies are financially incentivized to not take care of their clients if there is any way they can possibly do so while simultaneously charging them as much money as possible, and the inability of the public to recognize it makes it very easy for them to do. Furthermore, they are also incentivized to sell coverage for stupid things like routine doctor's appointments which they can very safely charge far more for than what they pay back to patients, and that confusion makes it easy for them to hide what they are doing from the patients. To make this worse, they are also incentivized to impose unnecessary costs on doctors because they know those costs will be passed along to the patients, which will in turn allow them to make profit on those costs they artificially created in the first place. As a result of this ability to profit from stupid costs, insurance companies are actually incentivized to lobby the government for stupid, expensive regulations at all levels so those regulatory problems you mentioned are actually a result of capitalism (and especially the legalized bribery of public officials), not an inherent problem of government which is why they only hit the US and not those countries with socialized healthcare.
On another note, you made an unjustified claim about a "government bureaucracy decide how long you're 'allowed' to live" which is something I've seen a lot but never seen any systemic evidence for. If you have any real evidence to back that up I'd be interested in seeing it, but remember, anecdotes don't count. Anecdotes are not data, they are persuasion, and when someone jumps straight to an anecdote with no substance to back it up, it's almost always because they don't have data to support their position. That lack of data might stem from their own ignorance, the difficulty of collecting meaningful data, or the fact that the data runs contrary to their position, but no matter what the case may be, the result is the same. It isn't evidence, and I assume anyone who jumps straight to anecdotes is doing so because they can't make a real argument so I ignore them.
Now, with all that said, my general feeling is that the best approach would be to make hospitals, specialists, and prescription drugs publicly funded while routine care like seeing a general doctor and over the counter medication is left to the free market, but I'm unwilling to advocate any specific plan because I know I don't have the expertise to fully deal with the complexity. An example of a wrinkle that comes immediately to mind is chiropractors because they can be both an essential part of recovering from an accident which would seem to fall under the government funding umbrella and a part of routine care which would seem fall under the free market, so putting together a coherent set of rules to take maximum advantage of both would be a major project. The only specific policy point I'm willing to throw out there is that I'd allow the general public to buy into Medicare/Medicaid at a 15% profit, making it effectively a government-run insurance company competing in the free market, although that's really more of a short term stopgap solution while that better system is worked out, not a permanent fix.
4930508
Would you give up your current healthcare for VA healthcare? I sure wouldn't. The VA is plagued by high wait times and low quality care. It's like a mini-NHS.
I've seen this claim made all the time, too, but I have not seen any evidence for it. Namely, I haven't seen any evidence of costs decreasing in any country after socialized medicine was implemented. I.E. in X country, they implemented single-payer in 1999 and costs dropped from 1999 levels in the next few years. If you could please present some facts on this, I'd appreciate it. Thus far from what I've seen, costs are rising in those systems too.
In fact, in recent years healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP has been rising at a rate slightly higher in other OECD countries than in the US. Most or all of the other OECD countries have some sort of universal or single-payer system. According to you they should be much better at controlling costs than the US. But at least in recent years, it seems that they're not keeping costs under control any better than we are. Slightly worse, actually.
Average annual growth rate in total health expenditures per capita, U.S. dollars, PPP adjusted
Deregulation would save tons of money. Here's just one example. This physician wanted to offer MRIs for $500 in Winston Salem NC, where it cost thousands at hospitals. But he had to get a "Certificate of Need" which only the state government can provide, by ascertaining "need" for medical services. A centrally planned economy and health care rationing sounds just like socialized medicine to me.
Nothing is as deadly as the government deciding if you "need" healthcare and if a private provider should be "Allowed" to construct a health facility. Socialized medicine costs more money, not less. Coincidentally enough, these laws were passed in the 70's, right when we started to diverge from what other rich countries are paying for healthcare.
I can find two of them. California and Vermont both wanted to enact a single-payer system. Their legislatures conducted studies and concluded that it would not be affordable without massive new tax increases. They're blue states, too, so they genuinely believed in the single-payer model but realized it would be too expensive. Those were states in which tax increases would've passed the easiest and it was still unpalatable even to the voters in those states. Unfortunately I couldn't find the exact text of the studies that they did.
So first I'd like to point out that emergency rooms are only a small fraction of the total US healthcare spending. Somewhere between 5-10%, which isn't entirely insignificant, but even if you cut the cost of emergency room visits in half you're only addressing at most 5% of total healthcare spending. I agree that this issue is a problem area, though, and I'm not sure if there's a "right" way to do it.
Capitalism works on the basis of voluntary transactions between individuals which is impossible to do if somebody is unconscious, or there is only one hospital in the area. In this instance I believe that if an entity is to be given the power to provide services without consent and then charge for them, that power must be limited in some way. Obviously if an emergency room charged $100,000 it would not hold up in any court of law. I will be first to admit that I don't know of an equitable solution to this, but I do think that if we address some of the other problems leading to high healthcare costs, then it stands to reason that emergency room bills would drop as well.
For instance, why not just make it easier for hospitals to be built in the first place? As it stands there is phenomenal red tape for that which doesn't exist if you wanted to build, say, a new movie theater.
All of the countries which do this are essentially getting free drugs off the backs of Americans. The drug companies pass along their costs to Americans because it's a take-it-or-leave-it situation in other countries. Additionally, other countries allow for the production of generics immediately, while US patents prohibit this, which allows the governments over there to pay even less to the drug companies.
The US is by far the worldleader in R&D. America is the drug companies' only place to make a profit. If the US went single-payer, they'd become far less profitable, perhaps even unprofitable.
The government can't wave a magic wand and reduce the costs that these companies have to pay in order to develop a drug. They can reduce a company's profit margin by lopping the price off, yes. But it'll cost the same to develop a drug, regardless. Investors want to put their money into companies where they can get a good return on investments. If Pfizer's profit margins plummeted from 10% to 2%, they'd be less attractive to investors and creditors, and would have difficulty securing capital to fund the production of new drugs. We'd see a dramatic slowdown in innovation of new drugs.
Also, the only way to truly have a single buyer is to literally outlaw private insurance. Again, most Americans can afford, and do so choose, to purchase private insurance. In the event that a single-payer system comes into existence, it will inevitably be plagued with the problems that beset every other government bureacracy. Long wait times, incompetent staff, cold and dispassionate care, etc. I'm sure that millions upon millions of Americans would purchase health insurance which covers things that the government system doesn't, and many doctors, specialists, etc would accept only private insurance. Are you willing to take private insurance from people?
Those countries with socialized healthcare are hit with long wait lines and inadequate care, because the staff at government run hospitals are lazy and incompetent. Look at the VA. If government officials aren't busy enriching corporations, then they're busy enriching themselves. Why do 6% of Britons buy private health insurance if the NHS is so good? Because it's not, and I'm sure that the 6% figure would be even higher if Brits had the freedom to use the tax dollars that go to the NHS to buy private insurance instead. The percentage would go up even further if, again, the UK didn't have the GDP per capita of Alabama and they had extra money to spend on their health. A lot of America's high health care spending is due to voluntary choice.
In order to get socialized medicine to work, you'd have to repeal a good chunk of these regulations anyway, (i.e. certificates of need) so that the government can operate without tripping over its own red tape. So which would be easier? Repealing all of these dumb regulations? Or, repealing all of these dumb regulations AND implementing single-payer? Passing one law would be hard enough, let alone both. Why not just start with the regulations and see if the problem gets better? We can always do single payer later.
Say that Death Panels did indeed exist. What evidence would you accept for their existence?
I've read of several disturbing stories from the UK where doctors tried to prematurely end somebody's life because they believed the treatment would be too expensive, or they just didn't think the treatment would work, even thought it later did work.
Sometimes you need an anecdote because an anecdote is all you have. There's not going to be some page on the NHS's website that says, "Meet our death panels," or "Meet our end-of-life care advisory board" (more likely). At the least, an anecdote is evidence that something has happened at least once.
Why not do what has been done with the laser eye surgery and breast enlargement surgery market. Namely, a lack of regulation. Those procedures went from 10's of thousands of dollars about a decade ago, to very affordable today. Unlike all of healthcare which has gotten more expensive. I wonder why.
I have a medical condition, and HIPPA protects my right to keep that medical condition a secret. The government already knows enough about me. I don't want them knowing what's wrong with me.
Additionally, I also do not want to give the government the power of life and death over its citizens. Citizen A has said bad things about the government? Just disconnect his IV the next time he's in the hospital. The Deep State's tendrils must be kept out of medicine at all costs.
4930619
Ok, a few things before I start.
First, in hindsight I really should have said this earlier, but this discussion has gotten too in depth for relatively quick replies. That means I won't be able to reply after work so you should probably expect one reply on the weekend from here.
Second, I think I need to clarify something up front. We are both ignorant on this topic. I have a fair estimation of your knowledge base from our conversations here and on Discord, and it's very clear you aren't an expert on this. This is exactly the kind of topic that is a huge, sprawling mess which takes years of detailed, in depth, and most importantly unbiased research to achieve a truly meaningful understanding of, and once you have that knowledge base it then takes constant effort to maintain currency because of the way the field is constantly evolving.
For reference, when I built my own knowledge of the military, I had to put a lot of effort into reading and understanding the arguments of both sides as well as drilling down to the politics, physics, and battlefield psychology at the heart of the matter. The reason I know I have arrived at true understanding is because I can coherently lay out the arguments of every side and use that deep understanding to put together a nuanced plan which takes advantages of all of their strengths and weaknesses.
You have made it clear that like me, you lack that degree of understanding on this topic, so my real goal here isn't to convince you of any position, just open your eyes to your own ignorance. I can clearly see that that ignorance has lead to severe intellectual dishonesty just like it did with religion before I opened your eyes to the inherent irrationality of failing to reconsider your position as you are exposed to new data and arguments. You are doing exactly the same thing here, and it is very clear to me that you are taking your small-government bias and blindly slapping it on the healthcare system. Once again, my objective here isn't to convince you that any of your positions are wrong because I too lack the knowledge necessary to make a meaningful judgement and thus am incapable of saying if any position is right or wrong, I'm trying to help you see through your own bias to help you get a clearer understanding of the world.
Just remember, no matter how detailed your understanding of any topic is, the reality is always more complex and there are always variables you are failing to consider. It doesn't matter if that's medicine, defense, immigration, economics, international relations, or anything else. You are always ignorant of important details even with a highly nuanced understanding of the topic and people with different opinions always have some legitimate reason for those opinions, so you need to be open to other perspectives and give legitimate consideration to their merits. You are always wrong about everything, so true intellectual integrity is understanding that, identifying and overcoming your biases, and working to make your perspective less wrong.
Oh, and fair warning, I'm going to verbally smack you when you really cross the line on this. Don't take it personally, I'm doing it to show the problem so you can fix it, not to attack you because that's just counterproductive.
Third, Scott just had a second interview with Dr. Shiva who is way more knowledgeable about this than either of us, so you should take an hour to watch that interview through (assuming you haven't seen it already because you should really be following Scott already). The link is below, so have fun with that.
https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1038064711747559425
Now on to your actual reply.
I lack the knowledge to give an informed answer to that question. I do know that a lot of veterans are very glad for the VA though, so it's clearly not all bad.
That said, what's more important is the actual data about its effectiveness and cost, especially if we look at how it has responded to varying funding levels in the past. I lack the data and understanding of the data to make an assessment there, but I will say that the VA is both a useful case study and excellent test vehicle because it would be a perfect place to find out if government funded heavy duty care combined with direct pay doctors (also paid for by the government in this case) works as well as I think it might.
Ok, I'm trying hard, but I can't see any way to interpret this section of your post as anything other than a stunning display of intellectual dishonesty. It seems highly likely that implementing the exact same system in two relatively similar countries would yield largely similar results. That data clearly shows the US is spending far more than those countries with socialized systems. The beauty of using numbers per capita and as a percent of GDP like that data does is that it effectively cancels out differences in size and, to some extent, economic situation, which makes it very easy to say that the US is relatviely similar to those countries. It therefore logically follows that the expected outcome of blindly dropping a country like Norway's system (based on their nearly identical GDP per capita) into the US would be for the US's numbers to rapidly move to match the country we copied policies from. That is where you get a drop in costs, not magical thinking that blindly ignores new developments driving up costs across the board, it's correction to the curve we have wandered far above.
Also, you have either misrepresented or misunderstood the data about the growth. That is very clearly not growth as a percent of GDP, but as a percent of previous costs, which means the higher preexisting costs in the US resulted in higher net cost growth as can be clearly seen on the %GDP graph above it.
That said, what I find most interesting about your data is that the last two graphs seem to indicate that switching to a socialized system would impose little to no extra cost on the US government, although it's probably safe to assume there would be a substantial spike in the short term as the system adjusts.
Two points. First, while that does sound like a bad regulation that needs to be changed, it is fundamentally an anecdote and thus does not say anything about the larger system. There are plenty of dumb laws on the books and they are usually either fixed or ignored as problems come up, so the bigger question is how does this shake out.
Second, what this really sounds like to me isn't a fundamental failure of government, but a case of crony capitalism. This kind of thing is exactly why I say campaign finance is such a big problem. The current system creates a legalized system of bribery, so in this case the big hospitals can bribe politicians through campaign contributions, those politicians can pass and enforce laws to favor those hospitals, those hospitals make tons of money by abusing the public, and the cycle of corruption reinforces itself.
This is a blind assertion with absolutely no data behind it. All you're doing here is repeating the same gospel to try to beat a view that is apparently based on blind faith just like any religion into my head. This can be effective persuasion against the unwary, but a huge part of my own enlightenment is that I've learned to spot these kinds of things and conditioned myself to have a hostile response to protect myself from manipulation. You should be ashamed of yourself for writing something so intellectually dishonest.
I have heard from a number of people on both sides that things started going badly wrong in the 70's with Glass-Steagall being the other big one that comes to mind. I haven't really looked into the details myself, but the more I think about it the more I think it would probably be smart to do so because there were probably some key points in there where corruption worked its way into the system. A quick check on Wikipedia says that's also when lobbying became a big thing along with some other similar points about campaign finance, so there's probably some major substance there if you want to dig into it.
Yeah, without the studies it's hard to say anything for sure. Two big immediate questions that come to mind are people coming in from out of state for care because the US doesn't really have internal borders and dealing with the larger problems like those GPOs Dr. Shiva mentioned, so I really can't say anything for sure. The first article is unfortunately a horribly biased mess of a hit piece to the point that I can't extract anything of value from it, but the second does seem to point to issues with interactions with federal law which makes sense at the state level but obviously wouldn't apply if the federal government did it. There's also the possibility that those laws were simply terribly written by one group of lobbyists or another (like Obamacare) because politicians are generally clueless about intricate subjects like this and it could be done affordably if it was written right, but I definitely don't have the ability to tell if that's the case or not.
Also, one important thing to consider is that the federal government has access to more revenue streams than the states do, so it might be possible to help fund a single payer system through things like tariffs (which seem to be how Trump aims to balance the budget) or push past a massive front-end funding hump with trillions of dollars in loans to get to the savings on the other side. When combined with the issues mentioned that might mean it is affordable at the federal level but not the state level as suggested by that data you posted earlier, but I don't have the expertise to be able to tell if that's the case or not.
Ok, cool. It sounds like we're getting somewhere with this. While there is undoubtedly room to discuss the details, I think you can definitely see how a government-run hospital could be a viable way to address this problem since it eliminates the incentive to exploit people who cannot make a voluntary transaction. I don't have the expertise to say if that's the best way to handle it or not, but my general thought for situations like this is that the amount of regulating and litigating the government would need to do if it were privately owned probably means it would be cheaper for the government to just do it directly to eliminate the paperwork.
One other related area you didn't directly address is the case of ultra-specialized care. This is a very small portion of total healthcare costs (probably less than 1%), but for the people it does apply to it's a huge deal. In some cases the pool of options can be as limited as one facility or even doctor in the entire country, so in addition to them being able to set any price you might also have to come up with the money to fly across the country to see them. That said, it is still fundamentally the same situation so I think everything you said applies here as well.
Heh, the funny thing about this is that there's a glaring problem with your argument which is highlighted by your own data. That data isn't medical R&D, it's total R&D which means what it's actually showing is the real vehicle for R&D, both in the modern day and historically. The military. Essentially everything of substance from transportation to food preservation and industry to medicine comes out of the military one way or another. In this case, the best example is penicillin which was largely ignored by industry and academia for more than a decade until the start of WWII got the US Army interested, and by the end of the war we were cranking out hundreds of billions of doses a year.
While it's unlikely the medical industry could achieve the same effectiveness, the solution is obvious. Implement a similar system on the medical side of the government, bring in as many senior veterans as possible to run it to replace the profit-based mentality with a mission-focused mentality, and use that to run R&D.
Also, based on what Dr. Shiva said, a big part of the current problem in the US is the GPOs, not the drug companies or some magical European boogeyman, although I don't have the expertise to do a deep dive on the subject.
What you're waving your arms at as some impossible thing is fundamentally a misrepresentation of how the defense industry functions, so the real outcome would be the healthcare industry operating like the defense industry I am intimately familiar with. That means you've crossed into my area of expertise now so I can speak with authority instead of simply presenting alternative viewpoints for your consideration.
Now, while defense companies do do some work on their own (called Internal Research And Development or IRAD), the vast majority of heavy work is directly funded by the government one way or another. In the military, IRAD mostly boils down to two things.
First is very early stage work. This is usually a very limited effort to demonstrate a concept or narrow aspect of a technology to convince the government to provide follow-up funding for it or to convince them that a company can meet the goals of a project. In a medical context, this would translate to coming up with potential drugs or devices for the government to fund further development of.
Second is translation work. This involves taking an existing capability such as a weapon or sensor and reapplying it in another context like moving it from an aircraft to a ground vehicle. This is usually taken to the point where the new capability can be demonstrated in the new context and using that demonstration to convince the government to pay for final certification ahead of purchase. In a medical context, this would translate to taking an existing drug or device, coming up with another way to use it to make it effective at other tasks, and getting the government to fund the expansion of its certification and purchase it for use in that new way.
It's also important to remember that the military also does some work in-house, so healthcare organizations could also do some work internally to get a critical capability out the door if needed. A good example of this in action is the Integrated Respiratory and Eye Protective Scarf which was an internal Army project which could have a ton of broader applications, but no one else pushed for it because existing gas masks were "good enough" so the Army went ahead and developed it themselves. I unfortunately don't know where that went since I had very limited contact with that and haven't heard anything since 2016, but it still illustrates the point nicely.
So, long story short, the drug companies don't need massive profits to develop things internally because the government has very thoroughly proven it can effectively fund development in the defense industry.
...This is stunningly ignorant and dishonest. First, you can get to the effect of a single buyer without banning direct transactions quite easily, you just need the government to make up the bulk of purchasing which will happen if hospitals are largely government owned so there's no need to outlaw private healthcare to get that benefit. It's important to note that this does not exclude the possibility of private hospitals for those who want to pay for it, just that they will have to compete with completely free public healthcare which will probably be a hard sell.
Second, health insurance in the US is a monster. It imposes huge costs to cover things that have no business being covered by insurance, jacks up costs to increase profit, and is generally a massive burden on the system. The concept of insurance works best when it's spreading the impact of a low-odds occurrence very broadly, and last I checked it's impossible to find a true disaster insurance plan in this country because the insurance companies don't want to give people that sane option because it hurts their bottom line. There's a damn good reason people in the US are abandoning the current system in droves and going to direct pay doctors who don't accept any form of insurance instead, so if the government has to take over that disaster management role and kill the insurance companies as a side effect then that's really just capitalism at work. The companies got too inefficient, so they got replaced by an organization that could do a better job.
For the rest of it, you are being openly manipulative here based on the fact that the general public doesn't see the bulk of government work in action. They mostly only deal with the lowest level of organizations like the car people (the name changes from state to state), and the reality is that it's essentially impossible to motivate people in those positions to care no matter what you do. I've dealt with quite a few government people from a variety of other roles and organizations in my life and career, and I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that they are no less motivated than people in private industry. The hardest working person I've ever known in my entire life was a government employee, I've seen how quickly the inside of a government organization works, and I've seen just how badly private industry can fail while still remaining in business. If you want an example of how motivated the majority of government employees really are, the easiest way is to go to a national park and talk with a park ranger about their work. I'd guarantee that once you get them talking about the park and nature in general, you'll see first hand how engaged and motivated they are to do everything in their power to make things better no matter how little money they make doing it.
The first paragraph is more of the same baseless persuasion with no substantial data to support it (e.g. accident rates) so I'm going to ignore it, but the second displays a clear ignorance of the way elected officials functions so I need to address it. When the real problem is corruption as I increasingly appears to me, you can't directly fix those bad regulations because of the amount of bribe money thrown at protecting them. That means that unless you attack the bribery directly (which is functionally only possible through an Article V Convention), you have to enact the single payer system first in order to cause those trip-ups to happen and get themselves fixed. Yes, this is undeniably a very serious and colossally stupid problem, that's exactly why I think fixing campaign finance is such a critical issue and frankly more important than healthcare.
You'd need to either find some kind of leaked directive or statistical evidence to show a problem. Anecdotes are almost always a case of bad judgement in one specific situation (and not always by the doctor), and if they are really as rare as they seem to be based on how infrequently they come out then their system is working way better than ours.
Also, the phrase "death panel" is pure persuasion with no intellectual rigor behind it so you should purge it from your vocabulary. It is every bit as intellectually dishonest as saying "insurance companies kill people for profit", so just like I mentioned before, when I see you use that kind of persuasion my defensive reaction trips and I immediately get extremely suspicious of your claims.
That may be a viable model for elective surgeries like that, and is certainly something that could be combined with my vague thought of government run hospitals and direct pay doctors. I simply lack the expertise and in-depth knowledge to say for sure.
I find your ignorance amusing. The reality is, weather we like it or not, true privacy is a thing of the past. Companies like Google already know essentially everything about you, and government intelligence agencies are far more effective (in part because those companies are an open book to intelligence agencies weather they know it or not). Similarly, if an organization like the CIA really wants to kill someone, it will happen one way or another and it almost certainly won't be anywhere near as obvious as a disconnected IV. The flip side is, they by and large don't care so long as you aren't a terrorist or something because they understand what kind of ripples their actions have unlike the general public so it isn't a real risk.
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I understand that there are a lot of facts and variables I am failing to consider here. You are correct that this is an area which requires years of study to fully understand and I don't have that. I've been researching the issue here and there for years, but I'm not as knowledgeable as Dr. Shiva.
I watched Scott Adams' interview with Dr. Shiva. While there were a few facts here and there that he got incorrect, or at the very least facts which can be reasonably disputed by other, contradicting information, I'd say most of his understanding seems very solid. His proposal does not seem to indicate support for government-run hospitals or doctors, just lowering the cost of care to about $200 a month and possibly introducing a public option for those who still need it. In addition, he proposes solutions which I myself have proposed such as increasing the supply of doctors, and reforming the research and development field. He didn't mention certificates of need but I would bet that he'd also support repealing those laws. All of the above would be a good political compromise that I would probably vote for if I could--but I'd have to see the final law to know for certain. It seems like you want to go farther than that, though.
If this isn't your exact position then I apologize, but from what you say, you want the majority of hospitals and doctors to be on the government payroll, and be government-run. This is then supposed to eliminate insurance headaches, excess administrative costs, GPOs, drug company bargaining power, etc. across the board. However, how would you propose having the majority of hospitals be government owned, and the majority of doctors minus specialists being government employees? Right now most of them are private, or run by non-profits or religious organizations (mostly Catholic). Shall we build a bunch of new government hospitals, or is the government to purchase existing hospitals instead? Pay for tuition for new doctors? Make existing doctors an offer which is better than what they're being paid? What if most of them say no? Medicare constantly underpays hospitals, so I don't see why the government wouldn't also make a low-ball offer to buy them outright. Or are we going to use eminent domain?
What are we doing here? What are you proposing here? I understand that you have hesitancy to give a definite answer until you know more, and I totally respect that. However it is difficult to debate you if I don't know exactly what you want to do. I've been pretty open about my solution: deregulation across the board, repealing the employer health insurance benefit (or extending it to all individuals) and possibly expanding Medicaid/Medicare. That, I would only support with a national sales tax so that everybody who uses the system is paying for the system. Most countries with universal systems have a VAT tax, for instance, and is much higher than US sales taxes. As it is now, the brunt of paying for our existing Medicare/Medicaid systems lies with W-2 wage earners, which is unfair as it (partially) excludes retirees, self-employed individuals, illegal immigrants, and trust fund beneficiaries.
I'm not trying to evade areas where you've called me intellectually dishonest--however I think that in those cases I was presenting whatever evidence I had at the time. If we have single-payer and nationalized hospitals and doctors, it will not be like Canada's. It will not be like the UK's or Sweden's. Those systems are flawed but mostly do a decent job, and most of their citizens are happy with them. Which I admittedly think probably says more than a few cases of institutional neglect. However, that will not happen in this country if we go down the NHS path. No, it'll be more like a Third World mess because of how extreme, insane, and hard-socialist the left is becoming. Think of the irrational baseless accusations thrown at Kavanaugh, Trump-Russia, etc. Think Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, or Antifa who scream abolish profits, abolish borders. Think Venezuela where the government just seizes all of the
oil companieshospitals and staffs them with incompetent party members, and then the left praises Venezuela as an example. The USSR proved that even without any private industry in sight, the government just enriches connected party members for social reasons. We are not small and homogeneous like Sweden or Norway. We have a population of 300 million different people with dozens of different ethnic groups who mostly hate each other unless they're ganging up on whitey or the cops. Each person has proportionately less of a voice per congressperson than they do in Sweden. Those societies are accountable. Ours is not. Small, homogeneous states like Vermont or Montana are infinitely more efficient and less corrupt than big cities like Chicago, or the federal government.With the left we have today, nationalizing hospitals and doctors would lead to catastrophes. We'd take better care of illegal immigrants than US citizens. We'd have staff appointed based off affirmative action and not merit. They'd all receive much better, more expensive pensions than they currently do. Billions of dollars would go "missing" like in the military. The government would spend a trillion dollars on developing a new MRI machine, like they spent on the F-35. People would be denied healthcare based on political grounds, just like the IRS targeted the Tea Party for audits. Why wouldn't they? Abortion would be provided in every hospital and be fully funded and take a one day waiting period, while non-urgent surgery would take three months to get. I'm sure a few of them would be bombed--I'm not letting the right off the hook. There would be cries of "underserved areas" in the inner cities and they'd build giant, expensive hospitals to avoid the appearance of class-ism or racism. Some Hillary in the medical records department will use her own personal email address, leak tens of thousands of medical records, and then never get fired for it. Whenever new innovations like Diagnostic AI or robotic surgeons come along, it'll be declared a job-killing technology and everyone will keep their jobs even if replacing them with a robot saves money... it's a lot harder to fire a government employee than it is to fire someone in the private sector. Government psychiatrists would declare any conservative-minded patriots to be insane, and have them committed to the brand new, 10,000 bed federal mental hospital. Okay, maybe that one's a bit out there. But you see what I mean.
We'd actually get more costly care, bigger deficits, lower quality, and more corruption, all to have "free" healthcare that you have to wait for weeks or months to get. It would be a zoo, destroy 18% of the economy, and put America well on its way to becoming a Third World country.
Honestly if you don't think that at least some of these things will happen, then it's probably just because national healthcare is a darling of yours and there's no way that anyone would mess with it because it's so perfect of an idea. I hate to say that about your position, but you said equivalent things about my argument. If I have a small-government bias and that's preventing me from looking at this objectively, then you have a pro-nationalization bias that prevents you from seeing how most cases of nationalization have gone terribly wrong. Hopefully you understand how truly broken and fractured this country is, which I know you do because you've implied as much. But that's not an ailment that's curable with socialized medicine.
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Ok, first, I think you need to calm down. It seemed like you got inappropriately emotionally invested in this reply and it hurt the logical integrity of your arguments. I know you're better than this so I'm going to ignore that, but you really need to work on keeping your emotions in check when discussing topics like this. Now on to the content.
First, you are broadly correct about Dr. Shiva's views. He did not talk about any form of socialized plan. That was my observation based on the fact that most of his ideas centered on the lower end of the care spectrum (e.g. direct pay doctors) and the pharmaceutical supply chain as opposed to the higher end stuff like emergency rooms. Those lower end issues he was focused on have always been where government-run programs break down so I see a lot of value in his ideas there. As such I'd also lean towards supporting him, but I'd do so on the basis that a partial solution is better than no solution and we will always iterate on whatever system we implement.
The socialized part was purely my opinion and is based on the observation that the really big stuff generally requires the government to do it. That's why getting your drivers license renewed is a huge pain in the ass, but only the government could put a man on the moon (and no, Musk can't do that, I know rocket science). I see these as complementary functions which take advantage of the strengths of both to create a total system which works better than what either is capable of doing on their own. Remember, everything has its strengths and weaknesses including both the government and free market, and if you aren't conscious of both when putting together a plan you're going to make a mess.
That is my leaning, but it's important to stress here that I recognize the limitations of my own knowledge and refuse to take an exact position because I know I'm incapable of forming a useful position on this topic.
This right here is a perfect example of that limitation. I don't know the best way to approach this transition because the reality is that major changes like this are always hard and there will be mistakes made. The real question is if the benefits of the end state outweigh the costs of that transition, and the data I've seen seems to indicate that is the case.
That said, I think the answer would be a little bit of all of the above because the reality is that each hospital is going to be unique. It's worth noting that in many cases the administration of the hospital wouldn't change all that much since the staff including the top person would become government employees so it probably wouldn't be as big a deal as you're thinking. Similarly, while a reduction in pay is possible (although not guaranteed because they could lock in current pay as part of the deal), that doesn't necessarily translate to a reduction in earned value when you factor in the reduced legal liability (there's no reason to sue for a free procedure after all) and the fact that they would presumably also get government benefits which are way better than anything in the private sector. You also pointed out the possibility of the government paying tuition which sounds like a very attractive option to me and would parallel what is already done with the military, although that would obviously be more of a long term solution so I don't think it belongs here. As for building new facilities and eminent domain, those are also options, although the costs of those are a lot higher so I don't see them getting all that much use, especially since the difficulty of competing with free healthcare is going to bring a lot of hospitals around weather they like it or not. One final point to consider is that many hospitals are already connected to the government one way or another, so that existing bridge can also be leveraged to bring some hospitals on board one way or another. Of course, I'm probably missing things here, but I think you get the point.
More than anything else, I'm opening myself up to new ideas and trying to share useful perspectives with you. Reality is complicated and our biases usually get in the way of finding optimal solutions, so I'm trying to help both of us see past our biases and hopefully reach a better understanding of not just the topic, but the broader range of topics.
This is an entirely different topic and something I don't want to get into here since the government doesn't really use specific revenue streams for specific jobs so much as throw everything into a giant pot and split things from there. That would mean we would have to consider a huge range of taxes like Trump's new tariffs and would wind up opening up another massive can of worms so I think it's best to leave that for another time.
Thanks, that's very fair, and I'm very glad to see you aren't letting the occasional media spectacle cloud your assessment of the systems as a whole. I personally view a big part of the right solution as getting a bunch of very informed people together to do a detailed policy assessment of each and every one of those countries to figure out the best pieces to import because you are very right in your assessment that no two countries are the same so the outcome won't be exactly the same in the US. Policy details that work well elsewhere might not work as well here and things that don't quite work right somewhere else might be more successful here, but the only way to get that kind of understanding is a very deep dive with a large, talented team. We'll also wind up with a flawed system because perfect is impossible in the real world, but based on the fact that a number of other countries have made it work I think it would be unreasonable to assume it is impossible in the US. That doesn't nessessarily rule out the possiblity that it is impossible, but it does mean making that claim require a major burden of proof since you have to demonstrate why the difference in countries is substantial enough to invalidate it when the US is at least superficially similar to them in many ways.
Ok, first I have to address a bit of a semantic problem I have with the word "left" in a political context. Simply put, I think it's so imprecise that it is functionally meaningless in the current environment. You could describe both Bernie Sanders and the BLM nutjobs as "far left", but their actual beliefs, positions, and goals are so unrelated that I was actually thinking Sanders might sign on as Trump's VP for a while because Sanders had more in common with Trump than Clinton. That said, based on context I'm going to be moving forward with the assumption that when you say "left", what you really mean is the behavior of the modern democrat party which is a very different question than policy or ideology.
With that established, what is really going on with the Democrats right now isn't about ideology. It's about tribalism, power, hate, and a dozen different flavors of openly supremacist bullshit. To be frank, Trump's election and the public backlash has clearly shown the public isn't taking their shit, so at this point the real question is what they do after the midterms. There's no question in my mind that they're going to underperform or, more likely, manage to outright loose seats even though this should be an easy election for them, so the real question is what they do after the fact. It's possible they'll start trying to rebuild the party into something more sane, but at this point I expect them to double down on the insanity yet again and collapse as a party. That could lead to a takover like Trump did with the republicans, but given how insane and insular the democrats have gotten lately I think it's more likely a third party could happen or an independent could become president and form a new party.
Either way, the real question is what rises to replace this insanity, and to a significant extent that hinges on Trump. If he can legitimately reign in the elites he'll deal with the serious income inequality problem pushing people like Sanders into the spotlight so we may see a group like the libertarians gain prominence. That said, I think it's much more likely that the elite will be able to use their power to keep him at bay until he leaves office which means those problems will endure and we'll probably get a more sane version of those socialist ideas rising to prominence one way or another. I'd also suggest keeping an eye on Kanye West because he could do something huge if he wants to, although I don't think he's decided anything for sure yet.
One last thing to remember is that we're already feeling the transition shocks as automation brings the world into post-scarcity, so that's also going to play a huge part in ways we frankly lack the tools to predict as a species just like how the pre-industrial world lacked the tools to predict what the industrial revolution would do. To give you an idea of how radically different this will be, it's impossible to say with any certainty that even completely failed ideas like communism won't become the best path once machines can effectively replace the entire lower class and produce enough of everything that the inefficiencies don't matter. I definitely don't know what the future holds on this count, but it's important to remember that we're coming up on what will be one of the most radical changes in human history and be aware that you might have to throw out everything you know about the way the world works.
Regardless, while you do have a very valid point that the democrats make this impossible, the larger truth is that they make doing anything impossible and are dying as a party as a result, so we sort of have to assume that any change would have to happen after the current insanity dies out.
Ok, time for you to learn quite a bit.
You definitely don't understand the military mindset, and by "military mindset" I don't just mean the people in uniform. This goes for the government civilians and defense contractors too.
Anyways, in the military mindset, the mission is always first. Weather that's an admiral pushing an undersized fleet to meet the nation's need or Lockheed pouring their own money into the F-35 to help the government, the mission always takes priority. While your corporate bias may say "missing" money is embezzled, the reality is that it's being spent on the mission. Weather that's spare parts for airplanes or extra funding for a promising R&D project, the mission comes first. The general doesn't care about some silly car, he cares about making sure his soldiers get all the training they need so they don't get killed when shit inevitably goes wrong because that's the mission.
The mission comes first.
I guarantee you don't understand what happened with the F-35 because the fact of the matter is that military equipment is so stunningly capable and complex that the general public can't understand it. This manifests in a lot of different ways so I'll hit a bunch of them in no particular order.
First, regarding capability, I distinctly remember a case where Scott Adams who is very plugged into the civilian side of technology through his startups dismissed a claim by the Russians that they could track every aircraft in the sky over Syria. I look at that claim and see it as being so trivial it's irrelevant. Like him, you are used to civilian technology where claims are usually pushed so far into ideal cases that they range from exaggeration to outright lies in the real world. In contrast, military technology is usually drastically undersold publicly to the point that it will deliver substantially better performance than advertised in the worst possible case. Vague mentions that sound like meaningless marketing garbage to the general public are actually stunning capabilities so advanced that they outstrip most science fiction, and then there are technologies so potent that even their existence is classified. You look at that price tag without any real understanding of what is really going on and wonder how it costs so much. I look at it and wonder how they manage to make it so cheap even with the problems because I understand at least part of what it really is (and what that number really is).
Second, you definitely don't understand what that trillion dollars number actually is. That's not development cost, that's total lifecycle cost for the entire program. That goes far beyond designing, prototyping, and testing a new airplane. It includes the cost of building thousands of airplanes for a dozen different countries along with the infrastructure to support them, training the people who will fly and maintain those airplanes, paying those people's salaries, the fuel they burn, buying spare parts, designing new upgrades in a decade or two, installing those upgrades in thousands of airplanes, and eventually retiring and disposing of them after decades of service. The amount of stuff rolled into that number is more than a little mind boggling, but the reality is that it's a very good thing we're hearing that number. We've never done that kind of total lifecycle cost estimation before, and that failure has caused some serious problems in the past when those early decisions made without sufficient consideration for total costs wound up causing serious problems down the line. That is being avoided to a significant extent with the F-35 because we have that number and can use it to inform design decisions, and for all the shit the F-35 gets, we can already see it working because the F-35 is a lot cheaper to operate than the F-22.
Third, a lot of the problems with overrunning the estimates for the F-35 have less to do with the aircraft or process and more to do with the estimates themselves. For example, when they were estimating the amount of code it would take more than a decade ago, they used the best estimating tools available at the time and then doubled the estimate because they knew those tools were based on less complex programs so they would probably underestimate the required amount of code. The actual requirement was something like triple that estimate. This is further compounded by the fact that the behavior of congress in recent years has resulted in people making very aggressive, optimistic estimates instead of building in appropriate budget and schedule margins to cover unexpected problems. I actually remember seeing an interesting study a while back showing when that inversion happened in Navy shipbuilding because construction programs went from being consistently under budget to consistently over budget, and I believe the author pointed to a rules change about how money was handled which basically forced them to keep going back to congress for more money instead of asking for what they really needed up front.
Fourth, there was, and to a lesser extent still is, a lack of understanding of the digital backbone of modern technology. This is most obvious in the people who blindly claim that having three completely separate aircraft would have solved the problem while ignoring the fact that the real cost is the sensors, electronics, and especially software, not the airframe. Admittedly we probably could have gotten a cheaper fleet if the JSF program had been split into four components with three airframes for the three services and, most critically, a common electronic backbone for all of them, but even then I'm not entirely convinced it would have been a better idea since the Navy probably would have screwed themselves by sacrificing air combat capability and it's highly likely the services would have pulled apart the common backbone by forcing unique sensors on their version and ruined that efficiency. As is, we effectively have that common backbone thanks to the single F-35 program, we've already seen parts of it reused elsewhere, and there's serious talk about exporting it to at least the F-22 airframe so we have gotten there over the protests of the people who don't understand modern technology.
Fifth, concurrency was a mistake, and fundamentally stems from problems in the way companies do business these days. In the broader market, many companies conflate cost transfer with cost savings. An easy example of this is switching a product from "batteries included" to "batteries not included" which the company will call a savings since they are no longer buying batteries, but they are really just transferring cost to the consumer since they now have to buy batteries as well and the actual cost to them will be higher as a result. Concurrency is a cost transfer because it imposes to cost of earlier defective products on the customer, but it is frequently billed as a savings because companies can usually weasel their way out of fixing them when they're selling to the general public. I won't claim to know where the idea to do this came from with the F-35 (although my suspicion is congress because they tend to be the root of most bad government decisions), but the fact of the matter is that it did, and the result was predictably more total cost since you can't offload defective products on the government like you can on the general public. One thing I can say on this is that it is unfair to put the blame solely on Lockheed because I used to know an engineer who worked on the F-35 in the early days and he said that everyone knew the first "production" aircraft was going to be total garbage and didn't want to build it, but the contract said they wouldn't get paid if they didn't build it so they had to flush a couple hundred million down the toilet.
Sixth, like all large programs, there were communications breakdowns between the top and bottom. I'm honestly not sure if I should even mention this because it's so universal (remember the GM ignition switch fiasco?), but it did play a part in the cost growth and especially the failed course correction attempts so it would be unfair to ignore it.
Anyways, I hope you find this interesting, and I'm looking forwards to hearing what you think about this.
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Oh hey, one other interesting thought I've had kicking around for a while I should toss your way. I have no idea how it would actually work, but it is interesting. Let the public buy into the government programs at a 10~15% markup, functionally making that part of the government a health insurance company. That makes the government part of the free market and lets them influence private companies by forcing them to compete against whatever features/rule the government-run program has which would by their very nature be outside the corporate
price fixing"best practices" that currently screw over consumers. It also has the side effect of generating some additional revenue for the government to help offset the cost of the current programs a bit which is always a plus considering how expensive they are. I definitely wouldn't expect any miracles with this, but it might be a useful piece of a larger solution or a way to help smooth the transition to a semi-socialized system by having the government become a GPO as part of the process of becoming an insurance company.