Politics Discussion Thread (Heated Arguing Warning)

[darrelljs]

Today I recieved a letter from the hospital. My GP refered me to a specialist after my allergies have taken a turn to the (very) worse, sickdays and lower productivity despite heavy medication.

The letter says: You have right to an examination within 30days of your referral. Unfortunately we cannot keep this time limit, but you do have the right of a treatment schedule and this letter confirming your booking is the first step of the schedule.
Referral 4th of October - date at the clinic 12th of June.
My meeting with the bank - monday morning. After that quickest private specialist who can take me.

I've been watching Borgen off of Netflix recently, and the last few episodes have focused on this public/private health care schism.  Is it true that laws were passed that give tax credits for private hospitals and health insurance?  Alert Bernie Sanders!

It reminded me of the school voucher programs in the U.S.  For those that don't know, its a tax credit if you put your kids into private instead of public school.  The left argue its an attempt to defund public education by siphoning dollars out, while the right argue that the public schools suck and they are simply giving people a choice.  Its quite the conundrum; private options will be able to deliver a better class of service than public ones to the wealthy.  The wealthy avail themselves of these, stop using the public services, and become resentful of the fact their taxes are still funding them.  At least some do:

Among all registered voters, 40 percent in the ABCNEWS/Washington Post poll support vouchers — “having the government give parents money to help pay for their children to attend a private or religious school” — while 55 percent are opposed.

Four in 10 of those supporters peel away when asked if they’d support vouchers “even if it meant less money for the public schools,” as critics charge. Given that outcome, support for vouchers falls to 23 percent and opposition rises to 70 percent.

Darrell

[MJW (ya that one)]

Today I recieved a letter from the hospital. My GP refered me to a specialist after my allergies have taken a turn to the (very) worse, sickdays and lower productivity despite heavy medication.

The letter says: You have right to an examination within 30days of your referral. Unfortunately we cannot keep this time limit, but you do have the right of a treatment schedule and this letter confirming your booking is the first step of the schedule.
Referral 4th of October - date at the clinic 12th of June.
My meeting with the bank - monday morning. After that quickest private specialist who can take me.

I've been watching Borgen off of Netflix recently, and the last few episodes have focused on this public/private health care schism.  Is it true that laws were passed that give tax credits for private hospitals and health insurance?  Alert Bernie Sanders!

It reminded me of the school voucher programs in the U.S.  For those that don't know, its a tax credit if you put your kids into private instead of public school.  The left argue its an attempt to defund public education by siphoning dollars out, while the right argue that the public schools suck and they are simply giving people a choice.  Its quite the conundrum; private options will be able to deliver a better class of service than public ones to the wealthy.  The wealthy avail themselves of these, stop using the public services, and become resentful of the fact their taxes are still funding them.  At least some do:

Among all registered voters, 40 percent in the ABCNEWS/Washington Post poll support vouchers — “having the government give parents money to help pay for their children to attend a private or religious school” — while 55 percent are opposed.

Four in 10 of those supporters peel away when asked if they’d support vouchers “even if it meant less money for the public schools,” as critics charge. Given that outcome, support for vouchers falls to 23 percent and opposition rises to 70 percent.

Darrell

SadGit said that the real problem is that there isn't physically enough doctors due to the welfare state being flooded. This would lead to massive inflation if private while public shafts people by having to choose who gets treatment or not. You lose ether way.

The reason why the right loves vouchers is because public school teachers love the DEMs because of the "public union" issue. I've only meet one GOP teacher in my life and it really shows.   This is a "culture war" issue not a fiscal or even educational one. The GOP is projecting a false image of the true motivations of their base in order to look like they want to make schools better which would make them more likely to succeed but in reality they just don't like public schools because they don't like public school teachers because they are DEMs.

[Bacchus]

I wonder how much rides on framing here. What would the answers to this series of questions be:

Should the government help every child receive secondary education?

Should the government taxi and redistribute resources to fund education, as a part of doing so?

What proportion of this funding should be made available to parents or educators at large, and what proportion should be spent by the government itself on running it's own schools?

I can't imagine that 70 percent will say that 100% of govt funding should be for the public school system.

As for the issue itself, I really struggle to see what expertise or motivation the government has for providing a decent education service. In USSR I guess they saved some money by using standard school building designs -- no need to hire hundreds of different architects.

[AdrienIer]

As for the issue itself, I really struggle to see what expertise or motivation the government has for providing a decent education service. In USSR I guess they saved some money by using standard school building designs -- no need to hire hundreds of different architects.

Entirely for profit education would be a disaster. The only other education providers in history is the church, and for obvious reasons that's a terrible idea today. So state education it is.

[Bacchus]

There is a whole universe of sociability beyond "for profit", "church" and "state" options, but we've been trained pretty hard not to think about it. I'm just saying what's on the surface, there really seems to be no reasonable link between state and education, outside of very peculiar projects of training up soldiers (Prussia's historical case), or a country-sized labour camp (USSR's). If it turns out that historically it's nonetheless the only link that worked, that raises more questions about history than it answers questions about how education should be provided.

[Commodore]

It's weird how education voucher support breaks down demographically (oops, we're supposed to say "along partisan lines") when you consider the whole thing is basically Section 8, but for schools.

[RefSteel]

As for the issue itself, I really struggle to see what expertise or motivation the government has for providing a decent education service.

Governments (at least even vaguely democratic ones) are not entities that can either have or lack motivation or expertise. (The mistaken assumption that "the government" in a large democratic nation can be considered as a single entity at all, in any way, in any area, or at any level, is at the heart of a lot of misunderstandings about politics.) The difficulty, regardless of who or what is in charge of education, is in actually getting the people with that motivation and expertise into positions from which they can use it effectively - e.g. where they aren't strangled by red tape (in any large organization) or frozen out by a corporate bottom line.

I feel like the main (beneficial) thing that government can provide with social issues is standardization: Without it, who or what has the resources and impetus to ensure that all children, as nearly as possible, receive a decent education? This is an honest question, not rhetorical, as:

There is a whole universe of sociability beyond "for profit", "church" and "state" options, but we've been trained pretty hard not to think about it.

Then untrain us! What exists in that universe? Nonprofit areligious NGOs can sometimes have major positive impacts, but to have a nation-wide one for social issues, they need at some point and some level to get law or regulatory policy put in place that standardizes and legitimizes their work, or it ends up crumbling from the edges.

If it turns out that historically it's nonetheless the only link that worked, that raises more questions about history than it answers questions about how education should be provided.

We're still part of history though. Those questions about it are interesting, and the answers might illuminate better options, but in the meantime, the only link that worked remains the only link that worked. It's a good idea to find a better one; I would like to, but can't think of any.

It's weird how education voucher support breaks down demographically (oops, we're supposed to say "along partisan lines") when you consider the whole thing is basically Section 8, but for schools.

Section 8 is completely awful - it's just that for those who depend on it, it is (or at least appears) better than "zero housing assistance." Many, many people fall through the cracks of Section 8. For better or for worse, the country so far agrees that homelessness is an acceptable consequence of economic failure, but that childhood education must be universal regardless of parents' circumstances. People who like section 8 but hate vouchers are a bit like shipwreck victims who understandably say, "don't take away the rotting board to which I'm clinging," but also understandably say, "don't chop up my kids' overcrowded lifeboat - not even if you leave them some of its rotting boards!" They'd rather have a rescue ship or a habitable island - they'd rather even have a lifeboat of their own - but there aren't any of those on the horizon.

[Commodore]

It's weird how education voucher support breaks down demographically (oops, we're supposed to say "along partisan lines") when you consider the whole thing is basically Section 8, but for schools.

Section 8 is completely awful - it's just that for those who depend on it, it is (or at least appears) better than "zero housing assistance."  Many, many people fall through the cracks of Section 8.  For better or for worse, the country so far agrees that homelessness is an acceptable consequence of economic failure, but that childhood education must be universal regardless of parents' circumstances.  People who like section 8 but hate vouchers are a bit like shipwreck victims who understandably say, "don't take away the rotting board to which I'm clinging," but also understandably say, "don't chop up my kids' overcrowded lifeboat - not even if you leave them some of its rotting boards!"  They'd rather have a rescue ship or a habitable island - they'd rather even have a lifeboat of their own - but there aren't any of those on the horizon.

Oh, I get it that way, mostly I'm just amused at someone plumping for vouchers and somehow expecting it to be anything other than Section 8.2.

[Bacchus]

Governments (at least even vaguely democratic ones) are not entities that can either have or lack motivation or expertise. (The mistaken assumption that "the government" in a large democratic nation can be considered as a single entity at all, in any way, in any area, or at any level, is at the heart of a lot of misunderstandings about politics.)

"The government" denotes not a specific entity, it denotes a specific type of entity. "The cold" is not an entity, every virus does not behave in concert with others, but it certainly makes sense to speak of treating "the cold", in fact it makes more sense to speak of that way, then of treating each individual virus. Entities in general are not objectively given things, we define them at whatever level of abstraction is appropriate. (Incidentally, this is why I am not a libertarian, those guys find jokes like "Who is Society? I've never met him" funny and pointed).

The government is a type of entity that, in the final resort, can coerce compliance to its decisions against the will of an individual. That's what makes it the government in practice. There is another, more teleological and normative aspect of government, which to establish an encompassing communal order which would allow its members to lead a full and flourishing life. It's not what makes a government, but it's what we'd like government to be, to the extent that government is a meaningful term at all. Neither of those aspects point to taking a leading role in education.

Your point is along the lines of -- well, the government in pursuing it's proper job of governing invests in nation-wide regulatory capacity which makes it cost-efficient to make us of this capacity in unrelated tasks, say fixing and funding the provision of a particular curriculum or range of curricula. I think this takes a very narrow view of the major costs of education, and makes a dubious assumption what a good education looks like. Standardized, really?

What needs to be standardized exactly? How many hours of physics should be taken for each hour of history? Or how many hours of classical mechanics should be taken for each hour of optics? Or the content of what should be taught under "optics"? Or, to take a different approach, the range of physical questions any graduating student needs to be able to answer? To me, all of those seem pretty absurd. Let us say you have a situation, where one top pupil can recite verses of the Bible in Greek and Koran in Arabic, but can't even tell you what would be the greatest height reached by a cannonball fired upwards at a certain angle with a certain force, whereas another is comfortable with Maxwell's equations, but is not quite sure what Abrahamic religions are. Is this situation bad or unwelcome? Is it better to have them both being able to solve rudimentary tasks across a large number fields, most of which will be necessarily be of no use or interest?

I am all for standardization in say, literacy, but do you really believe that enforcing standards in that requires the full force of the state's regulatory capacity? Or that people will turn out to be incapable of teaching kids basic language skills without enforcement?

Then untrain us! What exists in that universe? Nonprofit areligious NGOs can sometimes have major positive impacts, but to have a nation-wide one for social issues, they need at some point and some level to get law or regulatory policy put in place that standardizes and legitimizes their work, or it ends up crumbling from the edges.

The only training is practice, and that's precisely what we are lacking. There are some good advances in sociability now that we have internet, especially whilst it was largely unregulated and not-for-profit, but the fact is exactly that there is very little you can point to in our world that would show you an example of large-scale problem-solving that's not state- or profit-driven. To unlearn the modern myopia you largely have to either historically study very different societies, medieval cities are a good start, or engage in speculative thinking. Many people deem both of these activities "impractical".

Anyway, the state is not going anywhere in the near future, but I think vouchers/charter schools are not a bad first step. Not a panacea, mind, our society is incredibly bad at managing these mid-range problems where neither bureaucracy, nor the market can adequately substitute for community. The lack of skill and practice frequently means that if you give people a chance to solve a problem they start by making a mess of it, but New Orleans, for example, has really dramatically shown how quickly people can learn and get better.

EDIT: With regards to Section 8, US has made a dog's breakfast of it, but it works fine in UK, where it is just paid in cash, and landlords have no participation in the matter. Similarly with education, if the family presents a legitimate school bill, why not give them cash?

[RefSteel]

Standardized, really?

What needs to be standardized exactly?

Access to education.

Your questions are taking it as given that everyone has access to education, but that is not a given; to the extent it's true, it's the result of government regulation making it standard. I obviously expressed this poorly (by using a word that gets thrown around for things not relating to what I meant in education circles) but the point of what I called "standardization" is that when ~everybody in a society agrees that something should exist or be done in/by their society, but it requires pooled resources to be accomplished adequately, one function (arguably the primary or even only function of a "good" government) is to ensure those reources are pooled in a fair/agreed-upon fashion and committed to the purpose. And sure, if there were a general consensus within a society that it is vital for two hours to be spent learning underwater basket weaving for every hour spent learning to toss an egg salad in zero G, that society's elected government could make a rule to that effect - but that's not the reason government is involved in education. That was my point (in this context) about motives and expertise as well; government is a mechanism (an inefficient one, partly due to size and partly due to conflicting interests, partly because of the human personalities involved) for wide-scale agreement to be turned into wide-scale action: Not an entity with separate motives of its own.

I am all for standardization in say, literacy, but do you really believe that enforcing standards in that requires the full force of the state's regulatory capacity? Or that people will turn out to be incapable of teaching kids basic language skills without enforcement?

Who teaches kids to the basic standard of literacy, and who compensates the teachers for doing so? "The full force of the state's regulatory capacity" gets committed in a thousand different directions, but part of it is needed - unless and until some other method replaces it - to make sure that somebody is teaching this to everybody, and somebody is compensating them consistently.

The only training is practice, and that's precisely what we are lacking. There are some good advances in sociability now that we have internet, especially whilst it was largely unregulated and not-for-profit, but the fact is exactly that there is very little you can point to in our world that would show you an example of large-scale problem-solving that's not state- or profit-driven. To unlearn the modern myopia you largely have to either historically study very different societies, medieval cities are a good start, or engage in speculative thinking. Many people deem both of these activities "impractical".

Speaking only for myself: I'm good at speculative thinking. I like learning about history. The latter is exactly where we fail to find non-state solutions providing universal access to education. Medieval cities are a good start how? Are you talking about the apprenticeship system? I don't think you're allowing for the sheer amount of time and effort needed to bring a child sufficiently up to speed to be able to contribute meaningfully to a modern society.

Anyway, the state is not going anywhere in the near future, but I think vouchers/charter schools are not a bad first step.

Toward what? This sentence suggests toward abolishing the state, but is that intended? It appears to me that the state actually has value as a social institution, but either way, vouchers/charter schools are just retreading the same old back-and-forth movement along the line between state-driven and profit-driven problem-solving.

Not a panacea, mind, our society is incredibly bad at managing these mid-range problems where neither bureaucracy, nor the market can adequately substitute for community. The lack of skill and practice frequently means that if you give people a chance to solve a problem they start by making a mess of it, but New Orleans, for example, has really dramatically shown how quickly people can learn and get better.

Cool - how do you perceive that they managed this? Again, this question is not rhetorical; from context, you seem to be suggesting that in New Orleans, people were able to manage mid-range problems which neither bureaucracy nor the market could adequately solve for them. What do you think made this possible when it seems so difficult in other contexts?

EDIT: With regards to Section 8, US has made a dog's breakfast of it, but it works fine in UK, where it is just paid in cash, and landlords have no participation in the matter. Similarly with education, if the family presents a legitimate school bill, why not give them cash?

The quantity of cash involved and the limited U.S. appetite for spending on social programs. A lot of people in the U.S. would strongly disagree that it works fine in the UK.

[EDIT: That's the issue with housing, but there are a host of others for education. One example is integration: In the U.S. an attempt has been made in the past century to overcome racial and ethnic prejudices and ensure equal educational opportunities by "integrating" public schools - ensuring a mix of races and ethnicities in the classroom rather than allowing children and parents to "segregate" into schools of their often-racially-distinct choice. If schools at which vouchers can be redeemed are not required to meet integration standards, you end up with racially segregated schools (see e.g. the Schelling segregation model). If they are required to meet integration standards, you're no longer just giving the parents cash; you're introducing the first of a dog's breakfast of complexities....]