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Originally Posted by powerclown
About the corporate health care: Aren't you using exceptions to the rule, as the rule? Corporations really don't have it in their charters to kill off their employees by denying them health care, I'm fairly certain.
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corporations don't manage their own health insurance programs. They pay a health insurance company to do it. And even if they didn't, it's much cheaper to train a new worker than to pay a $100,000 hospital bill.
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When you say that in our society money is god, doesn't that imply a wish for everything to be free? ngdawg touched upon it. That one is entitled - just by their very existence - to life's amenities?
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That's the whole problem, isn't it? Greed-motivation leads to unsavory things, but humans are biologically programmed, as are all animals, to be greed-motivated. That's why communism wouldn't work on a large scale - if everyone gets an equal share of everything no matter what they do, then there will be lots of people who aren't motivated to do anything productive. Capitalism sucks, but what do you replace it with?
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In open societies people are free to do what they wish: they can go to graduate school just about as readily as they can join the Peace Corps. And there are economic ramifications to such decisions: radiologists make more money than social workers. In the end, nobody is forcing them to do one or the other. As they say, life is a series of choices.
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Let's go ahead and acknowledge the bullshit that pervades this very popular belief. Life is full of choices for those that have the resources to be able to make the choice. If you don't have money to pay for food, you can't go to school unless you get a full ride scholarship somewhere, which is very, very unlikely. So it's entirely possible that you do not have the option of becoming a radiologist. Additionally, my point was that he joined the peace corps to make the world a better place, and was willing to sacrifice his own wealth potential in order to do so, hence, he's thought of as a bit odd.
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If people prosper as a result of their own decisions, isn't that a fair arrangement? If people suffer as a result of their own decisions, isn't that a fair arrangement?
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You're taking the idealistic, and patently false, view that America is the "land of opportunity" for /everyone./ That simply isn't true. There are plenty of people out there, especially now, who bust their ass at work and are rewarded either by low pay or layoffs. How do you justify their suffering? They certainly didn't decide to fire themselves, and they did all the right things when they were employed.