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Clinton-Era Official Says Left Should Lead Following Center-Right Failures

Greenbeard said:
No kidding, single-payer would get rid of the markets you seem unaware exist today. Then you can get a taste of what "not market friendly" looks like.
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???

What makes you think I am unaware of markets?

Anyway, I was a against legislation that is not market-friendly, like Obamacare, and I am totally against single payer for the same reason.
 
Greenbeard said:
Because you're feigning ignorance of them, perhaps?
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Okay. So now you are just going to make **** up without an explanation.

You are dismissed.
 
Greenbeard said:
I'm not the one pretending Obamacare isn't built on markets.
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Yea I'm not sure what about the government mandating you to buy something from a private company is not market friendly.


I'm thinking this has more to do with who is doing the mandating.
 
 
I think DeLong is late on this, but it is nice to see someone like him put this out. The years of Democrats talking about being bipartisan should be over for now. You cannot attempt to reach across the aisle and work with people that operate in bad faith. The only thing this kind of centrist rhetoric has done is allowed the United States to slip to the right over decades with little resistance. It's time for the social democratic wing of the party to take over and pull us back towards the center.
 
 
MrWonka said:
So you clearly agree that a game should have parameters correct? Who decides those?
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How is it a game if there are no rules? Think of it this way. A contract requires two parties to agree, and at the point of agreement we call that, "A meeting of the minds". It's where both parties feel as though they can abide by the terms and in their own mind, come out on top. No contract ever was ever entered into with both or even one party agreeing to terms that they felt was not in their best favor; and no party even enters into a contract without the idea that they can win. The same goes for any game. A game's rules are essentially agreed upon prior to playing the game. You do not need a 3rd party to accomplish this. Whether the "basic" rules are available is immaterial to game theory, in fact, it makes zero difference. One can always choose not to play!


Tim-
 
Hicup said:
How is it a game if there are no rules?
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Exactly. So who writes the rules of the U.S. Economy? Who has the power to change those rules if they're leading to bad choices being made?

Hicup said:
Think of it this way. A contract requires two parties to agree...
A game's rules are essentially agreed upon prior to playing the game. You do not need a 3rd party to accomplish this.
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Who enforces the contract if the two sides think the other is cheating on it? Is there any Major Professional Sport in the United States that doesn't have referees making sure that the teams are agreeing to the rules? Are there any without a commissioners office that updates the rules to match new realities like to address player safety?

If the two sides of your contract come to a point where they have decided that the old contract is no longer viable can they negotiate a new one? In a game like a baseball for example, once a player gets a certain level of eligibility built up they qualify for Arbitration. Where if they don't think the contract they're being offered isn't fair they can go to a third party arbitrator to try and get it improved. Why can't we do something similar in other types of games?

Hicup said:
One can always choose not to play!
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How exactly does someone in this day and age choose not to participate in an Economy or a Society?
 
MrWonka said:
Exactly. So who writes the rules of the U.S. Economy? Who has the power to change those rules if they're leading to bad choices being made?


Who enforces the contract if the two sides think the other is cheating on it? Is there any Major Professional Sport in the United States that doesn't have referees making sure that the teams are agreeing to the rules? Are there any without a commissioners office that updates the rules to match new realities like to address player safety?

If the two sides of your contract come to a point where they have decided that the old contract is no longer viable can they negotiate a new one? In a game like a baseball for example, once a player gets a certain level of eligibility built up they qualify for Arbitration. Where if they don't think the contract they're being offered isn't fair they can go to a third party arbitrator to try and get it improved. Why can't we do something similar in other types of games?


How exactly does someone in this day and age choose not to participate in an Economy or a Society?
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I stated clearly in my first response to you that Nash's Equilibrium was never intended to be applied to the macro of societal economics. It doesn't work that way. In theory, and hypothetically speaking, if NE was practiced at every single variable level, the macro would resemble the micro, but Nash understood this to be too complex. He called it an unquantifiable quantity relating to human behavior. He had since wrote about this including the use of AI. Would two AI's where the written code of the AI was pitted against itself to develop rules to a new game come to a meeting of the minds without a third party intervention? The answer is yes within precise uncomplex conditions, but as complexity grew, so too would come the exponential growth of unquantifiable quantity.


Nash predicted this Unquantifiable Quantity as applying to all forms of mathematics, patterns, and abstracts. It remains true to this day!



Tim-
 
Hicup said:
I stated clearly in my first response to you that Nash's Equilibrium was never intended to be applied to the macro of societal economics.
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Ummm...John Nash won the Nobel Prize for Economics.

In fact, just last year the magazine named "The Economist" did a multi-part series on six of the core principles of Economics and the Nash Equilibrium was listed right up there with Supply and Demand.

What is the Nash equilibrium and why does it matter? - The Economist explains economics

The Economist said:
Decisions that are good for individuals can sometimes be terrible for groups
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Hicup said:
Nash understood this to be too complex.
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Complexity makes large economic systems very difficult to compute all variables, but it doesn't make a general concept true. Equilibriums like these are used by economists to predict all sorts of decisions in general terms.

For example, it really wasn't that difficult to see what was going on in the health care industry prior to the ACA. As health care costs increased insurance companies were forced into one of a handful of choices. Raise premiums, raise deductibles, kick sick people off their plans, or limit coverage. If they chose to raise premiums or deductibles they risked losing young healthier customers. That would, in turn, force them to raise them further which would risk losing more and so forth.

That realistically left them only with the second two...kick sick people off or limit coverage. Both of these options were obviously incredibly bad for the very people that health insurance was designed to help, but thanks to free market competition these companies had no other real choices. As long as one of their competitors were willing to do it then they all had to do it or they would risk losing customers to the one unscrupulous insurance provider.

The only realistic solution is to force all providers to play by a fair set of rules and require them to cover the sick in full. The give back to insurers was to mandate that all young healthy people have some form of health insurance, and to get poor people at least contributing something we subsidized their premiums.

Contrary to right-wing talking points the plan mostly worked. The one problem being that many young healthy people in the middle of a recession still didn't get health care and chose to pay the penalty. This caused the markets to take a while to level out, but as the economy recovered many more young people chose to get health insurance. So much so that even after Republicans attempts to destabilize things we're still seeing health care costs grow at a much lower rate.
 
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