>Social Security

Social security worked out pretty well for the first generation who received it, because they didn't have to pay for it. For everyone else it's been a redistribution of wealth from poor minorities to relatively wealthy white people. The fact of the matter is that poor people die before they make their money back from SS. So SS is both racist and regressive. It's absurd that any leftist would support it.

>Banks, regulation, and monopolies

It's virtually impossible to have a monopoly without government protection. And most monopolies in the industrial revolution failed without government intervention. The names escape me at the moment but several of them were even taken to court, sued under monopoly laws, won the lawsuits so they weren't broken up, but still fell apart within a short period of time. One of those examples of monopolies was AT&T, without which we wouldn't have had Bell Labs and our technology would be significantly set back. Temporary monopolies that pop up, as long as it remains a free-ish market, and can waste ridiculous amounts of money (kind of like government does) have significant benefits to go along with their drawbacks.

>Private for-profit schools

Any schools that want to be able to accept public funds (vouchers) must meet the same education criteria the public school has. So that answers your concerns about whether or not they'd actually educate people. Once it does that, I don't see what the big deal is about whether they take a profit home. I'm happy to incentivize schools for being the best. That's the problem with public schools, they're currently a monopoly and have not incentive whatsoever except to protect their own monopoly position.

>College will not be cheaper if you have fewer students attending

What makes universities so special that they're not impacted by supply and demand?

>how good your state test averages would look if you only allowed select kids in your school.

Great, if the public school is the best school around then everyone will use their vouchers at the public schools. I don't understand how this is even an argument? Are you worried that parents are so stupid that they can't tell whether a school is shit or not? Surely some will make a bad decision but I have a hard time believing it could possibly be worse than monopolies.

>As far as applying market theory toward things like STEM, there would be unacceptable business and national defense repercussions toward letting a generation or more of students receive religious indoctrination in lieu of education.

Again, the private schools must meet the same education standards as the public schools. So this idea of getting "religious indoctrination in lieu of education" is impossible. At worst you'd get religious indoctrination *and* education. Again, the best schools at least in my area are Catholic schools. Why shouldn't a poor Baptist/Methodist/Atheist with a bad public school be able to take their voucher to the best school in the area?

>We need a single payer system like Canada, Australia, Western European nations.

The US has the best healthcare in the world, bar none. Just try googling "world's best cancer hospital" or "world's best children's hospital." They're virtually all in the US. And for people in the area of that hospital... that's just the hospital they go to because it's local. If you live in Canada, Australia, or Western Europe and you have any money you'll come to the US for health care for anything serious. The US also subsidizes everyone else's healthcare, because we provide the profit motive for virtually all medical research. Without us the entire world's healthcare technology would stagnate. The vast majority of the poor health stats relative to the rest of the first world has more to do with culture than the cost of going to a doctor. The US has some of the highest obesity levels in the world. Of course we die earlier. The US FDA gave us the bought and paid for marketing for the agriculture industry it called the food pyramid which told everyone to eat a pound of bread every day. Lo and behold we're all dying of heart disease and diabetes. Our infant mortality rates are also largely related to cultural issues like obesity.

>If you want to see more people go into medicine, creating more demand for med schools,

You don't need to artificially "encourage" anyone to go into medicine. That's what wages are for. Wages for doctors are incredibly high. People are being kept out of med school by the AMA specifically to keep wages high.

>then it would be best not to replace evolution with intelligent design and biology with prayer circles.

I feel like you weren't listening when I said any school that accepts vouchers has to meet the same education standards as the public schools. So this is a non-existent problem.

>That said, if you want political stability, you have to provide economic stability. Even the ancient Romans knew that if you remove the bread and circuses, the wealthy would lose everything when the lower class revolts.

Central planning and concentrating power is a sure-fire way to bring about political instability. We see this in the US in microcosms all the time. NSA wiretaps are okay as long as "my guy" is the President. Then as soon as the "other team" is spying on everyone it's a problem. Socialism and central planning only works if you reasonably believe that people will always elect benevolent people and will never be duped, which is obviously foolish. How much *more* power do you want to give Trump? The free market system has led to the greatest improvements in the living standards of the poor in the history of the world. The only cases in recorded history where people have escaped grinding poverty are where they've had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where people are worst off, it's exactly the societies that depart from that.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/22/2017 08:42PM by Rade.