On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 12:01 PM, Nick Arnett<[email protected]> wrote:

> It makes a lot of sense to me to intervene as little as possible, but you
> seem to be arguing that any intervention is wrong.  How do you buy time to
> fix the system?  Do you let the whole thing collapse just to make sure that
> your point is clear and some reform is needed?  Isn't that devastately clear
> already?

I am arguing that intervention has costs and benefits. In this case,
the costs are vast, and the benefits are largely unknown.

I am also pointing out that there are millions of people in the US who
can be involved in making things better, and that this can happen
without any central intervention by the government. Additionally,
government intervention often hampers the efforts of those who are
most able to come up with solutions to problems through their unique
knowledge and skills.

> People, even liberals, can learn without enduring the worst of
> consequences.  You sound like a doctor who advocates letting people die in
> the emergency room to teach everybody else a safety lesson.

You are implicitly making a prediction -- that the consequences would
have been "the worst" if there were no immediate government
intervention. I have seen no evidence of the accuracy of your
predictions, in fact, I have seen evidence of the unreliability of
them. So I must discount your implicit prediction.

One of a doctor's fundamental guidelines is "do no harm". A
responsible doctor would never operate on a patient to remove the
appendix simply because the patient complains of a stomach ache. More
information about the state of the patient is needed before an
operation is justified.

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