Mech Engineer wrote:Dresden wrote:I'm also just curious from a philosophical perspective, isn't a pandemic like this a good argument for why we sometimes NEED a strong federal govt. response, and why we need to fund things like the CDC, and why we need to have things like federal (or state) stockpiles of medical supplies? By the way, I'm not against many libertarian ideas- the amount of money our govt. spends on the military is just absolutely insane in my opinion- but I would think pandemics offer a strong counter argument to the idea that govt. should be as small as possible.
Everything cannot be solved by small government. The idea of small government is appealing but it is not working as it should. A lot of humans are not wired for that and I feel Millennials and Gen Z are worse. We will have more disasters like this.
The small government ideas have to be kept alive though and we need to gradually move towards them. If you have big organizations, then you have something like WHO who got bloated and ineffective.
There is no perfect answer.
I'm ok with the general philosophical argument as far as it pertains to business; service industry; manufacturing.
I understand the problems with over-regulating and over-sized government. Chicago is a good example of local over-regulation gone bad. You can't legally set up a home-made pie stand in the city because you have to go through some insane loopholes to get the permit and there's some fear that people are gonna be selling home-baked goods with poison in them or something (whereas... your local McDonalds is 100% clean and safe from an employee mangling in your secret sauce?).
But as far as health care goes, I don't know why it all falls together under the umbrella of "business." Sure, leave the plastic surgery, back massages and teeth whitening to private business, but just as we have a national military that "protects" us from bullets and bombs, there should be a national health branch that protects citizens from diseases as well as natural disasters (hurricanes, floods, etc.). It's not a complex concept, and it's not an invasion of privacy. There should be a federal level health branch, and there should be a local level that deals with day-to-day basic ER health. It's like having a fire department or police department. If your house happens to catch on fire due to some reckless fools lighting bonfires next door, I don't see why it would make sense to hire private fire-fighting services to take out the fire. It makes sense for the sirens to go off immediately and put the fire out. Just like if a COVID-19 virus is wiping out all the old people in your city and putting thousands of people on ventilators, than there should be a 'don't-wait, turn on the sirens and save people' health-care force.
The big problem is that health care is lumped into one big industry. Truth is that P.T., chiropractice, brain surgery, pills, psychiatry, viral prevention, ER, dietitians, etc. all these things are drastically different and shouldn't be lumped under "1 health policy."
Create federal and local health branches that take care of the serious **** that needs immediate attention, and save the long-term care, ankle sprains, sore backs, therapy, etc. for the private industry. It would surely streamline responses like this. Of course presidents like Trump would want to take them apart. Why doesn’t he take apart the military then? What’s so special about it? Shouldn’t that be privatized too, in his and Rand Paul’s opinion?
Unfortunately my most stupid ideas/fears have been coming to fruition, so who knows?
