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Hickenlooper booed for saying, "Socialism is not the answer" (2 Viewers)

wikkidpissah said:
I imagine there will still be above&beyond policies like many seniors have supplementing Medicare now, so the insurance industry wont be out in the cold (much as they may deserve it) and that will be the choice end for those who want and can afford it
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I'm no expert but this is essentially the U.K. system, right?

I've had the same GP for the entirety of my 20 years as a New Yorker. John Hopkins board certified, swanky Central Park West office. He's my doctor because he was my CEO's doctor and I got a referral. 3-4 years he stopped taking all insurance. Instead he began offering a concierge service, with retainer tiers at 3K, 5K and 7.5K. Everything is out of pocket for patients. I don't think it impacted him negatively at all, because most of his clients are wealthy.

I have seen his Physician's Assistant since 2016 or so for my annual physicals. She still takes insurance & has reasonable co-pays, e.g., same traditional insurance setup I am used to using.

 
rockaction said:
Medicare-for-all (Senate and House): Both the Medicare-for-all plans would make the biggest change and eliminate employer-sponsored coverage completely. Under these options, all Americans who currently get insurance at work would transition to one big government health care plan. - Vox, March 20, 2019

Therefore, prices, wages, and distribution of services would be controlled by the government. A socialized industry, to be sure. 
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I'm not going to look stuff up right now, but my guess is that most of the top-ranked countries on the various economic freedom indexes have socialized health care systems. Nationalizing health care apparently isn't a death knell for capitalism.

 
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Maurile Tremblay said:
I'm not going to look stuff up right now, but my guess is that most of the top-ranked countries on the various economic freedom indexes have socialized health care systems. Nationalizing health care apparently isn't a death for capitalism.
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not lookin' up neither, but don't most of those have a mechanism for setting or at least negotiating prices? that's where this all comes crashing down for America - if they can't use national customerhood to bring vendors under control.

 
Maurile Tremblay said:
The good news is that, among the actual candidates, the idea that socialism might be the answer is limited to Bernie Sanders plus a few fringe people (maybe Gabbard, Williamson, Gravel ... I don’t know).

The main candidates would agree with Hickenlooper.

Biden is not ideological enough to be a socialist. He’s a centrist by nature.

Buttigieg, capitalist. Warren, capitalist. Harris, capitalist. Klobuchar, capitalist. Booker, capitalist. O’Rourke, capitalist. Yang, capitalist.

Hockenlooper just seems to have ended up in front of a pro-Bernie crowd.
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I agree with the point you're making, but I think things are a little more complicated with Warren.  I wouldn't describe her as a socialist, but she seems to harbor a genuine, personal hatred toward private business, especially in banking and finance but by no means just those two areas.  On any given policy topic, the narrative she uses pretty much always features privately-owned business as the villains.  She doesn't seem to be a big fan of private ownership of the means of production.  At best, she's a very reluctant capitalist.

 
IvanKaramazov said:
I agree with the point you're making, but I think things are a little more complicated with Warren.  I wouldn't describe her as a socialist, but she seems to harbor a genuine, personal hatred toward private business, especially in banking and finance but by no means just those two areas.  On any given policy topic, the narrative she uses pretty much always features privately-owned business as the villains.  She doesn't seem to be a big fan of private ownership of the means of production.  At best, she's a very reluctant capitalist.
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There is plenty about banking and finance reasonably causes hatred. 

 
IvanKaramazov said:
I agree with the point you're making, but I think things are a little more complicated with Warren.  I wouldn't describe her as a socialist, but she seems to harbor a genuine, personal hatred toward private business, especially in banking and finance but by no means just those two areas.  On any given policy topic, the narrative she uses pretty much always features privately-owned business as the villains.  She doesn't seem to be a big fan of private ownership of the means of production.  At best, she's a very reluctant capitalist.
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We can put an asterisk next to Warren, but I view her as basically a champion of ordoliberalism. She's a capitalist, but sees a big role for government in making capitalism work better.

I do agree that she seems hostile to large corporations in concentrated industries, but I think that stems not from any general antipathy toward capitalism, but from her own conception of what healthy capitalism should look like. (She's well aware of principal-agent alignment problems, etc.)

 
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IvanKaramazov said:
I agree with the point you're making, but I think things are a little more complicated with Warren.  I wouldn't describe her as a socialist, but she seems to harbor a genuine, personal hatred toward private business, especially in banking and finance but by no means just those two areas.  On any given policy topic, the narrative she uses pretty much always features privately-owned business as the villains.  She doesn't seem to be a big fan of private ownership of the means of production.  At best, she's a very reluctant capitalist.
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My notebook may well be out of date, but I've always thought that Warren takes issue with capitalism in instances where ethical behavior is clearly lacking.

 
timschochet said:
Yeah this whole thing grates on me. I’m not much of a fan of the Bernie-Warren-AOC wing of the party; Ive been clear about that. I much prefer the Hickenlooper wing. I like pro-business Democrats, I especially think they understand the importance of trade better and I think their ideas about foreign policy are FAR better. 

But the main proposals of the Bernie-Warren-AOC wing are: 

1. Medicare for All

2. Green New Deal 

3. Pay off student loans and free college 

4. Tax the very rich to pay for it 

This is not socialism!! It’s an extension of the New Deal and the Great Society. While it certainly represents an expansion of government, it does not represent an assault on our essential free market society. Branding these ideas as socialism is not only wrong, it’s simplistic and an attempt to destroy any real reasonable debate or discussion. 
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I agree. The term "socialism" is so loaded, that' I'm not even sure what exactly Hickenlooper meant by using it, nor what those who boo'd him thought he meant.

Public roads, public schools, public libraries.... technically these are socialist programs. A few more would not mean we've kicked capitalism to the curb and are now a socialist country. 

 
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Much more problematic for the Democrats was the person from PETA who grabbed Senator Harris’ microphone. It’s images like this that help the Trumps claim that liberals are out of control. 

 
Maurile Tremblay said:
I'm not going to look stuff up right now, but my guess is that most of the top-ranked countries on the various economic freedom indexes have socialized health care systems. Nationalizing health care apparently isn't a death knell for capitalism.
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Maurile, I used to look at the indexes. I'm not sure how much I trust them to accurately measure economic "freedom." To me, economic freedom means markets setting prices, wages, production, and consumption. It also means low taxation and the limited use of force in collecting that taxation. Therefore, I'm almost positive their high ratings of economic freedom would come from their regulatory schemes compared to ours, not anything regarding nationalizing industries or tax rates. They're also probably small, ethnically homogeneous countries, which makes any cooperative endeavor easier provided that trust is there and corruption at a minimum.

 
Captain Cranks said:
This is not a good look, Dems

All the other candidates need to say and feel the same way.  Those boos just give more fuel to the Republican fire and will scare away independents.    
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On the contrary, I think it's a great look. People are fed up with what our country has become, and the left needs to provide some new ideas on how to fix things. Trump and the far right are offering theirs. The Hickenloopers of the world are what will get us four more years of Trump, not the young progressive left that doesn't buy into the boogeyman idea of 'socialism' that Hickenlooper is feeding into here. Socialism and capitalism are near useless in terms of trying to label modern economic systems. There are essentially no pure examples of one or the other, and a blend of the two is what we are today and what we should be going forward. To feed in to the hard right's revulsion of the word socialism is to help stunt necessary, drastic changes to our country that need to be discussed and evaluated from a rational point of view. That crowd (and many, many more like them) are sick of the scapegoating and word games. Why even bring it up, other than to stick your flag in the dirt as someone who thinks we don't have major issues to deal with?

 
timschochet said:
Much more problematic for the Democrats was the person from PETA who grabbed Senator Harris’ microphone. It’s images like this that help the Trumps claim that liberals are out of control. 
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Here's an idea:  Let's be dismissive of the fringe.  More apathy please, they've earned it.

 
The statement "socialism is not the answer" is too vague, as obviously "capitalism is not the answer" either... in the sense that 100% pure capitalism isn't anymore the answer than 100% pure socialism is. Lots of people get screwed in 100% pure capitalism.

 
mcintyre1 said:
On the contrary, I think it's a great look. People are fed up with what our country has become, and the left needs to provide some new ideas on how to fix things. Trump and the far right are offering theirs. The Hickenloopers of the world are what will get us four more years of Trump, not the young progressive left that doesn't buy into the boogeyman idea of 'socialism' that Hickenlooper is feeding into here. Socialism and capitalism are near useless in terms of trying to label modern economic systems. There are essentially no pure examples of one or the other, and a blend of the two is what we are today and what we should be going forward. To feed in to the hard right's revulsion of the word socialism is to help stunt necessary, drastic changes to our country that need to be discussed and evaluated from a rational point of view. That crowd (and many, many more like them) are sick of the scapegoating and word games. Why even bring it up, other than to stick your flag in the dirt as someone who thinks we don't have major issues to deal with?
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Good luck with all that idealism which ignores what the majority of the electorate actually are: Uninformed, easily manipulated buffoons who are highly susceptible to word games.

ETA - I've said it before and I'll say it again.  If the Dems are fixated on finding the perfect candidate based on issues and not electability and think they can just counter the Republican strategy by simply presenting a "rational" point of view, we're going to see 4 more years of Trump.  

 
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mcintyre1 said:
On the contrary, I think it's a great look. People are fed up with what our country has become, and the left needs to provide some new ideas on how to fix things. Trump and the far right are offering theirs. The Hickenloopers of the world are what will get us four more years of Trump, not the young progressive left that doesn't buy into the boogeyman idea of 'socialism' that Hickenlooper is feeding into here. Socialism and capitalism are near useless in terms of trying to label modern economic systems. There are essentially no pure examples of one or the other, and a blend of the two is what we are today and what we should be going forward. To feed in to the hard right's revulsion of the word socialism is to help stunt necessary, drastic changes to our country that need to be discussed and evaluated from a rational point of view. That crowd (and many, many more like them) are sick of the scapegoating and word games. Why even bring it up, other than to stick your flag in the dirt as someone who thinks we don't have major issues to deal with?
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Raise taxes. Create additional entitlement programs. Actively redistribute wealth. Continue expanding the government.

You mean those new ideas?

 
Captain Cranks said:
Good luck with all that idealism which ignores what the majority of the electorate actually are: Uninformed, easily manipulated buffoons who are highly susceptible to word games.

ETA - I've said it before and I'll say it again.  If the Dems are fixated on finding the perfect candidate based on issues and not electability and think they can just counter the Republican strategy by simply presenting a "rational" point of view, we're going to see 4 more years of Trump.  
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I agree. Find someone who can win first then worry about the other stuff. The Dems can't allow 4 more years of Trump  appointing judges. 

 
mcintyre1 said:
On the contrary, I think it's a great look. People are fed up with what our country has become, and the left needs to provide some new ideas on how to fix things. Trump and the far right are offering theirs. The Hickenloopers of the world are what will get us four more years of Trump, not the young progressive left that doesn't buy into the boogeyman idea of 'socialism' that Hickenlooper is feeding into here. Socialism and capitalism are near useless in terms of trying to label modern economic systems. There are essentially no pure examples of one or the other, and a blend of the two is what we are today and what we should be going forward. To feed in to the hard right's revulsion of the word socialism is to help stunt necessary, drastic changes to our country that need to be discussed and evaluated from a rational point of view. That crowd (and many, many more like them) are sick of the scapegoating and word games. Why even bring it up, other than to stick your flag in the dirt as someone who thinks we don't have major issues to deal with?
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Hickenlooper was Governor of Colorado - name a more progressive state in the last 8 years - weed, healthcare, tech jobs, green energy?- while still ranked highly in best places to do business year after year . He has results - the others are just pretenders. I'll hang up and listen.

 
ffldrew said:
Hickenlooper was Governor of Colorado - name a more progressive state in the last 8 years - weed, healthcare, tech jobs, green energy?- while still ranked highly in best places to do business year after year . He has results - the others are just pretenders. I'll hang up and listen.
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I like Hickenlooper.  The problem he has in a national election is that he's neither charismatic nor a bomb thrower when it comes to rhetoric.  Unfortunately to gain enough traction to win, you need to be one of the two these days IMO.

 
Captain Cranks said:
Good luck with all that idealism which ignores what the majority of the electorate actually are: Uninformed, easily manipulated buffoons who are highly susceptible to word games.

ETA - I've said it before and I'll say it again.  If the Dems are fixated on finding the perfect candidate based on issues and not electability and think they can just counter the Republican strategy by simply presenting a "rational" point of view, we're going to see 4 more years of Trump.  
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IMO, candidates pushing a strongly progressive agenda are the more electable candidates, and I don't think it is remotely close.

 
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