And here come the taxes - Obamacare Fees

[fskimospy]

I would generally disagree with your assertion that patent enforcement amounts to benefiting from the efforts of others. For one, it is possible to enforce a patent where the damage award is only an injunction against the patent infringer. The only benefit the patentee obtains there is preventing the infringer from doing something that it could not legally do anyway.

Patent enforcement does not equal benefiting from the efforts of others necessarily, the extraction of rents is benefiting from the efforts of others. Not all patent enforcement is rent seeking.

 

[Sho'Nuff]

Patent enforcement does not equal benefiting from the efforts of others necessarily, the extraction of rents is benefiting from the efforts of others. Not all patent enforcement is rent seeking.

Now that I agree with. With one clarification - very little patent litigation (comparatively) is rent seeking.

 

[Fern]

My friend is in house counsel so he only has one client, who is quite wealthy and quite well established, haha.

As for how you benefit from the labor of others, the US patent system in its current form allows large interests and NPEs to extract rents, which is basically the definition of benefiting from the labor of others. Due to the high costs associated with patent litigation those rents are only typically available to people with deep pockets.

Seems to me the party paying the license fees is the one benefiting from another's labor. If there were no benefit to them they wouldn't bother with licensing the patent.

Fern

 

[WhipperSnapper]

FTFY

In response to: "I've come up with a new word for death by lack of health care: Insuricide."

The concept of dying in an alleged first world nation due to lack of basic health care when your nation spends 17% of its GDP on health care but leaves tens of millions uninsured or under-insured while other nations spend far less and have 100% coverage is a legitimate concept that needs a word to encapsulate it. Our fucked up health care system needs a word like that to describe deaths that result from it. I propose: Insuricide.

Examples:

"The drugs could have saved his life, but even though he had insurance, he could not afford the co-pays. He died from insuricide."

"His thyroid problem could have been treated, but because of his large student loan debt he could not afford to go to the doctor and pay for all of the blood tests. He died of insuricide."

"She had insurance, but an the insurance company's death panel found a way to rescind her policy because she had acne when she was age 12. As a result she could not get the treatment she needed for her curable breast cancer and she died. It was insuricide."

 

[werepossum]

Seems to me the party paying the license fees is the one benefiting from another's labor. If there were no benefit to them they wouldn't bother with licensing the patent.

Fern

Excellent point.

 

[senseamp]

They are benefiting from others' labor like a robbery victim is benefiting from the robber's labor. If there was no benefit to them, they wouldn't bother giving the robber all their money.

 

[berzerker60]

Laugh if you want. Insurance is not a fundamental right. If you want to argue the counter point, the stage is all yours.

We are not talking about freedom. Or the broader concept of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." We are talking about insurance. Something that was create protect against the risk of losses posed by known or appreciable risks. By definition it is not something that everyone is entitled to. It has always been something that has been bought.

No, you're right that insurance isn't a fundamental right. Health care, however, is, to the exact same extent that food and shelter are fundamental rights - that is, fundamental rights in a moral (but not legal) sense. Things that are necessary to live should be provided to everyone who genuinely cannot afford them at a minimal level for a number of reasons, from us not being monsters to the violence, crime, and social unrest that accompanies people who can't satisfy basic needs. If there were another way to get health care in this country without insurance, all the better - but right now, all we have are ERs, and using that as a health care 'system' is about as inefficient and wasteful as you could construct.

Also, I disagree with your equivocation of health care and health insurance. I know for a fact that they are not the same. I mentioned that my father has no health insurance, right? Yet he is able to obtain health care through a free health clinic run by a number of doctors in my town. They ask their patients to "pay what they can," even if that is "nothing." So there are options out there for folks to obtain basic medical care without insurance, and they are (or at least can be) affordable. Maybe there are not enough of those options. But they are there nonetheless.

So you're proposing fully funding free clinics to meet demand for everyone across the country? I'd be 100% on board with that. But basically you're describing universal health care with a stronger charity input, and/or ignoring the reality that a tiny minority of people have access to free clinics like your father that can actually provide the basic services they need (and the preventative care that saves us all enormous amounts of money, since things like vaccines and maternity care cost a tiny fraction of the amount of dealing with complications once they develop).

Dude if you do not think the fiscal deficit is one of the biggest threats to U.S. national security and sovereignty, I have nothing to say to you except "open your eyes." Eventually our creditors are going to want to get paid. And I'm betting that will happen sooner rather than later.

Our deficit is especially not a serious problem, but our debt isn't a problem either. Who do you think our creditors are, exactly? An international mafia, and us a poor shoe-maker, or something? Most of our debt is to Americans. The rest is to people who DO get paid off at exactly the time their bonds were set to expire, and always WILL get paid off at exactly the time their bonds are set to expire, and their absolute faith in that is why they continue to lend us money at almost zero interest (in fact, at negative real interest in recent years - effectively paying us to hold on to their money). Our debt never "comes due." That's just a nonsensical concept for sovereign debt. We have the biggest fuck-off military in the world by a lot. No one is going to 'come collecting.' If anyone decides to 'collect' through some magical system, they would only destroy their own economy as well, because the US economy is the backbone of an incredibly tightly interconnected global economy.

And where did I argue that we should be cutting in the face of recession? Precisely nowhere. What I am arguing for is fiscally responsible policy - something we haven't seen in this country for almost 40 years. Oh and protip - spending money we don't have in the face of recession is not a wise decision either.

Yes it is a wise decision. We should spend in smart ways, obviously, on things that will generate the most possible domestic economic activity, but we absolutely should spend it. That means infrastructure, feeding the hungry, and driving up consumer demand. (BUT, to say it again, we have to cut back when the economy starts doing better. This isn't an argument for spending infinite dollars forever.)

National debt is a good thing, so long as its payments don't become a burden on growth, which our is at most a very mild burden at this point. You're the one who wants to run things like a business. Do you not think businesses take out huge amounts of debt all the time, to spend on expansion and development? In practical government terms, think of a road that's estimated to last 30 years before needing repaving. We could pay it all now, but that's an unfair burden on today's taxpayers, who may not even be in this area in 5 years, let alone 30. If we take out a 30-year bond, people using the road over its lifetime will make the payments. It's a good thing.

So the government is my family? Oh happy day. We should be thrilled to have this hulking idiot big brother looking over our shoulder.

And yes, from an economic standpoint government should be run like a business or a non-profit, particularly because we live in a consumerist society. Laws and regulations should be passed because they make sense economically as well as socially. Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that all social considerations should go out the window during lawmaking. Rather, I'm arguing that the benefits of a law need to be weighed against all of the costs, taking into account the fiscal position of the nation as a whole. It simply does not make sense to institute expensive social programs when our "leaders" can't even agree on a budget.

I agree with these statements (other than the budget thing, which seems like a red herring), but I don't see how they're running government 'like a business.' It seems to me like it's arguing for running government like an efficient government aiming to promote the economic as well as social welfare of the people. I guess this is mostly me reacting to how that phrase is usually used, to promote an idea that businesses are somehow always efficient and rational actors (which is insane, just look at Enron, GM for decades, and the general prioritizing of maximizing short term profits rather than long-term growth).

Who said I was doing legal work at 13? My first job was working as a house painter with my father, where I made a whopping $5 an hour. [etc] In any event, I think my life history is particularly relevant to a lot of people in the U.S. Because it demonstrates that through hard work and careful planning, one can improve their situation dramatically in this country. I was not born with a silver spoon in hand. I just had parents that showed me the value of honest hard work and fiscal responsibility at a young age.

It's genuinely great that you were able to accomplish those things through your hard work. I'm just trying to point out that the opportunities you had to succeed through hard work and perseverance aren't universally available. I sure wish they were. I know you don't see luck as a significant component of your success, but there are ways you were very fortunate. You didn't get massively indebted by an illness; you didn't get arrested early in life for the dumb small mistakes we all make as kids, killing your job prospects forever; you had living parents, and what's more, it sounds like basically good parents; you had access to good schools where you could work hard and apply yourself. You also had lots of help - roads, police, food inspectors, regulators preventing you from being defrauded, etc. That DOES NOT take away from what you've accomplished - it's still a rare and valuable thing. But none of us are in this life alone, and now that you'd made it, you should think in terms of helping other people accomplish the same things by making sure they have these same opportunities.

Regardless, we are not talking about taking food away from the poor and huddled masses. We are talking about health insurance. If someone is in the position of choosing to buy food or choosing to buy health insurance, which do you think they will buy? Yet Obamacare would penalize (er., tax) them for that decision. Please explain to me how that makes sense.

Because everyone needs health care, just as much (if not always as immediately) as food and shelter, and Obamacare was an attempt at letting 'free market efficiency' handle that through universal health insurance rather than just having a single payer system. But to do that, we have to require that everyone carry health insurance, or no one would buy it until they needed it, and the costs would shoot up astronomically. A single payer system like the rest of the civilized world has would be enormously better, but this is what we have for now. The worst possible scenario is returning to the status quo ante, where people routinely get their insurance cancelled by the insurance company as soon as they start drawing on their policies, where huge numbers can't even get insurance no matter what, and where people allow small, cheap problems to grow into huge, expensive ones because they can't afford to see a doctor early on.

So you are saying that there is no other alternative to those problems (poverty, etc.) than large government? Perhaps I am naive, but I have more faith in people than that. You and I would probably agree that the solutions to the problems you mentioned are in and of themselves a collective action problem. I.e., lots of people recognize the problem, but the solution requires lots of people to work together, which is hard (though not impossible) to accomplish. You would argue that government adequately addresses that problem by forcing people to work together. I would argue that it is possible with appropriate leadership to accomplish the same thing without government involvement. We would both probably agree that government is the "best" solution, provided that the solutions were implemented in a cost effective manner. Because if they are not, all the government is doing is substituting one (potentially more serious) problem for another.

Can you point to a country in real world history where these social roles (caring for ALL of the nation's seniors at a minimum level, making sure everyone has food, etc.) were taken care of through non-governmental collective action? I certainly agree that government is never going to be 100% efficient, and there will be waste, because nothing created by man has ever been perfectly efficient and absent waste. Every charity has 'overhead costs,' some more reasonable than others. I don't see anything in history that could fill that role, though, unless maybe we're talking about more communal, preindustrial societies. Libertarianism is a fine dream, as is communism, but until we can see real world examples working at a decent scale, it's hard to take very seriously its assurances that everything would be fine if we followed this theory.