Philosophical Productive Discussion

[Megamandrn001]

Education funding in this country has more than doubled, in real dollars, since 1980. Tertiary education is probably even bigger. Teacher pay is tied to a mandatory seniority schedule with an unfunded benefit scheme.

You'll notice this has nothing to do with what I said. That doubling of real dollar is not reaching teachers. Education, and by extension, the DOE, is in shambles. This is not an accident, it's by design. My point stands.

Single-payer healthcare is not the norm anywhere you will want to look to. Even Canada was forced to allow a private market rather than continue to politically restrict supply. And I think like the above the explosion of government spending and control should lead you to question your premises about the likely benefits of further monopolizing the sector with a single corporation.

It wasn't forced into it, it was propagandized into it, since everyone who's not blind can see how much money private healthcare pulls in in America. You are not naive enough to think that the powers that be everywhere would not move heaven and earth to get a piece of that pie for themselves. There is no data that supports the idea that private healthcare is superior to single payer anywhere on earth.
Again, I don't have to question the premise: reputable agencies that conduct examinations every year of health outcomes in countries around the world have rated America's unique private healthcare system dead last in almost every category for ten years running.

One thing I've learned is that most problems we've faced have had studies done in order to hash out what the best way to achieve this or that is. Obviously these aren't set in stone and are not gospel, but for me, scientific evidence of the best possible outcome is an incredibly strong indicator of which way to go, even if it clashes with previously held beliefs.

I think this is a very utopian vision of not just democracy but politics itself. The nature of politics, especially in a state that is increasingly seizing more of the means of production, is not a dialectic towards identifying a general will. Many positions are simply irreconcilable. Your and Joanne's best government possible may be a 100% tax rate to fund the trans genocide, but this is irreconcilable with my best government possible that does not engage in genocide nor tax anyone. It is not bad faith to believe others intended mandatory policies are not just unwise but potentially dangerous.

You're not wrong. In fact, this proves my point about what I typed up there about the Civil War. Joanne wanted a country with legal slavery and my side did not, and what resulted was some shootin' of folks until the issue was laid to rest. Mentioning that a system of governance doesn't function perfectly for all time and eventually falls apart isn't an indictment of said system, because... well, they all do in one way or another. Eventually things devolve into violence. You don't want it to, but that seems to be how it always goes. All you can hope for at that point is that the violence ends up destroying something vile. That's a pretty big gamble, and why you shouldn't try or hope for it!

I'm a leftist, but I don't think socialism is perfect and infallible and obviously the best way to go all the time around the world. I think that socialism is the thing you have to use to push back the pendulum that's swung incredibly far into late stage capitalism, lest the wheels fall off that. Were the pendulum to swing left for the next hundred years or so, that would turn to shambles as well and some rightward pushback would be warranted.