How does the philosophical underpinning of Theonomy differ from Sharia, @Dvir ?

Government by holy text seems pretty suspect unless you happen to have a nation made entirely of adherents to one exact interpretation of that holy text.

And heaven help anyone who comes along and feels differently.

Most of Heinlein's future history was based on the US becoming and then overcoming a theocracy in the early 21st century. Ironically the Latter Day Saints were part of the resistance because the theocracy was not THIER theocracy.

Let's talk my favorite subject. Health care. Is pure capitalism a good thing for health care?

As stated prior, @DrYuriMom , what do you mean when you say "pure capitalism"

The invisible hand. Market forces handle everything with little or no regulation.

No minimum wage

No tax structure to encourage some things and discourage others

No state enterprises

What stops people from banding together and making an organization that handles healthcare as a single payer or hybrid system?

People pay for it individually or it doesn't happen

If done individually by choice, nothing.

But if government does it, that's socialism, right?

Not necessarily no. You've read Hayek yes?

Socialism is explicitly the relegation of all resources to a "dictatorship of the proletariat", whatever form that may take

You could make the argument that an enforced monopoly is a sort of "sector socialism" I suppose, but there's no incompatibility with the government competing with the market

I think the only real exception here are things where you're going to inevitably have a monopoly anyway- a lot of infrastructural improvements work in this manner

If the gov't uses tax dollars then they are manipulating the market

Depends on what they do with those tax dollars

That's not pure capitalism

The point behind a state (IE the difference between an ancap and a libertarian) is that you have an organization that handles force

This is so that you have a singular, fair set of laws, and an expectation of enforcement. This exists due to market need

The more the government manipulates the market, the less pure it is. Hence what i was saying about a mix being needed. It sounds like we're not far apart.

Again, it depends on what the government does. If there's no market for something due to lack of ROI and people create an organization that does this task, that's still totally fine within the market

Not everything needs to be privately, personally held and controlled in a capitalist system. Capitalism is simply a "do what you wish" methodology

Again, I come back to health care.

How do you square the circle of not letting people die untreated but leaving it to the market?

Again, I come back to my prior example
>nobody has healthcare for X cost
>X cost is available in theory
>people form an organization to barter as a group, or some other method, to reduce cost to below that of market competitors
>market competitors now have to drop prices, offer better service or lose that market segment

The problem in the States is that the government provides loads of hurdles, including ones you wouldn't even expect were there in the first place until they decide to repeal them. They also legislate in favour of rich lobby groups, further undermining the market they then try to interfere in to "fix"

It would be like if I went to your house, gave your harddrive a whack with a hammer and then pretended it was a manufacturing error

I certainly won't argue that some of the regulation is not helpful, but hospital and clinic care in the US is pretty efficient and getting better. That 25% of everything goes to administrative costs of insurance is the a big hurdle. So are the huge margins of the drug and equipment companies.

there is a problem of who is supplying resources and who are responsible for spending resources. When the person spending is not directly responsibly to the person supplying, then you, without fail, have more being spend than is supplied leading to shortages.

Well and let's look at why those margins are so huge

No argument.

But Grenade, are we willing to let people due of curable conditions just because they don;t have money?

Not only can they get that shit for cheap+with government assistance, the government then tells other people they can't make that medication because big pharma owns *the idea*

And you can buy and sell knowledge as a product, a commodity, rather than a service

when things are finite, you might have to. not because you want to, but because you don't have a choice.

If you need food and have none but have medicine, will you give medicine to the dying person with food? or the dying person without food?

This is also why Scrib was likely talking about the distinction between capitalism and corporatism. The US is corporation-driven, not market-driven