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Tuesday, September 21, 2004
Hippocrates, Gorgias of Leontini, a 3-inch-nail, and Thou
Disconcerting.An Aberdeenshire joiner has hit out after waiting nearly 24 hours to have a 3in nail removed from one of his fingers.There are few things which demonstrate, to my mind, the sophistry of collectivists more clearly than socialized medicine. Governments can no more 'poof' a private good into abundance that it can 'poof' a system for innovating said good into existence that could trump simple competition. In the attempt to do so, one encounters Mr. Law of Unintended Consequences in the form of a digitally suffused 3-inch-nail, or worse. So the proposition for the collectivist here (and elsewhere) is, “am I willing to sacrifice fundamental questions of quality assurance along with the hope of innovation and without even any guarantee of quantity, in return for the attribution of 'free-to-all'?” A faustian gamble. Whatever else one might say about him, Dan Smoot offers a poly-sci angle on the question: Whenever government enters a field of private activity, that field becomes a political battleground. Whenever you mix politics with medicine, doctoring becomes a political instead of a medical activity.As well as becomming a bureaucratic instead of medical activity. These considerations are outside the field of vision for these would-be Protagorases as they have diefied the “narrative” and thus fallen captive to it's charm. To wit, Gorgias tells us: “The spoken word is a mighty lord, and for all that it is insubstantial and imperceptible it has superhuman effects. It can put an end to fear do away with distress, generate happiness, and increase pity…When the power of the incantation meets the beliefs of a person’s mind, it beguiles, persuades, alters by its sorcery…techniques which cause the mind to err and deceive beliefs…For if everyone could remember everything that had happened in the past, could understand everything that was happening in the present, and could foresee everything that would happen in the future, the spoken word would not have the power that it has.”But it cannot invent magnetic resonance imaging. posted by Malaclypse the Tertiary at 1:11 AM · |
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