Chetzemoka

Naturally.

History lesson time: This wasn't done on purpose. It's an artifact of decisions made by Congress during World War II to support war production.

So many young men were away at war that it created a labor shortage, even with some women entering the work force. This led to spiraling increases in wages that were threatening the viability of critical war manufacturers.

In an effort to protect this manufacturing sector, Congress capped wage increases. But those corporations were still competing for workers and now they were no longer able to offer them higher and higher wages. So instead, they started offering them "perks" like health insurance, pensions, and paid time off.

THEN:

"In 1943 the War Labor Board, which had one year earlier introduced wage and price controls, ruled that contributions to insurance and pension funds did not count as wages. In a war economy with labor shortages, employer contributions for employee health benefits became a means of maneuvering around wage controls."

Emphasis mine. And guess what? When those young men returned from war and re-entered the work force, they wanted those perks too. So which company was going to be the first to deescalate the arms race and NOT offer health insurance?

And those perks being so ubiquitous meant the government never had an incentive to provide health coverage directly to anyone of working age, so we only have Medicare for retirees.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235989/#:~:text=In%201943%20the%20War%20Labor,of%20maneuvering%20around%20wage%20controls.

Then the people have to be organized enough to keep the food going! It's not magic, the world doesn't just run without any planning or direction.

And I'm just saying be careful of who and what you support and make sure they're planning to have these things covered.

Do what? Just saying "we'll have farming and transport" is not a plan.

I'm not saying there isn't any other way to accomplish food production and distribution. I'm saying that just overthrowing our current systems without an explicit plan to keep food on the shelves is going to result in regular working class people starving. That has happened in every revolution except the American, and that's because the American revolutionaries already had the Continental Congress in place making plans about how to administrate the country, if they managed to win the war.

But most revolutions were just pure chaos with no plan that resulted in regular people starving to death. I 100% agree we need new systems. But I'm not terribly interested in living through a violent revolution.

Well, it better have some kind of mechanism in place to keep the grocery stores full or it's going to fail on its face.

And my whole point was that you're wrong in your assessment of why the cultural revolution was a disaster. It was a disaster because it was a populist authoritarian movement. Had nothing to do with progressive or conservative no matter what propaganda they used to dress it up.

Our institutions are not the problem, our policies are the problem. I want to see a transition to UBI, but a dramatic overhaul that dismantled WIC and SNAP before we got UBI in place would be an unmitigated disaster for the very people we were intending to help.

It's not the reform that I'm skeptical of. It's the lust for revolutionary destruction as a path to reform that I'm skeptical of. It's emotionally satisfying without regard to its actual efficacy in accomplishing the proposed reforms. Because history does not show us evidence that this works out well in the short nor the long run.

Are you saying you think a populist authoritarian movement was really communism?

Well they solved starvation by dramatically increasing it and then replaced old systems with new ones that have all those same old problems. So consider me unconvinced. I think we need to find a new way to change these systems that's more resilient for the future

I think it's just an effect of giving them sodium ascorbate instead of ascorbic acid. It's not the usual cause of hypernatremia, but it is possible to cause hypernatremia with that high a level of sodium intake, especially in the setting of kidney failure. I think they knew that and that's why they specifically noted that side effect.