re: OT: GSB Primary/Political Stuff (Vote in bold)

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Very well thought out and laid out principles. Out of curiosity....are these your thoughts and conclusions, or did you get this from somewhere else? Not an accusation or a criticism...I am just wondering.

And what you are pointing out makes sense. Thanks for sharing.

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I've got a masters in Finance and have been a wealth manager/financial planner/stock broker going on 17 years, and have owned a wealth management and corporate benefits firm (with 3 partners) for nearly 13 of those 17 years.

On the corporate benefits side of my business, employer sponsored employee group health insurance is one of the things we do. I have 20 employees who run our in-house third party administration (TPA) of all our health plans. We have around 210 companies comprising about 16,000 employees that we administer.

I've seen first hand how insurance companies use networks to try and control medical related costs charged by doctors and hospitals and the like. I've seen what happens when new rules come down by the insurance commissioner or legislated by state or federal government. I've seen exactly how government run Medicare, Medicaid, Peach-care, Tri-care, social security disability, Obamacare, and VA hospitals all work in the system and how they try to control costs and create waiting lists and death panels and how the quality of care is so much worse.

Combine that with the fact I specialize in mostly individual wealth management/retirement planning and corporate retirement plans like 401k's, I do market analysis almost every day. I know everything it takes to run a business and I know what things happening in our economy effect businesses and the economy.

It has become abundantly clear to me why entitlement programs and socialistic concepts can't work in a free market capitalistic society... why they simply can't coexist.

It is impossible to mandate financial limits on a business or program or entity with regards to how much they pay employees or beneficiaries and charge for products and services when the costs to run that business or program or entity are based on the free market and have no relative limits.

Example: If I have a business producing and selling widgets, and the government says I have to pay my employees $15/hr and I can only charge $100 per widget, but the cost of materials for each widget is $25, the energy cost to run the production machines is $25, employee labor is $25, and taxes are $25, well then the government mandates are not only leaving me no profits for capital re-investment (which is the key to growth), but the profits are so small that I'm even paying less in taxes, which results in less revenue for the government, so now they start wanting to control costs even more and charge even higher percentage in taxes. And it starts a death spiral until I'm either drowning in debt or going out of business.

The government can't control the energy costs to run the production machines or the widget materials costs. The free market and laws of supply and demand control those. The laws of supply and demand should also control the level of employee wages too. But as you can see, the government is trying to dictate that as well, which is simply compounding the problem. It will force-feed unskilled workers into the system which will contribute to the reduction of quality of products and services. The limiting of profits will also reduce skilled workers who will seek employment elsewhere that doesn't limit their pay ceiling. Again, reducing quality. And then without capital re-investment, growth will stagnate and unemployment will rise as businesses die to this process.

Look at every entitlement program and government run entity and you'll see that this is where the flaw in its design is based and why it is failing and/or outrageously under-funded and completely unsustainable.

This is why there is no such thing as "Democratic Socialism" where the system has socialistic concepts mixed with free market concepts. Socialism, as Marx explained very clearly, is an all-or-nothing concept called "Communism", where EVERYTHING is controlled by the government.

Just look at China and North Korea for perfect examples in our lifetime of the global free market system completely ruining their economies and taking them down a path of unsustainability. Those countries are at the pinnacle of tyrannical regimes with horrible economies and teetering on the edge of a fiscal collapse. I can't imagine being a citizen of either one. Zero freedom would suck.