Republicans are stupid thieves.

[MSimon]

Again, a state compels you to patronize a non governmental third party for the state to grant you permission to use the public roads. Why is this acceptable?

They are not denying you permission to use the roads; just permission to financially endanger others while doing it.

As was mentioned by MSimon, in the olden days, if you damaged someone with your ox/cart/whatever, you were liable to become a slave to pay for it. This is similar to such long time common law only modern style.

Yes. But you were not required to become a slave in advance.

[JLawson]

Went to jail myself for a night, for not having insurance... and running a red light. The car was, of course, towed off...

That was close to 25 years ago. It was a decided lesson - haven't been without coverage since!

[Diogenes]

Everything not forbidden is mandatory.

Thanks, that's the quote I was looking for.

[Diogenes]

In my province car insurance is mandatory, but we have to use a government car insurance company. It was passed into law by the socialist NDP back in the seventies. It's been lovingly referred to as The Insurance Corporation of BC, or The Insurance Corruption of BC, or Icky-Bicky, or Moscow Mutual Insurance.
I'm sure the fact that mandatory car insurance is being proposed by a paticular political party has more to do with protecting injured parties than political philosophy.

This makes more sense than the way we do it. The idea that the state should force patronage to a nongovernmental third party for an ostensibly civic minded purpose is to my mind an abrogation of the responsibility the state is attempting to assert.

In other words, if it's the State's job, why are they letting a civilian organization do it?

Now my argument is that it Isn't a legitimate job for the State to do at all, but if it were, why then must it rely on civilian third parties?

[Diogenes]

Let me try one of my stock arguments on you.

What is your life worth? Can you be compensated for your life with money? Were you to lose your head in a car crash, would it make any difference to you whether the accident was your fault or the other guy's?

My point is, the most valuable thing to any individual is their bodily integrity, yet they willingly risk it by driving on the roads. Every Day, People will risk the lives of their wives and children, yet God forbid that they should have to risk damage to their automobile!

There IS no compensation for your life. Insurance will not save your life, nor your body. *IF* you choose to drive on the public roads, you willingly take this risk.

I suspect that if you read the proposed law, the only requirement is that you have insurance for damages you inflict on OTHERS. Insure yourself or not as you please, but you MUST insure against your damages to others. At least, that is how it seems to be here in VA.

EricF brings up a good point. Damage before the fact?

What other aspect of law assumes you are probably going to commit a tort or crime before you do it?

Applied to race it is called "Predjudice." Meaning to Pre-Judge.


Another example in history is the selling of Indulgences. (giving you forgiveness for sins you haven't yet committed.)


Prejudice and Indulgences are not examples of Precedent we should want to emulate.

[Heath_h49008]

Auto insurance... insurance in general... is a very profitable business.

Politicians need money for elections and life.

Politicians can create laws forcing people to purchase insurance... (even health insurance soon!)

Is any of this sinking in? Seriously people, just follow the cash.

[Diogenes]

It is wrong to deny others the right to travel (which is virtually the same thing as their ability to work.) to protect the prettyness of other people's cars.

You keep harping about "the prettyness" of other's cars. Would you accept this bill if it were restricted to insurance to pay for the life & limb of the other driver, and the FUNCTIONALITY of the other car?

No, for several reasons. The most important one of which is it violates a basic principle that ordinary people have a right to try to earn a living. By putting onerous restrictions on the poor that overturns thousands of years of custom, precedent and principle, we are opening the door to even more egregious violations of basic human rights.

After all, doesn't the victim have the same "right of way" as you?

Yes, the "Injured Party" ("Victim" implies a criminal party rather than a hapless participant.) has just as much right to use the public roads as anyone else.

Aren't you liable to compensate that victim if you destroy HIS ability to hold a job?

Tough question. Depends on how much culpability you have in destroying his ability to hold a job. If you are completely culpable, (meaning you intentionally commit a criminal act against someone) yeah, your life and property ought to be forfeit. If you are not at all culpable, you should not have to compensate the injured party at all. Most cases fall somewhere in between.


For example. Here in this town, a few years back there was a young boy trying to cross a busy boulevard during relatively heavy traffic. A kindly driver in a large van decides to stop so the boy can go in front of it. The kindly driver motions for the boy to quickly cross the street. The boy darts out in front of the van right into the path of an oncoming car that kills him. The oncoming car could not see the boy because of the van obstructing his vision, and the boy could not see the oncoming car for the same reason.

Now who bears responsibility for this? The Driver of the vehicle that killed him? The driver of the van that directed him to cross? The boy himself? Was it intentional, or accidental?

Who suffers the loss? The boy lost his life. The family lost the boy. Both drivers have the anguish.

How do we compensate anyone for their loss? How does insurance fix this?

Is YOUR ability to get to YOUR job more sactrosanct than his?

Not at all. I do a reasonably good job of being safe on the road, (No accidents. Knock on wood.) and I hope others do the same.

You sound like one of the heartless Democrats!

In this particular case, the Democrats are also on the wrong side. The vote on this bill is 87-8 . It has overwhelming support in the house.

Like I always say, most people don't mind a bit of slavery as long as they aren't the slaves.

[Diogenes]

Again, a state compels you to patronize a non governmental third party for the state to grant you permission to use the public roads. Why is this acceptable?

They are not denying you permission to use the roads; just permission to financially endanger others while doing it.

Financially endangering others is considered perfectly acceptable in todays society. Have you not seen our new budget deficit? How about the housing meltdown? Banking collapse?

But I know what you mean. My advice to people who cannot afford to take the risk that their vehicle or themselves might be damaged because of an accident is to "Stay off the road." Which is the same advice they give poor people who can't afford the artificially created extra expense of buying insurance.

If "If you can't afford it, Stay off the road!" is good enough advice for one side, is it not good enough for the other as well?

As was mentioned by MSimon, in the olden days, if you damaged someone with your ox/cart/whatever, you were liable to become a slave to pay for it. This is similar to such long time common law only modern style.

Do you not see the irony of linking Slavery to this notion? We have cast Slavery into the pit. Why not this idea which is linked to it? After all, if they are complimentary contemporaries, don't they both deserve the same fate?

Apart from that, paying for an accident which you caused is after the fact. Not before the fact.

[Diogenes]

I'm amused at the Obama health-care plan, which will essentially criminalized failure to have health insurance. This will also be a burden on the poor, especially those employed part-time or sporadically. Depending on how it is implemented, it may be a license to require people to buy insurance at whatever the insurance companies care to charge.

You are showing an inkling of what I am getting at.

The distinction is that I suspect the law in questio doesn't require you to cover YOURSELF, just your liability to others.

If OK were Libertarian Land, the government wouldn't own the roads, a company would. I suspect that company would either require that you have insurance or charge a BIG premium to use the road. After all, if YOU can't compensate the other driver for his injuries that YOU caused, almost certainly the company would be required to. So the law in question is your fault for not making OK into Libertarian Land.

Bunch of fallacies in this one. Again, the biggest issue is "before the fact."

[Diogenes]

1. As I mentioned earlier, My mother was ran over by a horse drawn wagon and nearly died. She underwent several operations. People have been killed by horses and wagons.

2. If you are hit by Warren Buffet, and he has millions of dollars of insurance, it won't help you a bit if your neck is broken.

1. Hers or someone elses? If someone elses, shouldn't they pay for the operations?

I'll have to ask to find out for sure. I'm pretty sure it was someone else. My mothers family was too poor to have a wagon. The people of that time would have simply said "The child should not have ran out into the street."

2. Sure it will. It'll cover the hospital costs and the recuperation costs and physical therapy costs and the costs to live while you can't get a job and all sorts of other costs.

Funny, I don't see any of this stuff balancing the scales. I certainly wouldn't regard all this hospital stuff as a fair trade. I'd rather not have my neck broken.

How do we balance the scales? We can't. Ergo, the man risked his neck, and lost the gamble, "and all the kings horses and all the kings men can't put humpty dumpty back together again. "

I'm pretty sure Christopher Reeves would have traded all his wealth for a functional neck.

[EricF]

Good point. "Prior to the fact." Isn't this a legal term meaning you can't charge someone with a crime before they commit it ?

I think this is actually a bedrock legal principle. Why isn't mandating insurance a case of Prior to the fact of a crime, or in the case of civil law, prior to the fact of an injury?

Come to think of it, I think mandatory insurance may be the only example I know of the government Forcing you to pay for an injury you haven't caused before the fact!

I suppose you could say the selling of indulgences might be a prior example of this sort of thing, and that didn't turn out very well, did it ?

No, if you unintentionally damage someones property, you have not necessarily committed a crime. But you are held legally responsible to make the owner of the property whole again.

This is more like making sure you are financially solvent enough to be ble to make someone whole if you damage their property or body. Just like we require banks to be financially solvent in order to do business.

[Diogenes]

Ha ha ha... you're pulling your own leg! I know a woman who works at Whataburger. At $7.25/ hour, she makes $1160.00/ month before taxes. Figure $300.00/ month off the top for FICA and Taxes. A typical apartment might cost $450.00/ month. Figure $10.00/ day for food = $300.00/ month. Let's give her her water and electricity for free. This leaves $110.00 / month to spend on everything else. (Toilet paper? Soap? etc.) This particular woman has an infant granddaughter that she has been taking care of. She gets food stamps, does certain other nefarious things to get additional money. She catches rides from friends to get her to work.

First, if at that income she is paying that much in taxes, there is something seriously wrong with your system to begin with.

Yeah, i've been saying that. However, FICA is not considered to be a tax. (It's Social Security, so it's part of your government funded retirement program that's going bankrupt and will be 57 trillion dollars in the red shortly.)

Second, I lived of less than that and still managed to pay my monthly fees.

Were you paying rent and utilities at the time?

Third, at that income and with a child, she would get support from the government, right?

Absolutely. She STAYS on the food stamp roster, and she's always used the free medical care at the hospitals. She was on Section 8 (DHS pays your rent for you.) living in a $650.00/month house at one time, but she didn't file her paperwork on time, and so she's been off of it for a year or so. (Trying to get back on it though.) I think her daughter may still be claiming the baby, but I don't know. I haven't talked to her for a couple of months.

Fourth, she could always ride a bike to work. That is what poor people here do. It is healthy too and saves money on gas, oil, other fluids, inspection, repairs etc as well.

She could. She won't. I'm pretty sure of that.

5th, TP for a two person household is <8 dollars a month and if you really need to save on that, then use yesterdays newspaper or if you dont have one, then yesterdays cathalogues, gggg

You can afford a newspaper? You spendthrift!

I guess the insurance industry in the US indeed sucks as bad as Obama said. In Austria, I have up to a million coverage for those 50 Euros that I pay every month and quite a bit of that is tax (per horsepower).
In Austria (I guess that is contrary to the US), the minimum coverage is 100k. You cant get less. The price is about the same as in the US if you take the lower tax into account.

Don't mistake the circumstances surrounding Car insurance with that surrounding Medical insurance. They are not at all alike. I don't know why people keep claiming that there is an Insurance problem, when the main problem is a lack of a feedback loop on costs.

The insurance here is purposedly meant to cover peoples injuries first and then their damages. In fact, it is sometimes cheaper to pay small damages out of your own pocket, so your insurance rate does not go up.
It is meant as an insurance for catastrophic accidents with lots of damages to material and life.
And the "then insure yourself" argument is total fail, sorry. It is not just other motorists that get injured in traffic accidents. What about pedestrians? Little children? You want a 3 year old to go get an insurance against being hit by a car? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?

It is ridiculous. Why would you suggest it? Are not the parents responsible for 3 year olds in Austria?

Now if this 3 year old was to be hit by a car, what follows could be years of pain, surgeries, disadvantages in school and job situations and yes these things can be put into numbers. Many lawyers in the US make a living of doing just that.

Fine. How much money would you trade for a broken neck?

For me, there is no amount of money. Think of it as an asymptote, and the price is beyond infinity.

[Diogenes]

Went to jail myself for a night, for not having insurance... and running a red light. The car was, of course, towed off...

That was close to 25 years ago. It was a decided lesson - haven't been without coverage since!

The lesson you learned was to respect the power of the Authorities. Not whether or not they were in the right.

I respect their power. I FEAR their power. That doesn't mean I won't oppose them when they are wrong.

[Diogenes]

Good point. "Prior to the fact." Isn't this a legal term meaning you can't charge someone with a crime before they commit it ?

I think this is actually a bedrock legal principle. Why isn't mandating insurance a case of Prior to the fact of a crime, or in the case of civil law, prior to the fact of an injury?

Come to think of it, I think mandatory insurance may be the only example I know of the government Forcing you to pay for an injury you haven't caused before the fact!

I suppose you could say the selling of indulgences might be a prior example of this sort of thing, and that didn't turn out very well, did it ?

No, if you unintentionally damage someones property, you have not necessarily committed a crime. But you are held legally responsible to make the owner of the property whole again.

This is more like making sure you are financially solvent enough to be ble to make someone whole if you damage their property or body. Just like we require banks to be financially solvent in order to do business.

Let me emphasize the "Prior to the fact" thing.

The Protestant schism was a result of Martin Luther finding certain practices of the Catholic Church to be morally reprehensible. Among these was the "Selling of Indulgences." You see, when people committed a sin, it was Catholic doctrine that they should tell their priest so that he may give them an appropriate punishment. It eventually occurred to some clever clergy that they could simply make people pay fines for sins they committed. Eventually, this evolved to the point where the Clergy would issue them papers (Indulgences.) that gave them permission to commit sins of a certain magnitude because they already paid the Church in advance.

So it came to pass that you could go to your local clergy, pay him enough money, and he would grant you permission to commit Adultery or Kill someone. (I'm pretty sure the system wasn't misused because I expect permission to kill someone cost a great deal of money, and probably only Lords and Nobles could afford it. )

The point is, Paying for sins BEFORE you commit them is a logical and moral fallacy, yet that is the system we hold to with this insurance buisness.

You are in fact paying for sins you MIGHT commit, before the fact.