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Comment by dtf | Hacker News Reader

He starts his article with a line from Maggie Thatcher on socialism. Not a subtle way to tee off a debate - he may as well have dropped in a couple of references to the Third Reich while he was at it. Maybe he does raise a few interesting points, but he then completely loses it by claiming that it's plant-based nutrition (organic, no doubt) that we all need rather than doctors and medicine. It's a perfect "qu'ils mangent de la brioche" moment that shows the man has zero clue what he's talking about. This isn't a cogent argument against healthcare reform that needs defending as free-speech-under-attack; it's just a public relations facepalm of the first degree. The boycotts are stupid, but that's just stupidity responding to stupidity.

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"but he then completely loses it by claiming that it's plant-based nutrition (organic, no doubt) that we all need rather than doctors and medicine"

That's not what he wrote. He wrote:

Unfortunately many of our health-care problems are self-inflicted: two-thirds of Americans are now overweight and one-third are obese. Most of the diseases that kill us and account for about 70% of all health-care spending—heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and obesity—are mostly preventable through proper diet, exercise, not smoking, minimal alcohol consumption and other healthy lifestyle choices.

Recent scientific and medical evidence shows that a diet consisting of foods that are plant-based, nutrient dense and low-fat will help prevent and often reverse most degenerative diseases that kill us and are expensive to treat. We should be able to live largely disease-free lives until we are well into our 90s and even past 100 years of age.

I don't know enough about nutrition to discuss the second graf, but he doesn't imply that good nutrition negates the need for health care--people get diseases and injuries that aren't caused by bad decisions of their own the other 30% of the time--but it's equal "stupidity" to think "let's spend trillions of public dollars on treating each other for diabetes and heart disease instead of putting down the cheeseburger and going for a jog".

> He starts his article with a line from Maggie Thatcher on socialism. Not a subtle way to tee off a debate - he may as well have dropped in a couple of references to the Third Reich while he was at it.

Thatcher presided over a country with socialized health care and heavily unionized coal mining, and complained about them.

In the US, we are now debating having the government run the health sector. I.e. "socialism".

I don't think that a criticism of socialized healthcare from someone who's been there is quite the same thing as "referencing the third Reich".

To my knowledge, the Thatcher quote has nothing to do with their health care system, and it would appear she was an advocate of the NHS, not an opponent.

From http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp...

Our stewardship of the public finances has been better than that of any Government for nearly 50 years. It has enabled us to repay debt and cut taxes. The resulting success of the private sector has generated the wealth and revenues which pay for better social services—to double the amount being spent to help the disabled, to give extra help to war widows, and vastly to increase spending on the national health service. More than 1 million more patients are being treated each year and there are 8,000 more doctors and 53,000 more nurses to treat them.

That is the record of eleven and a half years of Conservative Government and Conservative principles. All these are grounds for congratulation, not censure, least of all from the Leader of the Opposition, who has no alternative policies.

I don't know how many times I will have to see this. It is not socialism. It is not "i.e. socialism." It is not kind of like socialism. It is not socialism. Socialism is not just some made up word for increased government interference in private markets. It is a synonym for communism, used interchangeably by Karl Marx in his Manifesto.

The New Oxford English Dictionary defines communism as:

  a political and economic theory of social organization that 
  advocates that the means of production, distribution, and 
  exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a   
  whole.
  • policy or practice based on this theory.
  • (in Marxist theory) a transitional social state between 
  the overthrow of capitalism and the realization of
  communism.

To those who would argue that the word has evolved in its definition: when a word gains multiple, easily confused, and mutually exclusive meanings it proceeds to acquire no meaning at all and does nothing but politicize, infantilize, and confuse a discussion.

He starts his article with a line from Maggie Thatcher on socialism. Not a subtle way to tee off a debate

Somewhat inflammatory, sure -- but hardly worthy of a boycott. The vast majority of the Mackay piece is a level-headed argument -- one that you can certainly disagree with, but I think calling for a boycott is schoolyard politics.

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