Exactly.

It doesn't need to have 'nothing ever wrong with it.' What it needs is to have a distinct improvement over the alternative. The argument is that the set of problems inherent in a national health care system is preferable to the set of problems inherent in the current mess. If a public/private mix works best, great, go with that. But rejecting the premise that a national plan could be better due to ideological rejection of government programs is no way to make policy.

I'm not convinced you've drawn the correlation between economic well-being and marriage rates; a lot of heavily white not-too-poor areas still have poor marriage rates, high divorce rates, and high abortion rates. But events IRL have, sadly, distracted me in a negative manner, so I'll just pass on further exploration of that, though I think we could have an interesting back-and-forth on it.

At this point, I think I have a reasonable handle on your position about international trade: the socioeconomic costs of displacement are sufficiently high that they outweigh the economic gains from trade, even if some of those gains are used to create a social safety net against the effects of displacement. Is that a fair summation? If so, then I think we've at least tacked down the bounds of what we're disagreeing on. I do agree that the social safety net was historically insufficient, particularly when coupled with the effects of racism. I don't agree that it cannot be made sufficient and still have a net gain.

My contention would be that the gain in overall standard of living as a result of the free trade was enough to, even with that poor safety net, still result in an improved standard of living over the status that America, including black Americans, would have had with an isolationistic trade policy, as much of that industrial boom came during a period when the US was very much a net exporter; without those exports manufacturing would not have boomed as much and both the black citizenry and the populace as a whole would have been worse off. But that's arguing a what-if situation, which is very hard to prove one way or another.

If schools are so popular, there should be no need to mandate participation, right? People will just opt in because they love it so much.

People will tend to do the default thing. Schools are mandatory so that people will send their kids and not incur the social cost of uneducated, low-value workers later in life. Social Security is mandatory so that people will defer those monies and not incur the social cost of homeless, impoverished elderly. Old poor people were a major social problem in the early 20th century. Social Security dramatically changed the face of old age for millions, and was made mandatory because the costs of those who chose to risk not saving up were higher than the benefits of those for whom the risk paid off.

You're conflating the thread (public health care) with the specific point there (access to abortion clinics). Abortion clinics exist in the places where they have not been forced out because they meet a demand that exists today and doctors can make a living at them, even under today's health care system. Democrats generally (though not monolithically) assert that a woman who needs an abortion should be able to get one without interference from the government. This principle is able to stand on its own, regardless of payment. A separate common Democratic assertion is that anyone's access to medical services should be a given, not only because of the moral position but also because of the aggregate reduced cost of making preventive care available to people who would otherwise try to wait and hope it goes away on its own and end up with expensive, serious conditions. These are separate principles.

As for free trade, we are again mostly in opposition. Isolationism is, economically speaking, a terrible idea. Environmental, financial and labor issues certainly need to be more prominently considered in trade treaties, but shutting out imports would be devastating to the US economy. We already have a manufacturing base; the largest one in the world by a wide margin, in fact. The US is better able to take advantage of an interconnected world than any other entity on the planet partly because of that manufacturing base, which can import raw materials and export (or produce for domestic consumption) higher-valued goods. Buying American is nice, but we just don't produce everything we consume anymore because it's not economically efficient for many lower-valued goods.

I'd be interested to see your basis for relating marriage and abortion rates to trade; there doesn't appear to be much correlation between rich areas of the country and areas with higher marriage rates, for example.

Right, we have forty-seven million healthy, middle-aged, rich people who are the ones not getting insurance. Working poor who, for example, don't take their kids to see the doctor until they've gotten seriously, seriously ill and in need of expensive publicly-paid treatment when cheap preventative care would have nipped the issue in the bud if they could afford it... why, they just don't want health care!

Let's test the hypothesis that Social Security is popular. You would expect, therefore, that when the President of the United States proposes making adjustments to it, this would be loudly and vigorously denounced. Lo and behold, this is what happened. Yes, Social Security is very popular in the US, and only small minorities (yes, including many Libertarians) want to do away with it.

Oh, I'm sorry. I just had poll results saying Canadians were happy with their care. You have unsupported anecdotes. Clearly I should accept your premise, Anonymous.

The sugar tariff is because of the US sugar producers, not Iowan corn farmers. The US sugar industry makes a profit with the tariff in place. They would not if the tariff goes away. Therefore, they are incented to spend money, even large portions of their profits, to keep the tariff in place. The rest of the country spends small amounts more and does not notice any individual expense, so is not strongly incented to demand the end of the tariff. Thus, the tariff remains. Oddly enough, Johnny Mac did not propose ending the sugar tariff, and he received large donations from the US sugar industry. Yay, integrity!

This is the kind of right-wing idiocy that has left the Republican party in its current state. Democratic areas do have more access to abortion clinics as it stands now, and yet the demographics that associate with Democrats are growing faster than the demographics that associate with Republicans. Democrats, far from sobbing and calling it 'genocide,' actively seek to expand access to these clinics on the basis that government should not be intervening in a woman's personal medical decisions. The vast majority of pregnancies that become naturally viable are not terminated; most abortions are for cases where the fetus would not survive for one reason or another (including that the mother might not survive delivery). Most of the rest are because the prospective parent is not ready or able to provide a stable family life, but many do go on later in life to have a child when they are better able to provide for one with a decent quality of life. Republicans have a stupid idea that Democrats 'want' to have abortions. Democrats want to make it an option for people who, for whatever reason, need one.

Just because that's the experience in every other country that's implemented single-payer, why should anyone expect that's what might happen in the US? Really!

Ron Paul has a lot of good points. He was the only 'no' vote this week on a Congressional resolution slamming Iran for its voter fraud issue - and while denouncing the fraud seems like a good idea, it really hurts the anti-theocratic movement by letting the mullahs scream that the reformists are American stooges. But economics is not one of his good points. 'Unmanaged' economies are, at best, like the Gilded Age in the US, and at worst like Somalia. The boom-and-bust cycle of the Gilded Age was catastrophic for large percentages of the American population; toning it down via regulation and trust-busting was a major breakthrough in the development of the American economy.

And yet, despite the right-wing horror stories (with their purely anecdotal basis), Canada's national healthcare system remains extremely popular, with Canadians expressing high levels of satisfaction with the care they're getting. See? Only about 90% of Canadians express satisfaction with their system! There has to be something wrong with it!

They can go get other, more productive jobs. Since the rest of the country will have that extra 1/20th of the GDP floating around, there'll be money for investing and spending. They could get jobs flipping burgers and still be more productive than what they're doing now.

Yeah! Retirement savings were so much more efficient before Social Security! Sure, it meant lots of old people ended up begging on the streets, but those people didn't have any money by then, so they didn't count against the efficiency!