Is the presumption then that natural market forces (ie, not regulations from governmental forces) will prevent the employers from either colluding against employees or from buying each other out?
The presumption is that due to differing currencies between markets, with such small governments, there will be natural monopolies or oligarchies of single industrymen and maybe an apprentice or two. And that the control will be social- you are not likely to cheat a neighbor that you have to continue to live with.
The last part, which I put in bold, seems overly optimistic to me. I'm not sure that social pressure was ever a solid deterrent for cheating one's neighbors.
Now whether separate currencies will help to suppress it is another matter. I'm not sure though how a large country such as the US, which presently has one currency, could realistically split up into a large number of city-states where each has their own. The division of the country does not seem that outlandish but the division of the currency seems like a big problem.
It would seem that you would eventually end up with markets where > 90% of the population is involved in food production or trades that exist to aid in the same. To me that seems to operate counter to the types of gains in efficiency that we have tended to celebrate in the past century or so.
Yes, and that's the point. Efficiency reduces the number of jobs available drastically, and centralizes ownership of first level maslow industries such as food, shelter, clothing. This is a great thing for the few centralized aristocrats, but a negative thing for consumers and workers.
I'm not sure that the loss of efficiency is a net gain for many people. While it would put a lot of people to work would it not also leave a lot of people to find themselves in jobs with no demand? If everyone is producing food, shelter, and clothing, then what happens to the demand for computer programmers (for example)? To me it seems that you are calling for a deterioration of society as we know it (I don't mean simply by reduction of that one job that I specified but others as well).
what happens if no insurance companies want to offer a plan that does that?
The solution that Alito cited that was in place for religious non-profit and church organizations was for the insurance company to be required to pay for the drugs out of their own pockets and establish a separate pool of money for doing so, that the religious institutions would not pay into. The government considered this to be acceptable because the drugs are cheaper than pregnancy care so the insurance company would save money.
I would think that the insurance companies would object to that as it interferes with their right to unlimited profit. Forcing insurance companies to pay for something is clearly "Un-American" as we have learned since 2001 (and possibly earlier). Even if it comes under the guise of helping the insurance companies to "save money" they could save even more money by not paying for it at all and forcing the customers to pay for it instead.
However I would think that the insurance companies would even more so object to this curious new mandatory bifurcation of services. The SCOTUS apparently is now requiring the insurance companies to offer twice as many plans as they intended to offer - one version of each plan that covers contraception and one version of each that does not. This also may well make a larger billing nightmare for providers who have to know when to send a full bill to an insurance plan and when not to. And once other religious groups find other services that they object to (Ginsburg mentioned amongst other objections to blood transfusions, antidepressants, and pork-derived products that some religions hold as being critical) the problem becomes even bigger.
Once insurance cards mention one's religious affiliation as a result I would see other problems arising.
Starting a business should not mean having to sacrifice your beliefs.
And if the purpose of the business is propagation of my beliefs, then it is double-plus good, right?
Can they also put a switch in this to make Office usable? I can't stand that fucking ribbon interface that makes everything I used to do the most often 5 times more difficult.
You'll really like Windows 8, then, because the ribbon is implemented for File Explorer and the Common Dialogs, too.
Well, as long as they don't force it into the command prompt somehow, I will still have some hope of doing useful work in spite of having windows installed.
On a different matter, did you just add me to your foes list today after reading my rant about how badly the ribbon interface sucks? I don't recall seeing you on my freaks list before today.
There's a Hide/Show transcript button just below the video.
That is not particularly useful, though. The Hide/Show transcript button displays the transcript in real-time, with the video. I can't search the text of it, and I can't go through it more quickly with my own eyes than the speed that the people in the video are speaking.
In other words, it is mostly a waste of time. It takes the same amount of time to watch a video with transcript as it does without.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." - Voltaire
