I think the 9th Amendment covers privacy and many other rights, but since many people seem to believe that the Constitution limits the rights of the people, rather than limiting the power of government, that battle is likely already lost.

Damn, and you were doing so well there for a minute.... But then you mentioned the Daily Mail (right-wing tabloid, for non-Brits - like The Sun without the tits) as your source for information about the NHS. Now most other things about the UK can be considered shitty (as with the US), but the one thing that *IS FOR CERTAIN* shitty in the UK is the Daily Fail. ;-)

My guess would be that Monsanto and Dow now have an Agent Orange clean-up chemical to sell and have been lobbying for this to boost their profits.

And a plentiful supply of Cheetos and Red Bull for refreshment after the epic battles?

If you don't perform routine maintenance on your car and the engine seizes up, your car insurance still won't pay out. If you don't perform routine maintenance on your body and your heart seizes up, your "major medical" policy would have to pay out.

Then there are the people that can't afford even the major medical policy or the routine maintenance. What do we do with them? Turn them away from the emergency room and let them die, or have the people that can pay pick up the tab like we do today? It seems like maybe helping them get routine maintenance might work out less expensive in the long run.

I certainly don't know the right answer, but I don't think it as simple as going back to the good old days, and I doubt those days were as good as people seem to think.

FLAC is compressed too, so that would be out. However, I would think that you should really get a discount for using a lossy encoding like MP3, since you aren't getting all of the data.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Communications_Commission
The FCC is directed by five commissioners appointed by the U.S. president and confirmed by the U.S. Senate for five-year terms, except when filling an unexpired term. The president designates one of the commissioners to serve as chairperson. Only three commissioners may be members of the same political party. None of them may have a financial interest in any FCC-related business.

Don't copy that floppy!

By owning a corporation you don't magically lose the protections you enjoy as an individual. Having the money to invest in corporations should not buy you more representation than those that can't afford to, or choose not to, own corporations. It's not that groups of people deserve less protection; it is that they don't deserve more protection - the whole "Equal Protection under the Law" thing you mention. Corporations already provide protection from certain liabilities - we really don't need to be granting them full citizen rights as well.

Taking car insurance as an example (who doesn't like a car analogy?), if you don't bother to pay for routine maintenance, when your engine seizes up your insurance does not cover rebuilding it. With health care, if people don't pay for routine maintenance, are you saying that insurance should be there to cover when their heart seizes up?

I would think that the reason you want a health care system to cover routine stuff is that you want to encourage people to get regular check-ups, and fix things when they are many times less expensive to fix, instead of waiting for catastrophic events. The only reason it is a bastardization of the concept of insurance is because the insurance companies have inserted themselves into something they should not be involved in at all. A single payer system would take care of that.

Sure, but it will be a bit harder to make modifications once we "steal" it back when all the company publishes are the binaries. The GPL ensures that the source code is available for modification, and without copyright this would not be the case.

The 14th amendment says "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.", so presumably your quick, boring solution would require another amendment, which doesn't seem particularly quick or boring. Unless children of illegal immigrants are not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States, which seems unlikely since many such children have been granted citizenship.

I (as will shortly become obvious) am no economist, but presuming that some US companies do business with people outside of the USA, if we are taxing those businesses are we not also gaining some tax revenue from people who are not in the USA - i.e. who are not us?

I'm also curious why, if business taxes are so bad and only appeal to the ignorant, just about every country seems to tax businesses. Do we lack non-ignorant people setting tax policy throughout the entire world (give some of the other laws created, I wouldn't doubt it for a minute) or are those setting the policies simply pandering to the ignorant masses that elect them?

With rope?