The onshore tax havens Delaware, Wyoming, and Nevada are vastly worse in scope than any offshore country. They push the narrative about those “terrible foreign countries” to distract us from this fact.
The problem is US tax code, not offshore financial centers.
All of the Apollo missions, actually, including 13. In fact, Apollo 13 marks the farthest distance human beings have ever been from Earth because of the modified trajectory they had to use in order to get back to Earth faster with their damaged spacecraft.
But Apollo 13 also is the only moon mission where there was never a single individual alone in the ship when it went dark behind the moon. (On all other missions, the Command Module Pilot remained in the ship while the other two landed on the surface, so for the duration of that time, they were doing solo orbits that took them through the silent shadow of the moon.
I’m born and raised in Appalachia, my daddy worked in the coal mines and drove an 18 wheeler. Certified redneck enough that I confuse the shit out of my New England neighbors.
I went out and marched with striking nurses when Bernie put out the call, and I’ve never voted Republican in my entire fucking life.
Lmao, I’m your age and literally inhaled a bag of Werther’s while I had Covid because Paxlovid tastes so bad. And I’m about to buy a cane for those days when it would be very helpful to make my invisible disability more visible to all those people trying to rush around me in the grocery store. I old.
To me, it’s all about rational return on investment providing economic incentives to achieve what we want to achieve.
My favorite example to explain what I mean is my own personal health insurance. I have a chronic medical condition that requires constant medication, frequent visits to specialists, and expensive medical tests and procedures. There is simply zero chance that I will ever pay enough in a monthly premium to cover what I cost. Meaning I am always a net financial loss for a private, for-profit insurance company.
This gives a private company every incentive in the world to obstruct and deny my care in hopes that I’ll get frustrated and give up, or maybe even die and get off their books forever.
The government, on the other hand, has a positive financial incentive to keep me healthy. If I am healthy, I am working, paying taxes, buying goods and services that contribute to the economy, and hopefully contributing something beneficial to my community. Only the government (acting as a proxy for “society”) naturally profits from insuring my healthcare.
This is why I believe we should have fully socialized medical care. Because there are some specific things that only the government has natural positive economic incentives that align with what is beneficial for the general public.
Whatever those things are, they should be socialized. And generally those things are basic life sustaining things like food, housing, medicine, education, utilities.
I’m fine with privatized capitalism in a very restricted, heavily regulated niche form. But all the basic necessities should be socialized.