On the 8 Spot

I’m a big West Wing Fan, and in someways it has shaped how I view things. I still remember a scene where Sam Seaborn‘s  declarations, I pay a lot of taxes and I love it! I may have an unhealthy regard for my abilities but I have no doubt that in the crucial ways I am me because i was fortunated enough to be born to my parents. I was lucky, this was no fault/act of mine. Taxation is a transfer, I love paying taxes, just hope there was more ways to ensure that the transfer is not a transfer to the swiss bank acounts of government officials! .read the whole thing!

But of course, these are only a part of the link between the state and inequality. Tawneyite socialists claim that spending on (say) health and education are forces for equality.

But are they? Julian Le Grand famously argued in a book in 1982 that the rich actually got more than the poor from these services – a claim supported more recently by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

In the case of healthcare, the claim is also supported by this paper (pdf). One reason for this is that the poor under-estimate their ill-health and so are less likely to make claims on the health system. Another reason is that the rich live longer (pdf) than the poor, and the bulk of health spending on most individuals comes late in life.

via Stumbling and Mumbling: The state and equality.

“People with stronger friendship networks feel like there is someone they can turn to,” said Karen A. Roberto, director of the center for gerontology at Virginia Tech. “Friendship is an undervalued resource. The consistent message of these studies is that friends make your life better.”

via Well – What Are Friends For? A Longer Life – NYTimes.com.

Hope you can read the whole thing! I was choking up while reading this!. To be a good man, a dream , probably just a dream!

Truth Is Usually A Dangerous Concept, But For Tex It Was Natural

Jack Nicholson’s character in “A Few Good Men” was right. Most people can’t handle the truth. Most people are so fearful of the truth, they need to get drunk just to slur a few words of it. If they dare speak the truth, they feel they have to get up on the pulpit and preach it. That’s about the only way they can manage to deliver it. They definitely don’t want to look people in the eye and say what they think.

via Truth Is Usually A Dangerous Concept, But For Tex It Was Natural – Lakernoise.