"1) A flood of government equity, distributed by those ever-so-entrepreneurial bureaucrats. There is, of course, no chance that the same people who brought us ethanol subsidies ("so stupid not even the Soviets tried it"), the Fannie Mae housing bubble and the $3000 hammer won't screw it up."

It would be put into a trust, disbursed and managed as a credit union by participant states and guaranteed by the NCUA, not centrally-governed.

And, all of those "waste" slags you have against the government are exactly why my proposal would be decentralized and managed on the state level by default. The $3000 hammer is swallowed into the Pentagon, which is why it's dysfunctional. Decentralized management by default makes the program work effectively: spread the "risk" geographically rather than in one silo.

I think you just fundamentally oppose government action in any scenario because of your political leanings (likely libertarian from the attitude), which is fine, but to write such vitriol while simultaneously offering nothing of your "if i ruled the world" solution smacks as being simply obtuse for trolling purposes.

"A no-cost-to-government expansion of Medicare, which I'm sure has some Canute-like power to push back the tides of adverse selection."

So, every small business is filled with sick people who would enroll because they can't afford private insurance outside?

I'm proposing that it would be a financial boon for SMBs because they can get better rates through Medicare for their group than from private insurers. Bonus: there would be healthy people enrolling in the program who don't need constant healthcare services.

"We've got billions (trillions?) already deployed in "education", whose product is widely understood as unsatisfactory at best. We just had a post showing that about 25% of the students at a well-regarded university are interested in nothing but the grade, and are so unprepared they can't imagine any way to get it on their own. Why not fix THAT?"

Oh, so the answer to fixing economically bloated and unsatisfactory education is to do what exactly to the bloated and unsatisfactory education system? Yours doesn't seem like much of a solution. It's actually a non-solution, no offense.

"I'm sure you mean well, and there's no doubt the problems are complicated, but seriously, this sort of thing lacks the thought I presume HN types bring to work every single day."

You took time to write about how terrible I am for even back-napkinning some solutions, without offering anything in return. Thanks for the gainsaying: I learned alot about you.

You know, your own response raises the elaborated problems to your proposals. But you're so committed to your preferred end-state that you've flipped the obvious answers. State bureaucrats will be smarter than federal? because they're "decentralized"? Healthy people will pay premium for a program that will take them at any time? C'mon man, really?

This stuff doesn't even link up with your first explanation of the problem.

You can see the details enough to see the problems, but you see the implications and don't like them. So you find ways to overlook them without even noticing what you've done. You are outsmarting yourself. It's precisely because you are so smart that you have driven yourself to positions that make no sense.

THAT is the problem. I could pose mathematical proofs of a contrary approach and you'd still fight it.

Because you are smart enough to see that going after the real problems in education would touch some fundamental and touchy subjects: parental responsibility, what "equality" and "fairness" really mean, whether we _can_ educate _everyone_, whether "teachers" as currently organized as a benevolent as they claim. And so on. Lord only knows what the final answers would be, but even talking about this stuff would be enough to blow the Progressive Coalition into a thousand tiny pieces. So we don't go for the central, systemic problems of the main program, we write scads of bug-catching programs to sit atop them and intercept the bugs. That would never work in code, and it won't work for government.

THAT is the offer. You are going about the problem all wrong -- your approach goes against everything you (meaning "you" as a stereotyped smart, problem-solving, elegance-seeking, Hacker News ur-type) do so well, day in and day out.

Now, I apologize for the grandiose generalizations and stereotyping and the reckless assumptions about goals and mental state. I just don't understand why such brilliant people are so routinely taken with "solutions" of a pattern they wouldn't tolerate for 15 seconds in their work. Go ahead, downvote this too, I suppose it deserves it -- but holy mackerel, I just don't get it.

"State bureaucrats will be smarter than federal? because they're "decentralized"?"

"Smarter"? Why would they need to be "smarter"? They just need to analyze a business plan just like any other bank would (which is why I propose a "credit union" style of management and disbursement), but you're saying it will be rife with waste and fraud. I disagree, and can name this very network upon which we disagree as just one counterexample of a government funded program (centralized at that!) that works, and that likely would've never happened without soul-crushing R&D and deployment expenditure from a cabal of private network competitors. In other words, it wouldn't have happened, from the "session" OSI layer back to physical. I can also name other government developments (Polio elimination, Interstate System, Railroad, hell even the USPS up until about 4 years ago) that made America the engine of the world economy; but it belabors the point and you'll just disagree anyway.

"Healthy people will pay premium for a program that will take them at any time? C'mon man, really?"

They will if they can get a discount over Blue Cross for similar coverage. Why do you think people shop at Wal-Mart? Because of the happy faces?

You say you're all about business, try this exercise real quick: go and see how much it would cost to get coverage for a four-person startup through a private insurer (remember, get like for like coverage) vs. premiums for Medicare. See the difference? Now calculate it if one of the four has/had cancer. Not so fun.

"I just don't understand why such brilliant people are so routinely taken with "solutions" of a pattern they wouldn't tolerate for 15 seconds in their work"

Your design pattern, if I can suss it out from your comment about "equality" and "fairness" and "educating everyone", is that you want simple human nature/nurture to win out against educating all children (even and especially corner cases like poor and problemed ones).

"So we don't go for the central, systemic problems of the main program, we write scads of bug-catching programs to sit atop them and intercept the bugs. That would never work in code, and it won't work for government."

First, comparing educating children to bug-catching programs is asinine on it's face; secondly, there are a number of successful companies out there that have legacy code to maintain that is rife with bugs. Not only that, this code often can't even be read let alone maintained by anyone but a single person that the company then has to continually shovel money at to keep them from leaving. Wall St., the insurance industry (go figure since we're talking healthcare!), hell even the two most successful technology companies on planet earth by any measure (Microsoft and Apple) maintain buggy legacy code for ages. It's in fact, rare that they throw out the entire system. Yet, you want to do that for a country with 75 million kids.

You don't know anything about what I would or wouldn't do, because I'm focussed here on how we think about the problem.

If you think our current educational system "works", then why is it that our economic problems are poor worker preparation and inflexible attitudes about work?

If you are satisfied with how you're thinking about all this, I can't change that. Maybe sometime, when you're wondering why everyone is so stupid / evil that they can't see the brilliance of boosting small businesses with $10bn annual subsidy and their own single payer health system, you'll consider that maybe something along these lines helps explain the disconnect.

BTW, suggesting that the Postal Service was some kind of economic accelerator until 4 years ago is just ignorant. Their productivity is terrible, UPS & FedEx kicked their ass decades ago. They should have been relegated to rural / remote universal service, and the rest privatized, a long time ago. Think about why they weren't and you'll go a long way to understanding why political entities make lousy economic decisions.

The $3000 hammer is an accounting artefact. To make it easier they sold a package of gear to the military as if everything cost the same. So you got a very expensive hammer, and a very cheap gas turbine!