Productivity and wealth depend on healthy people producing real goods and services.
I am troubled that seemingly simple issues are regularly re-framed in ways that miss the point.
For example, I keep hearing, "Health care is not a right".
On the other hand, we have roads, bridges, sewers and clean water (as well as wars and other massive wastes of money), because we, collectively, pay for them with taxes and fees.
Those are things that, mostly, contribute to the well-being of people producing real goods and services.
Roads, bridges, clean water, and sewers are not a right.
Health care is not a right.
Health care is simply in the national interest; another facet of the well-being and productiveness of a society.
Another issue I find incorrectly re-framed is the laissez faire attitude to the excesses of the financial and banking industries.
It's too effing obvious that much of the silly financial paper shuffling doesn't make 5#it.
Oh, that was wrong, it does!
Derivatives, Credit default swaps, and Asset backed commercial paper turn out to be as valuable as ass paper? Derive that!
Real people produce real goods and services, and we're not going away.