teedubbya wrote:From a purely non-emotional non-humanistic point of view I wonder what the actuarial cost of those 3000 lives on 9/11 was based on the extreme overreaction we have had as a country. To hear the rhetoric you would think that radical Islamic terrorists are running amok in this country and killing right and left.
If an insurance companies bottom line depended on calculating cost benefit for actions taken to prevent the loss of life Vs. the cost of losing a few lives it would be interesting to see the decision. There have been very few American lives lost to radical Islamic terrorism. You could argue that is due to our actions taken if you count 9/12 as the starting point. But if you think time began prior to 9/12 and included 9/11 as part of the total view it paints a different picture. We have decided it is worth an absurd premium, and maybe that is an acceptable decision, but I don't think it's been well thought out. It's another curse of not having cost tied to income or outcome.
A loss of one life is tragic and insurance companies get bagged on all the time for assigning a dollar amount to a life. We put a huge dollar amount on these particular lives, and added our rights as part of the expense. Yet it continues with all of these jackalpoes of both parties running for office pouncing on the Brussels thing and trying to jack up the price in dollars and rights.
This is a subject and policy being driven by emotion over logic which is exactly what the terrorists want/need to be successful. It's also inevitable and they know it. They have defined the battlefield and we are playing on it. They have us chasing cockroaches and blaming each other.
I've said something similar. It's an unpopular idea, but the truth.
Hell, I think there's a strange irony to the fact that there is overlap between people who want to spend huge amounts of money preventing a handful of terrorist deaths, are very much against the government spending any money preventing death through government subsidized healthcare. One could argue from a fiscal "bang for your buck" standpoint, sinking the same amount of money into a single payer health care plan could save more lives than you could prevent through whatever military activities we'd perform there.
****** note ***** I am not pro single payer healthcare. I prefer people having to pay huge amounts of money for pharmaceutical drugs because that industry pays me. Do not mistake my saying you could save more lives by sinking money into it as an endorsement of it. I do not necessarily think saving lives is a net positive.
