> I left unstated the fact that many OECD governments are greatly increasing their roles in healthcare, because I thought it was readily apparent. Perhaps I should have been more clear.

It wouldn't change the basic problem; you first started with the claim that public health care usuually means destroying private health care and have progressed to define "destroying" private health care as government either not decreasing (your penultimate post) or increasing (your last post) its role in health care.

Which means that, stripped of the peculiar definition of destruction, your claims is that public health care means the government either not decreasing or increasing its role in health care. Which is trivially true, of course, but absolutely vacuous.

Clearly stated, you criticism should be that my claim is tautological, not trivial; this is a legitimate point... But you seem to be forgetting that the proposition was part of a larger argument, where I was criticizing a previous post which claimed to support liberty, but was also supporting government healthcare programs. My argument was basically that the government health program destroys the private market, thus eliminating liberty (and choice).

If you take the statement that 'increasing government control destroys private markets' alone, it is tautological; but extracting that phrase from the argument of which it was only a part, then criticizing the statement is a pointless set of activities.

> Clearly stated, you criticism should be that my claim is tautological, not trivial

Its both, and "circular" is another word for tautological.

> But you seem to be forgetting that the proposition was part of a larger argument, where I was criticizing a previous post which claimed to support liberty, but was also supporting government healthcare programs.

No, I'm not. Your argument in support of government healthcare plans being inconsistent with liberty was that they destroyed private healthcare, a claims which, when questioned, required redefining "destroy private healthcare" to just mean that government remains involved in healthcare at the same or greater level.

So, the whole line of argument was superfluous abuse of language to cover up a bare assertion that government action in any domain is, in and of itself, inconsistent with liberty.

There isn't even an argument in any meaningul sense being made.

dragonwriter>Its both, and "circular" is another word for tautological.

wikipedia>"Circular reasoning differs from tautologies in that the premise is restated as the conclusion in an argument, instead of deriving the conclusion from the premise with arguments, while tautologies states the same thing twice."

dragonwriter>Your argument in support of government healthcare plans being inconsistent with liberty was that they destroyed private healthcare, a claims which, when questioned, required redefining "destroy private healthcare" to just mean that government remains involved in healthcare at the same or greater level.

Earlier on, you stated : dragonwriter> You seem to be using a strange definition of "usually" -- every OECD country has "some degree of public healthcare" (what the grandparent post suggested support for), and yet most of them have some degree of a private system.

I have been trying to argue (with no apparent success) that the "some degree of private system" is gradually becoming little private or no private system, through a ratcheting up of government intervention, hence the statement that all have increased or kept constant their levels of participation in the healthcare system, and they rarely (if ever) decrease it. If the amount of state participation only ever increases or stays the same, and it increases often, then the government is 'taking over' healthcare.