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It might perhaps be accurate to say that healers in general - or doctors as we would call them today - have never received complete, unadulterated trust from the public any time in history (including today). People did trust and respect individual healers, but they also were suspicious of and dismissed a good many others.The story of nineteenth century United States is particularly telling. This was a period of “free trade in doctoring.”[1]The stage for this was set in the earlier century, when a scarcity of doctors, among other things, had encouraged tremendous self-reliance in terms of medical matters. People began self-treating more often and gradually started to take that to be a most desirable state of affairs. A popular book then was titled “Every Man His Own Doctor.” (The name of course makes invisible the work of women who were more often than not the primary healers and carers in families.)Image courtesy National Humanities CenterTo quote historian Nancy Tomes, “19th-c Americans embraced a freewheeling approach to health care, characterized by enthusiastic self-medication and unapologetic questioning of medical authority.”[2]One point of origin of this state of affairs is a doctor named William Buchan. He was a high-placed physician in Britain, a member of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. His 1769 book Domestic Medicine became very popular and influential in the USA, and remained so until the mid-1800s. Buchan was a unique physician in that he did not believe in the monopolization of knowledge: “The fears, the jealousies, the prejudices, and the interests of the [elite physicians] are, and ever will be, the most effectual obstacles to the progress of any salutary discovery.” He believed that professional knowledge and training were unnecessary in treating most diseases, and that a doctor was indeed valuable but on only rare occasions.[3]More damning - and highly relevant even to our times - were the arguments of John Wesley, an influential thinker of the mid-1700s who founded a new religious reform movement: Methodism. To quote from sociologist Paul Starr’s history of the American medical profession:In former times, thought Wesley, people had treated themselves, but the physicians then concocted complicated theories to confuse ordinary people. “Physicians,” he wrote, “now began to be had in admiration, as persons who were something more than human. And profit attended their employ as well as honour… To this end . . . [t]hey filled their writings with abundance of technical terms, utterly unintelligible to plain men…”These are but two among multiple examples of people in the mid- to late 1700s developing a culture of skepticism against esoteric medical knowledge and the purveyors of that knowledge: the doctors.The last straw came in the early 1800s in the form of political action, with the ascendancy of Andrew Jackson the seventh President of the US (1829–1837). As part of what is known as the Jacksonian democracy ideology, many far-reaching changes occurred in the US, including state action against exclusive privileges and elitism. This was a political environment not at all tolerant of special licensing for medical practice. One politician declared: “A people accustomed to govern themselves and boasting of their intelligence are impatient of restraint. They want no protection but freedom of inquiry and freedom of action.” In other words, any person who wants to practise as a doctor should be free to practise as a doctor: there is no need to limiting practice rights to an exclusive community of licensed doctors.To quote Starr again:State legislatures were still enacting licensing laws in the 1820s; then they began rescinding them in quick succession. Illinois empowered medical societies to issue licenses in 1817, modified the law in 1825, and abolished licensing the next year. In Ohio, licensing was introduced in 1811 and repealed in 1833. Licensing laws, or penalties for the unlicensed, were dropped in Alabama in 1832, Mississippi in 1836, South Carolina, Maryland, and Vermont in 1838, Georgia in 1839, New York in 1844, and Louisiana in 1852. Several states, including Pennsylvania, never had any licensing.To sum up, in the cultural and political milieu of those times, American doctors could not win the trust of the public and make them feel confident that they - the doctors - indeed possessed special, socially important, and individually useful skills and knowledge. For Americans then, there was nothing particularly exceptional about the activities and ideologies of their doctors. This general mistrust would continue for several decades until new developments in medical science, coupled with changing (as always) social and political norms, finally presented doctors with numerous special skills, access to highly complex knowledge about the human body, and immense trust and respect.This widespread confidence in the “blessings” of medical science did not of course last long. With the influential critiques of Rachel Carson and Ivan Ilich began, since the 1960s-70s, another long period of skepticism which continues to this day.Footnotes[1] Pure Food[2] Remaking the American Patient | Nancy Tomes | University of North Carolina Press[3] The Social Transformation of American Medicine

Nationalism had little to do with Manifest destiny really. Nationalism is a means of uniting disparate people under a single cause and thus giving them common identity that transcends their differences. The purpose of nationalism is to give voice to a culture and to create physical manifestations of that culture and give voice to individuals in that culture and a say in how that culture is enacted. A Democratic Republic with a Capitalistic economic system is thus far the most efficient means to enact nationalism but far from the only way of doing so.Manifest destiny was the simple filling of a power vacuum. The people who held that land were weak and backward. Technologically stunted and requiring tremendous amounts to land to support mostly sparsely populated hunter gatherer cultures. Similar events happened in the Middle East, Europe and Asia to replace hunter gatherer cultures thousands of years ago.An expansionist US is not necessarily a bad thing. Take Mexico for example. It has been locked in perpetual misery for it’s entire existence. Wave after wave of genocide has rolled through Mexico. Poverty and corruption have held sway. So much so that a third of Mexico’s GDP is exporting it’s workers to the US. A further substantial chunk of Mexico’s GDP is exporting resources to the US and factory workers working for US manufacturers. Mexico has essentially been reduced to an enslaved state. What the US does impacts Mexico, yet Mexicans have no real say in what happens. If the US annexed Mexico, the standard of living and life expectancy of Mexicans would increase dramatically. Mexicans would gain a much stronger voice in important economic and security decisions. The average Mexican would be considerably better off as an American rather than a Mexican. Though the initial effort would require extensive bloodshed as the average Mexican hates the US and everything we stand for. Had we annexed all of Mexico after the Mexican American war, the US and descendants of Mexican citizens would have been considerably better off.So if we employ Utilitarian ethics, American expansionism is a good thing. This is one of the reasons why I find Utilitarian ethics so repulsive. They lack any empathy for the people involved. Socialism is built on utilitarian ethics and this is one of the reasons I oppose Socialism with such vigor. Just because the people would be better off and both nations would be better off if the US annexed Mexico, does not make it right to do so.The US however would likely find some nations that would willingly join us as states if we were to court them. That sort of expansionism is not ethnically repulsive and might be good for all involved without disrespecting the beliefs, culture and rights of those added to the US.As for a US civil war, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to see the US remaining as a single nation. We cannot even have the same breakfast cereal today. There has to be a Left wing and Right wing version of even that. This is how deep the divide is between us. There is a complete and total disconnect between Left wing and Right wing US. A peaceful separation where the West coast, rust belt and NE possibly minus Vermont form into one nation, while Eastern Oregon, Washington as well as Southern Illinois, Ohio and Indiana go with the other nation. Some states like New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin are going to be problematic. Nevada could probably be split allowing Liberal areas to go with the Left wing nation and Conservative areas to go with the Conservative. Colorado however is essentially Denver vs the rest of the state. That’s not an easy answer, but the isolation of Colorado would probably be the deciding factor and put it in the Conservative nation. Wisconsin and Michigan might not have easy answers. Though it might be possible to split those states as well, though it’d require population shifts in order to move people of the appropriate ideology to the region that was joining the nation in line with that ideology. This would be an ideal process that caused the least friction and bloodshed.If actual war broke out a min of 3 million Americans would die as combatants with 30+ million dying as collateral casualties due to disease, lack of access to essential medicines, food, clean drinking water, of exposure to elements and getting caught between rampaging armies or victims of those armies. The world would be tossed into WW III as the economic collapse and loss of US protection would ignite wars all over the world. At least 1 billion people would die around the world as a direct result of a US civil war and the US upon finally ending that war would then be sucked right into WW III.An even worse scenario is the road we are traveling now where we enter into an El Salvadorian kind of slow motion genocide. Already hundreds of people are dying every year in this genocide. For example the anti-smoking Nazis (Left wing. The virulence in which smoking is persecuted has nothing to do with health effects. OTC pain killers kill as many people every year as smoking does. Though recent snake oil studies contend that smoking causes every disease known to man and is THE most toxic substance on the planet, capable of causing an instant heart attack with even the mildest exposure. The truth is tobacco companies generally supported Right wing candidates and are head quartered in traditionally Conservative areas. Same with beef which is under constant attack, yet Pork which is far worse health and environment wise based on the rather flawed studies is left alone. Beef is raised in Conservative areas where Pork is generally raised in Liberal areas). The war on smokers alone kills a dozen a year as rabid non smokers and smokers meet and kill each other over this debate. One of the most poignant was an up and coming Country star killed by a non smoking bar owner in an argument over smoking. One of the most blatant was a man who was so incensed by another man smoking a cigarette 15 feet away outdoors that he exited his car, marched over and berated the smoker who then filled him full of holes for his arrogance.You are seeing people targeted for various political affiliations and sub groups more and more today. The violence is escalating and we may well see death squads roaming the streets of the US in the next few years if the tension continues to escalate.I do not see us coming together. The fanaticism on both sides is hardening. Both sides are rife with hypocrisy and the Left has already demonized the Right to the point where the Left is openly making statements about killing or that Right wingers do not deserve to live. Not extremists either. VP Biden for example implied that “Climate change deniers” should be rounded up, with the implication of serious harm. So too have several other prominent Left wing politicians and spokes people. That the Left not only tolerated such true hate speech, and what else can you call threats against a group for having a different political opinion? Not only did the Left tolerate such, they are cheering it on. The Right is starting to catch up and militarize. Up to this point the Right has been rather civil, but it’s been rebutted by gross incivility, hate and blatant illegal actions that are every bit as bad as segregationist acts against Blacks. For example modern “diversity” textbooks in colleges that imply White males are born racists and claim Christianity is the root of all evil. I’m not even technically Christian and it enrages me the way the Left treats Christians and discriminates against them.There are many more examples and it’s becoming a tit for tat situation where both sides are devolving into trading wrongs and nobody is even interested in being right any more. So lets say I’m rather skeptical we can put this nation back together again. The two core philosophies Collectivism on the Left and Individualism on the Right are diametrically opposed. There is no middle ground. No possible compromise. We are one or the other. You cannot mass convert the nation either way. People are too entrenched. The Left has taken the tactic of flooding the US with foreigners, who are essentially Left wing mercenaries such as Illegals and Syrian refugees in an attempt to tip the scales, this only deepens the crisis and inflames the conflict. We are fast approaching the point of no return and may have already passed it. So separation is more and more looking like our only peaceful option.

Kyle Kulinski is perhaps the most famous millennial leftist in the world whose top five issues are…I must be convinced Biden will fight for at least ONE or TWO of the following:- medicare for all- free college- living wage- ending the wars- UBIAmong non-idiots this is called "having standards", among Biden bros it's this: (ps: your voter outreach needs work!!) https://t.co/0TLUBPg8TO— Secular Talk (@KyleKulinski) April 9, 2020In a previous answer I explained the wisdom of his “fight for at least one” voting standard, but in this answer I’ll dive deeper into each of those issues to shed light on what people like me from the other side of the political spectrum think of them…1. Medicare for AllBefore we implement Medicare-for-All on the federal-level, we should first implement it on the state-level, i.e. Medicare-for-All-Vermonters or Medicare-for-All-Californians. If Kyle Kulinski is right that single-payer will reduce costs and increase quality then why not prove it on the state-level first? The thing with most policies whether they be in life or politics is that they sound good on paper, i.e. going to the gym after work. Great idea, right? But most people don’t do it. This is because there are tradeoffs to even the best ideas. Despite good intentions and high hopes, the vast majority of ideas in business, life, and politics fail. How many business ideas have you had in your life that you thought would make you rich? How many relationships have you thought were “the one” to only end in broken glass and broken hearts? The fact we’re so often wrong about things we’re so certain about in our personal life should humble our political views, especially because the failures of our political views will have much greater consequences than a slashed tire. We should therefore make sure to ground even the best sounding political policies in more localized success before having our way with all of America. The beauty of the American system is we have 50 states where each state has its own government to test out the best ideas, i.e. laboratories of innovation! This is after all a similar path our more progressive neighbors to the north took whereby they past single-payer on the provincial level first and then overtime they grew it out with broad bipartisan support.Kyle Kulinski falsely claims “Medicare-for-All” is a centrist position because a couple of European countries offer single-payer, but America is a much bigger country in terms of population size and economy. If Medicare-for-All was imposed on the entire United States the closest equivalent would be if the entire European Union imposed a single version of single-payer, which even progressive Europeans would adamantly oppose. The bottomline is despite what Kyle says about his position being “centrist” it’s not in American, European, global, or historical terms. It’s a radical position. Own it! There’s nothing like it in size or scope anywhere in the world and so because of this fact we should first implement it successfully on the state-level and then we can talk about passing it at the federal level on a purely partisan basis (polls show majority of Americans support “Medicare-for-All” but that support dips as soon as they learn more about it. A more effective and official gauge of what Americans think of something is the almighty vote. The only time single-payer was put up for a vote was in the Democrat-majority state of Colorado where it then proceeded to lose on a direct ballot proposition by a resounding 79%. Before the vote, many Coloradans adamantly argued, much like Kyle, that the majority of Coloradans supported it! They were wrong.)Secondly, please allow me to join Kyle Kulinski in humbly theorizing about what this multi-trillion-dollar government takeover would do to our extremely complicated multi-trillion-dollar healthcare industry. I believe despite leftists’ good intentions, Medicare-for-All would lead to higher costs and lower quality healthcare. America is #1 in the world for medical innovation. This is despite the fact we don’t have a capitalist healthcare system. We have a cronyist healthcare system, a.k.a. big government/big business partnership, but nonetheless it still has capitalist elements. Kyle Kulinski likes to point to the success stories of socialist healthcare systems, but the fact is socialist healthcare is built upon the foundation of American medical innovation. As leftists also point out the richest people in the world come to America for their medical procedures because we have the highest quality care, but the problem isn’t quality, they argue, it’s access! But the way to fix access isn’t through a government takeover of our system in the name of healthcare being a “human right,” which single-payer doesn’t even guarantee anyone a right to “health” or “care.”Monopolies whether they be in the form of government or business is never good. Competition is the queen of innovation! Statistics show the most innovative parts of our economy are the least regulated, i.e. tech, clothes, cars, toys, furnishings. If Kyle Kulinski got his way then I believe monopolization will lead to less medical innovation therefore costing billions of lives overtime in a way that would be impossible to calculate because there is no way to measure what could have been. During this pandemic, governments around the world have responded to the need for a vaccine and better treatment via deregulation, i.e. getting out of the way and fast-tracking the process. Donald Trump is most likely alive because of his healthcare deregulation (perhaps at the chagrin of some of you reading this). The government protects old entrenched industries by giving them subsidies, tax exceptions, and passing regulations that makes it harder for smaller companies to compete. Kyle Kulinski needs to explain why since the 1980s corporations now lobby for more regulations and government programs. Is it perhaps because innovation threatens their profits? Imagine if government and its government-protected oligarchies lost its control over the healthcare industry? I believe we would see a boom in medical innovation that threatens those who benefit the most from the status quo. Some of the smartest minds in the world view aging as a disease and therefore something we could eventually end or even reverse. Imagine if we approached aging itself with the same sense of urgency as we did pandemics.Finally, Kyle Kulinski has said his father may be alive today if we had single-payer, but Kyle Kulinski had said years prior to that his father died because he didn’t like nor trust going to the doctor. Emotional anecdotes are persuasive, but using Kyle’s anecdote I could just as easily make the claim that he’d be alive if we deregulated the industry, stop tax-incentivizing/mandating employer-based healthcare, and removed the government caps on doctors and nurses so we could have more of them! Most of the western world has a doctor shortage because of governments purposely capping them. This fact alone should make anyone think twice before giving our federal government even more control over our healthcare system because they’ve clearly failed us (not their lobbyists) in this elementary part of healthcare.2. UBIThe problem though with freeing up the healthcare industry, leftists will argue, is that even if costs come down and quality goes up, as we see with parts of the healthcare industry that are less regulated (cosmetics, eye surgery), there will still be millions of people who couldn’t afford it! Should they just be left on the street to die? No. The benefit of a UBI is it ensures people will have enough money in their pocket to buy into our big, beautiful, competitive healthcare market. I’ve personally been writing about UBI since 2014 and the central issue I’ve leveled against it is that there is no limiting factor. If a UBI is passed at $1,000 a month then in the next election politicians will run on increasing it to $1,200. Our elections will turn into auctions with other people’s money. Taxes would have to keep rising to pay for an ever rising and inflating UBI whereby many of the globalist 1% would be forced to relocate overseas in order to stay competitive in a global economy. Money flows like water to the places of least resistance. With that said, I also believe in a similar vein to Bernie Sanders that as long as there are problems in the world there is a job to be done. Why give people money simply to exist? It sends the wrong message and incentivizes people to have a lot of children. I believe the federal government should keep unemployment below 5% (via tax cuts and spending increases when economic conditions require) and in addition I believe in a jobs guarantee at the state-level. Just think during this pandemic we could employee people to be testers, nurses, emergency call center operators, sanitation workers, construction workers, daycare watchers, etc. There is plenty of work to be done. No time to sit around!3. Free CollegeIn America we spend more money per pupil than every country on Earth (except Norway). And yet despite the government spending more and more money, America’s education quality is getting worse and worse as evidenced by the fact our presidential candidates speak at a 4th grade level. Money is clearly not the issue here, although we could do a better job at distributing it. So what is the problem? Our public schools have turned into indoctrination camps. Over 90% of teachers and professors are Democrats. By making universities “free” what Democrats would effectively be doing is giving a handout to their political supporters to indoctrinate the next generation instead of preparing them for the workforce and to vote. For example, can you name the three branches of government? Can you name 10 U.S. Presidents? Do you have a technical skill? It’s scary how few people can answer yes to those three questions, especially as we are speeding toward a more democratic (thus far) and technical future. The real solution seems obvious to me and that isn’t to have “free college,” but instead to “free students.” Parents and students should have vouchers for K-12, which Kyle should like because it’s basically like UBI for education.And then beyond 12th grade, the government should get out of the business of education altogether! Zero loans. One of the greatest tragedies of my generation is that the federal government is turning us into debt slaves via university, housing, credit card, and national. It’s criminal that 30-year-olds have hundreds of thousands of dollars in unforgivable debt. This isn’t because of capitalism. No bank would give a loan to someone who couldn’t afford to pay them back. Our society has become so indebted because the federal government protects banks from risk in order to “make lending easier.” The easier the federal government makes it for poor people to get a loan the richer the rich will get and the poorer the poor and middle class will be as we compete with each other for a limited supply of slots in universities and housing therefore driving up the price of the product for each other! For example, if I only had $5,000 in the bank and you only had $10,000 in the bank and we both wanted to buy the same home then how much would the home cost if the homeowner really needed to sell it and we were the only two potential buyers? They’d probably sell it for around $6,000, but then when banks come into the picture with the protection of the federal government they can give me a mortgage in excess of $100,000. I can then turn to the buyer and offer to buy the home for $7,000. The other guy can also take out a massive loan too so he could offer more. We end up driving up the price with the bank’s money to the point where the only limiting factor is the buyer’s appetite for debt. But don’t worry, we’re told, because someday a guy will buy the house for even more money! The government is creating a bubble by design. This same scenario plays out in education, except you can’t sleep in your diploma . If government got out of the loan business then it’d be much harder to get a loan for housing and education. And then guess what? The price of university would drop back down to 1970s level where the price point would be much more affordable and where the product would actually improve because in order to get customers they’d need to better demonstrate that their graduates who got a degree in X could get a job.One of my more alternative policy ideas is the creation of a national test-taking platform. It would be like the AP and SAT exams, but it’d offer many more exams.Credibility comes from standardization. By separating “test-taking” from “schooling” it’d give students more power over their learning. In the modern era, learning doesn’t stop when you are 18 years old or 23 years old or 27 years old. On the site/app you could sign up for a test in virtually anything and then go to the facility on the day of the exam to take the test. If you pass the exam you’d get a paper and digital certificate (the digital certificates would appear on your profile on the app, which you could make public for employers to see). Who would an employer rather hire: the applicant who is $100,000 in debt from a university they never heard of and who would need a higher salary just to get by or the 50-year-old who is willing to start off at a lower salary and who has passed all the major exams in the field and from the employer’s personal experience they’ve found that these certificates have demonstrated a better indication of an applicants level of knowledge? The safer bet would be the 50-year-old. I think if my test-taking platform was implemented with a mix of public/private funding then we’d see a boom in learning again where we’d stop pushing 50+ to the outskirts of society and where everyone would have a better sense of what they don’t know so they may feel compelled to get more educated in that topic before pounding their chest about it. Too many people think they’re an expert on a topic only after reading an article about it from a highly biased source. Fluid certification in new skills would better reflect our modern employment reality than our traditional rigid education system.4. Living WageIf we increase minimum wage then there’s a lot of evidence that people who make under that amount will lose their job and many small businesses would have to shut down as they couldn’t afford the increase in salary as labor is already many small businesses largest cost. Walmart lobbies for a higher minimum wage because it’s just one more way to make it harder for small businesses to compete. A spike in wages would be especially rough on our rapidly growing service industry, which pays a lot of its workers in tips. If anything a “living wage” would increase the black market for working off the books, which therefore pushes more workers into the shadows of the law. And just think about it: if you believe $15 minimum won’t cost jobs then why not make it $20 or $30 an hour? The truth is that it will cost some, but perhaps if bureaucrats could find the exact price point then the few people who lose their jobs would be offset by the larger number of people who’d see a pay increase. I, however, don’t believe it’s possible to find such a price point for the entire, diverse (I cheerlead America’s state/regional diversity instead of trying to squash it under one umbrella) United States of America. I also don’t believe that if such a price point could be found that partisan-appointed, tenure-based bureaucrats would be the one to find it. A much more natural way to increase wages is by virtually eliminating unemployment with the measures I mentioned before: deregulation, low taxes, federal government jobs program, state jobs guarantee, test-taking platform.5. Ending the WarsThis isn’t 1789 as some conservatives wish it was in terms of domestic policy nor is it as some leftists wish it was in terms of foreign policy.The reality is that a terrorist anywhere threatens us everywhere. The United States of America has the largest target on its back, and not so much for what we have done although there are cases where what we have done definitely didn’t help, but for who we are. I highly encourage leftists to read up on self-defined socialist Christopher Hitchens views on America’s foreign policy. He, for example, supported the invasion of Iraq and our fight against Jihadism.Jihadism is like an ideological virus. Ideally, we could just hide behind our borders, but we can’t. We must prevent Jihadism from spreading. I believe America has been too quick to pull the trigger. Another alternative policy proposal of mine is that we should put a smartphone in every muslim’s hands who live in these terrorist hotbeds and then track them and secularize them. As the muslim world becomes more secularized then there will be less dry wood to light. It’ll be harder for Jihadi’s to infiltrate muslim minds and therefore muslim governments with their extremist views.With that said, we will need to occasionally drop democracy from the sky by bombing terrorist most-wanted hideouts. We also have to consider that we live in perilous times where W.M.D’s are becoming more powerful and accessible than ever before. We need to destroy these networks before they can get a chance to do real harm to us that could make 9/11 look like child’s play. Part of this strategy is ensuring state-sponsors of terror like North Korea and Iran don’t become the world’s “W.M.D. arms dealer,” which is what they plan to do because of they’re desperate need for cash. To prevent this nightmarish scenario America cannot hide behind our puddle. We must actively draw a line in the sand. War must be on the table. Negotiations have failed with Iran and North Korea for decades. Time is on the side of the nuclear proliferator. They will keep stringing us along with weak agreement after weak agreement until the point where we could no longer militarily intervene to stop a holocaust/slavery/further-proliferation without having to consider our own nuclear holocaust. Economic sanctions are not producing fast enough results. We must continue to use cyber warfare to sabotage their facilities and then where the dollar, democracy, and digital fails we may need to use drones.Thanks for reading! I know many of these views are unpopular on Quora, but I believe in the name of intellectual diversity it’s important to hear the downsides of even the best sounding policies. Kyle Kulinski is somebody I frequently listen to because despite our policy differences I think he’s smart, well-intentioned, and honest. To his credit he’s willing to call out the left and the right when he thinks they’re wrong, but one of our fundamental differences is that I’m extremely skeptical of the consolidation of all forms of power whether they be private or public. Power to the individual!