>with the objective of pushing private for-profit healthcare (which just doesn't make sense)
Maybe it doesn't make sense for you, but it makes their buddies in the private sector a lot of money. And that's the game in capitalism, making a lot of money.
The government competing with affordable options for everyone against the private sector is "bad for business".
You're correct that the game is to make a lot of money but the key to making that work is ensuring transactions are beneficial to all parties.
It doesn't matter how you structure things you end up with some way to climb the hierarchy. The problem with pure communist systems is they try to prevent all hierarchies. Human nature attempts to circumvent this, the only way to do so is via corruption and political power. Corruption and political power exist in abundance in free markets as well, but there is another outlet for personal ambition. People can get rich. The hope is that you can build a system that incentivizes people to get rich by providing value for everyone. You can have private for-profit healthcare but you have to make sure that people get a good deal out of that. Normally we rely on competition to ensure customers always get a good deal. I don't think that works in this setting. Healthcare is tricky, I don't think we've found a good way to setup incentives for heath systems to have the best outcomes. We will need strong government regulation no matter what we do. Competition will not provide sufficiently good outcomes.
In the US you have great hospitals but at astronomical costs, the entire system is distorted by insurance companies and massive bureaucracies. Here in NZ the hospitals are terrible underfunded socialist messes. We can't hold on to staff because we don't pay enough. Emergency waits are hours. My friends wife just spent 3 days before getting emergency surgery to reattach nerves and tendons in her hand. She had to travel 3 hours to another city to get that care. The last two times I required emergency care the wait was over 8 hours. I can't pay for better service and there is no private emergency option.
If a hospital were worked owned and controlled, they’re not gonna bribe their Tory buddies to shutdown public medical services because most people aren’t that ridiculously selfish and no one individual gets wealthy. And if it’s a private hospital, the doctors and nurses will use profits to pay themselves well and cut down on costs, because again, they are face to face with people trying to pay foe their medical care.
> It doesn't matter how you structure things you end up with some way to climb the hierarchy. The problem with pure communist systems is they try to prevent all hierarchies.
That is a massive non-sequiter though, nobody is suggesting that factory workers rise up and sieze control of the hospitals. Or even that nurses do so. The proposals for healthcare usually involve the oligarchs being in control and the public enforcing standards. Which typically turns out to be unsustainable because the middle class is where the people who know how to run things come from and they just got cut out.
The problem here is excessive centralisation where if (more practically, when) the government becomes corrupt or makes a bad decision it becomes illegal to do something different to the regulatory standard.
Politics by people with communist leanings isn't helping the situation, but the fundamental issue here is people keep proposing 'solutions' that don't work and effectively block people from actually solving the problems. Eg, I bet someone with a good idea of how to organise an independent emergency healthcare service wouldn't be allowed to do it in England.
The only reason I mentioned a pure communist system is to compare it to a pure capitalist system. I then argued that neither will solve this problem.
I agree that centralization causes huge problems.
My main point was that I don't think we've found a good system for providing hospital care and whatever that solution is I don't think it lies at either extremes of the left - right political spectrum.
We need to change human genes. That's the best long term way out of this. Corruption is just gene trickery. "Best for me, not for thee". Unless "thee" is genetically related.
Unbelieavable wealth and seeking power is gene survival. More wealth more survival resources. More power more survival and reproductive resources.
Genes drive everything that is "wrong" with the way things are.
It definitely came across that way to me in your comment as well. You associated corruption with capitalism via "and that's the name of the game" as though the objective of capitalism is to destroy public institutions, when what's actually the case is that the objective of corrupt people is to destroy or co-opt public institutions for their own benefit. The economic system is largely immaterial in that effort. Actually, you could argue the opposite in that capitalism helps prop up public institutions versus other economic systems because there are minimum levels of regulation, rule of law, and security that are required for capitalistic economies (ranging from the US, to Sweden, to Singapore) to function and for capital owners to profit.
The Soviet Union accrued massive debt due to internal production inefficiencies caused by corruption and mismanagement. Russia has extraordinary natural resources, by all rights they should be one of the most wealthy countries on earth.
Notice how on that list none of South America countries appear after 1990s? Venezuela has been hostile to the US, yet they are still there. Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia have elected socialism-leaning governments multiple times during the last 30 years. Not to mention Nicaragua or Mexico, that are not considered South America. Colombia is the latest example. So they are poor because of US meddling, and not even a tiny part due to their policies? You have to try harder if you want to blame their issues on the US.
> Notice how on that list none of South America countries appear after 1990s?
This is regime change /that we know about/. Intelligence agencies haven't made a huge habit of discussing their covert successes.
> Venezuela has been hostile to the US, yet they are still there.
Yes, because the international response would be quite severe if the US decided to what - destroy Venezuela?
Foreign occupations and coups decimate countries who then have to deal with the effects for generations. The new regime is usually beholden to the powers that put it there (or the old one has to abide by the occupier's demands), permanently crippling the government or the economy or both. Many countries continue to suffer under the conditions created by their overthrowers, so maybe they share some blame but it's largely the longlasting effects of foreign incursions.
> You have to try harder if you want to blame their issues on the US.
It's really not that difficult to understand cause and effect here. If you destroy a country's economy, divide its people, cripple it's infrastructure, and install an authoritarian government, it's going to take a long time to recover.
Yes, the US had its hand in Argentina as well - they supported the violent military junta that saw Peron overthrown and leftist journalists and activists murdered by the thousands during the Dirty War. When I was studying there, the family I stayed with had relatives who had been abducted and "disappeared," which was such a widespread phenomenon under the right wing government that they have a name: "Los Desaparecidos". Here's a Wikipedia article about how the CIA contributed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor#Argentina
Also, your article is unfortunately paywalled, but an op-ed from someone at the WSJ isn't going to change my mind.
Exactly. They should know better and vote for governments that are aligned with the US government's interests, so they don't need to go through a CIA-sponsored coup.
Much of that poverty has its roots way back in the time of the Conquistadors and the generations of Spanish and Portuguese families that looted the riches of the Inca empire.
The descendants of those families still have huge wealth and influence in South America.
I really don't understand how people can simultaneously believe that governments are corrupt and the private sector would support the public's interests. Guess who is corrupting government: the private sector who only support their own interests.
I know this is difficult to understand how it works, but the beauty of the free market is everyone benefits while selfishly working for their own self-interest.
Socialism, however, requires altruistic behavior, and very few people are consistently altruistic and self-sacrificing for the common good.
> I know this is difficult to understand how it works
Are we going to pretend that free market capitalism and its magical benefits haven't been pounded into all of our heads from every angle from the moment we were being taught anything about how the world works? It's not difficult to understand, it's difficult to see in a world where companies commit crimes and collapse in mountains of debt, but no one goes to jail. Not a situation that Adam Smith would approve of.
The reason the benefits capitalism are spread out to any degree is because there are riots when they aren't, so you need to at least reward the people responsible for putting those riots down through violence, technology, and bureaucracy. Hence, the middle class.
> Socialism, however, requires altruistic behavior, and very few people are consistently altruistic and self-sacrificing for the common good.
"Socialism" requires cooperation, and people do it just fine. Even capitalists are socialist amongst themselves when it comes to keeping out competition.
Are you really going to pretend -- to this audience -- you haven't enjoyed the (yes) magical benefits of profit-seeking innovation?
Progressivism conquered America a century ago. Antitrust law. Central bank. Income tax. Universal suffrage. Old age pensions. Public education, research grants. National parks. Interstate highways. Welfare, public housing. Equal opportunity employment. Disaster relief. Socialized medicine for the poor and elderly. Workplace safety. Automobile safety and emissions standards. Space shuttle.
Recently, a flirtation with Universal Basic Income.
People are (hopefully) concerned with growing inequality, wealth centralising into small pockets of society, the lawlessness in which multinational corporate entities operate, the damage being caused to the environment by heavily promoted consumerism..
> Are we going to pretend that free market capitalism and its magical benefits haven't been pounded into all of our heads from every angle from the moment we were being taught anything about how the world works?
My dad was a professor of finance in a midwestern college. He'd have students coming up to him saying "I didn't know there even was a case for free markets!"
> "Socialism" requires cooperation, and people do it just fine.
Both socialism and free markets require cooperation. The difference is that socialism requires forcible cooperation, and in free markets the cooperation is voluntary.
The driving force between market capitalism isn't selfishness Walter. It's competition.
People innately like to compete and will do so over the dumbest things, like who can get the little puck in the net with sticks the most, or who can correctly guess the sum of a pair of dice.
Market capitalism coopts this most basic of human instincts,not greed, and selfish greed is actually the root of many failures of capitalism endeavors, and human endeavors in general.
Because a socialist system is ran by the public. It is beholden to the public as its shareholders. Mcdonalds needs to taste tasty, but only to get you hooked enough to choose mcdonalds over other foods. You think the shareholders would rather their customers actually eat healthy which means limiting consumption of Mcdonalds? No, they are practically in the business of selling cigarettes but in the form of fats and sugars. They want you addicted. The goal of the capitalist isn't to make their customer happy, its to extract as much of their available disposable income as possible.
Every country that tried having the government run food production produced starvation.
Those goalposts were just fine where they were, put them back and address the actual argument. Nobody was advocating for 'government run food production'.
Pleasing the customer is not always good for the customer. I'm sure nicotine addicts get a lot of pleasure from smoking a pack a day. In fact i think that is still Newport's slogan.
Plus your quip is a little bit dated honestly. The soviets had famines because they literally didn't support evolution for quite some time. They believed Lysenko and allowed him to execute his critics. Meanwhile today, look at China the past few decades when modern agricultural practices were finally well established around the world. Another 600 million people in 50 years. Huge population growth doesn't happen because of starvation.
> Pleasing the customer is not always good for the customer.
Ah, the arrogance of knowing what is best for others. (Of course, I know what's best for everyone else, too, but my arrogance stops at taking the next step of being entitled to force it on them.)
> The soviets
You can make excuses for the Soviets. But you gotta explain the starvation from every other communist country. The starvation in Jamestown when they tried communist agriculture. The starvation in the Pilgrims' first year when they tried communist food production. The failure of the Kibbutzen in Israel to feed themselves without government subsidy.
It goes on and on.
P.S. China stopped starving when the stopped collectivist agriculture.
Now for the flip side. Which was the first country to eliminate famine? The US, around 1800, with free market agriculture. Next, which free market agricultural system has suffered from a famine?
lol you misspelled "ran by corrupt authoritarian governments that don't give 2 shits about the public unless they can exploit them"
You can ding corporations... but the real world socialist examples are worse.
Corporations aren't perfect (and we don't live in pure capitalism anyways. Common sense controls exist for good reason). But they are better than socialist governments.
McDonalds is able to sell garbage food because most Americans are addicted to sugar. Your free-market evangelism is the economic equivalent of their junk food.
I enjoy a meal at McD's regularly. I just have a QP, I never buy shakes or soft drinks. The QP is healthy food.
Besides, the US under free market agriculture produced the tallest people in the world up until WW2. It's kinda hard to believe that Americans grew that tall from eating garbage.
Well, socialism isn't communism, and money still exists under socialism, so if the service center isn't doing their job, then, as you capitalists like to say, money talks.
Capitalism, like democracy, is the worst form of government, except for all the others. To believe that the US brand of capitalism can do no wrong is to be as deluded as the communists were. If the free market were perfectly efficient, there would be no such thing as conmen or MLM scams, and every consumer would be 100% informed and perfectly rational. That's ridiculous, so the government needs to step in at times, to promote a freer market than one without regulation.
Go eat at a restaurant in Times Square. They exist only because of their location, and the fact that tourists don't stay long. So their food is bad AND they don't need to try and harder because it doesn't hurt their business. They're a total ripoff and a tourist trap and that's with capitalism's vaunted free market backing the enterprise.
My family owns a bunch of McDonalds. Success is tied to location mostly. The product is pretty meh at best. The only products that have maintained quality are fries, coffee and coke. The rest are worse by any measure.
There’s a reason why Five Guys, etc are everywhere. People who want a good burger go there.
it works like this. In a free market, you dont have to buy my services, but you will if it is better for you on the whole than not. I may consider you cattle to be exploited for profit, but you probably wont just give me your money if i try to sell you my grass offcuttings for $10k. If i somehow come up with a way to produce a great lawnmower that costs me $1 to make, and I sell it to you for $100, you would perhaps think this is a great thing, while I make out like a troll. win/win. If I offer you a shitty lawnmower for $100k, you simply decline.
Socialism would absolutely not require selfless people-it would simple require that workers control and own the companies they work in, and the knowledge that fixing other people’s problems makes everyone’s life better. Less theft, violence, better mental health, no more mass shootings, no more homeless encampments.
Imagine if that co-worker that doesn’t contribute or might even drag the team down can just quit and play PS5. Glorious.
How do I know people don’t need coercion or even pay to produce great products? Open source software. Windows is capitalism and Linux is socialism. Which do you prefer?
The politicians you vote for can regulate those companies, that is how the system is intended to work. If those politicians takes bribes to not regulate those companies, then the problem is corrupt politicians taking bribes, you don't fix that by giving those politicians more power you fix it by voting them out and voting in politicians who does what you want.
> Guess who is corrupting government
How are they corrupting the government? Is the private sector deciding who gets power in the government somehow? Sounds like your democracy doesn't work then. Giving all the power to politicians when the democracy doesn't work just leads to the same scenario as in Soviet.
Bribing the government isn't "corrupting" them, a politician who accepts bribes or tit for tat deals is already corrupt.
How about we have a national vote on what phone you get? Which car you get? Whether carrots or tomatoes get produced? What movies get produced? What clothes are produced? Which diseases get funding? What apartment you get? How many ounces of meat you get per week? What music you get to listen to?
Corruption is a human ingrained need for trickery to gain advantage of potential gene competition. It is ubiquitous for humans and increases with perceived genetic difference, up to a maximum.
Maybe it doesn't make sense for you, but it makes their buddies in the private sector a lot of money. And that's the game in capitalism, making a lot of money.
The government competing with affordable options for everyone against the private sector is "bad for business".