> It is also more efficient to refuse hospital care for those with serious medical conditions. Letting them die is probably more cost-effective.
No, it's not, that's a silly argument. We have hospitals not because we're such great moral people, but _because_ we've figured out that it's much better for society if an illness doesn't mean you have to roll the dice whether you survive.
But at some point, costs become an issue, I'm sure you see that as well, e.g. with an ageing population. It's not even a moral question, at some point you're arguing against the laws of physics. And you may think that human laws are hard to change, but wait until you've tried changing those.
> You think that profit-seeking can be a force that results in progress, whereas I think it is fundamentally adversarial to the public at large.
There's some schools of thinking where living in the West is "fundamentally adversarial" to the public at large and we better go back to pre-industrial life, traditional and simple because reject modernity and all that. I don't subscribe to that.
I don't think there's a way to deny that profit-seeking results in progress - the only question is whether you could achieve a similar level of progress without it. I believe history has shown that you cannot, and then it has re-run this experiment multiple times, and always ended up with the same result.
> I believe history has shown that you cannot, and then it has re-run this experiment multiple times, and always ended up with the same result.
You seem to think I am a communist simply for thinking that profit seeking should be regulated by the government and that government functions should not be in the hands of corporations.
I never once said that corporations should not exist, ot that all profit-seeking activity should be forbidden. You just presumed that, because you hold fairly extremes points of view.
The fact that you don't see how extreme your point of view is turns this conversation in an exercise in frustration. Oh well.
I did not assume that at all. It's just that the communists denied that greed (or, framed more nicely: self-interest) is a common human trait, so they set out to prove that it's much better without it. And the rest is, as they say, history. My opinion is that we don't need to try that again.
You appear to believe that profit-seeking cannot result in progress, and I disagree. Is that an extreme viewpoint? If you, too, consider self-interest "of the devil", capable only to destroy but not to create ("profit-seeking can [not] be a force that results in progress"), then I suppose it is an extreme viewpoint, much like the idea that the devil could be a force for good.
I just don't believe in the devil, or god, but I believe that you wanting to optimize the outcome for you in a game constrained by rules that require you to create value for others in order to receive value, will end up being much better at creating value than if there was no external motivation for you.
No, it's not, that's a silly argument. We have hospitals not because we're such great moral people, but _because_ we've figured out that it's much better for society if an illness doesn't mean you have to roll the dice whether you survive.
But at some point, costs become an issue, I'm sure you see that as well, e.g. with an ageing population. It's not even a moral question, at some point you're arguing against the laws of physics. And you may think that human laws are hard to change, but wait until you've tried changing those.
> You think that profit-seeking can be a force that results in progress, whereas I think it is fundamentally adversarial to the public at large.
There's some schools of thinking where living in the West is "fundamentally adversarial" to the public at large and we better go back to pre-industrial life, traditional and simple because reject modernity and all that. I don't subscribe to that.
I don't think there's a way to deny that profit-seeking results in progress - the only question is whether you could achieve a similar level of progress without it. I believe history has shown that you cannot, and then it has re-run this experiment multiple times, and always ended up with the same result.