"Means of production"! Your sounding positively Marxist AT. I hardly know where to start here. There is employment because some want to do a certain task, and others find this of value enough that they are willing to pay for it. For the sake of this particular arguement, it makes no difference whether said service is within the public sphere, or the private sector. You, for example, could work for Acme Financial Analysis and Pizza Delivery Co Ltd, or, you could work for the People's Democratic Financial Analysis Workers Unit 2315 (Carl Marx Division). Of course the value of any work can be very subjective, and we could go off on endless tangents here, but the basic fact is that someone deems something of value, produces a good or service, and it is paid for.
Nothing Marxist about what I said. I just understand when I'm about to encounter Marxist rhetoric. And it does make a difference whether or not a service is offered by the public sector or the private sector. The public sector will more often than not will deviate from a profit motive. Without this metric, there is nothing to determine whether or not a venture is running efficiently.
You are simply following the spin of the far right when you suggest that the private sector produces all of value, and "government" leeches off of these supposedly energetic fellows.
If the government can create value, then it wouldn't need the use of force and coercion on market participants.
There is a reason no one needed to subsidise the iPod. It was produced. People seem to like it. That's it.
Most government services are critical, and would have to be paid for whether they were contracted out, or part of a government bureaucracy. It is a matter of political choice what goes into private vs public areas of the economy, not economic imperative. Yes, there are some pros and cons here re what goes where, but idealizing the business community, while denigrating government is not only simplistic and often misguided, but falls into the hands of some of the most self-serving and voracious in society today.
We do have proof that these services would have been paid with or without a government bureaucracy. In Hong Kong, the government leases all of the land in the country. In Singapore, the government offers public housing flats for the sale of private individuals. However, unlike the US Government, these other governments operate for profit, which means there is a metric of success and failure.
There would be nothing wrong with Government Bureaucracy offering goods and services to the market, if it operated like a business. This is not what most governments do, which is why most governments fail at whatever they do.
Yes, very many do. That's why we need a referee, in the form of an elected and accountable government to steer those greedy and selfish folks into a more pro-social direction.
People have wants and desires, and by pursuing these desires, they make others better off. Everyone is concerned with their own interests. That's what selfish means. Everyone wants more than what is required for basic survival. That's what greed means. I already have 15 pairs of shoes. I am also not interested in your pro-social rhetoric. I just want another pair of shoes. Someone else who is just about as interested in your nonsense as I am wants to make more money. He makes me better off by giving me what I want, and my money becomes his income.
Greedy people can only get what they want by finding ways to make you and me better off. That is pro-social. We don't have to do anything but let people live their lives. It isn't your place to determine what is good for other people.
Baloney. The US is on a par with other advance nations generally, although the highly stratified nature of service there means that some live in near third world conditions, while the affluent have everything they need. The former, including those struggling to pay grossly inflated health insurance premiums, would have some complaints I'd bet. Health care is expensive in the US today because it is in the clutches of the business community, which has added several layers of profit and price inflation. That's why those in places like western Europe, Canada, or Australia can get the same care for less.
Actually, those places get less, for less. You're more like to survive any type of Cancer in the United States (65.9 % five year survival rate) than any other country in the world. No other country has a rate closer. In terms of medical research and drug innovation, no other nation comes close.
The issues are the cost and the cost only. Health care was always a profit motive business. This has not changed. The increase cost in health care is due to it's government involvement in distorting market prices.
By 1960, nearly 75 % of Americans had some form of private health-insurance coverage and/or paid out of pocked. These numbers were continuing to advance. Then two government programmes were instituted and this number started to dwindle. The per cent of health care expenditures as a part of private insurance increased, but the out-of-pocket expense decreased. The Federal, State and Local Government expenses replaced out-of-pocket expenses. Do you really think health care would be expensive if the Government were not subsidising the ill?
The number of medical schools have declined relative to the size of the population a century since the AMA started it's monopoly style licensing practices. In terms of admissions limits, the peak year for applicants at U.S. schools was 1996 at 47,000 applications with a limit of 16,500 accepted. The original intent of these rigorous regulatory practices were to combat the increasing inflow of new doctors into the marketplace. As the high supply of doctors meant a lower salary provided by the overall market. Do you really think health care would be expensive if the AMA still had no monopoly power on licensing?
In 1992, The Prescription Drug User Fee Act was passed, which allowed the FDA to charge pharmaceutical companies a fee for filing a new drug application. This is goes part of their research and evaluation budget. After the drug is approved it's patented for several years, in which case, the pharmaceutical companies can charge and arm and a leg for their overpriced drugs without the threat of competition. Do you really think drugs would be expensive if the FDA were privatised?
And these are just three examples of the government strain on the health care sector. All of which can be attributed to this:
If you want to understand the economics of the American Health Care System, it probably helps if you got the economics part down.
A non-reply. Your point was that the free market was the best method of allocating resources to where they are most needed.
No I didn't. I said profits are the only reason, and really, the most effective and most efficient ways to allocate such resources. This can happen without a free market, a market economy or just about any economy. Profits are vital for an economy. I'm only telling you that if drugs were decriminalised, then resources would be allocated towards the production and consumption of drugs instead of being wasted trying to stop it.
If it were truly "free", without all kinds of government intervention in aid of pro-social goals, then you would have a jungle, with warlords, dope dealers, and crazed Wall Street traders runing a violent melodrama, rather than a civilized middle class society.
This is all already here, and there is no Free Market to blame it on. Sooner or later, you'll have to find another boogyman.
Ridiculous. I'm talking about comparable advanced western democracies, which you well know
If you think it's so ridiculous, perhaps you should figure out how this metric is suppose to be used before using it. Less spending per capita doesn't tell you anything about quality of the care in said country. You might as well compare it to a country with no health care at all. Increasingly, we find countries which spend less has:
- Lower health care outcomes
- Longer wait times
- Less drug innovation
- Less treatment
The more you actually learn about these things, the more you will learn that spending does not always equality to quality. Imagine if everyone used such a mundane metric to judge the performance of Tech Companies.
Apple spends less on R&D than Google. Does Apple have more/better products than Goole?
It sounds like you have the foggiest idea of how research, and academia in general, is done these days. Research builds on the work of other fellow collegues in related fields, and universities and other facilities often work in direct cooperation, across international borders. There is plenty of research being done in Canada, as there is in other countries.
I know how research works. You somehow forgot that research eventually leads to some sort of innovation. Otherwise, you are just wasting resources, which is exactly what is happening in Canada. If there is research going on, it's not anywhere near the same capacity the United States. Socialised medicine is practically a parasite off the American Heath Care system. Over the six most important medical innovations in the world four of them were developed in the United States and one was improved in the United States. There is plenty of research being done in the Canada, but the last great medical breakthrough Canada has ever given the world was in 1922.
Give me a break...
And just as an aside here, it is often the publically funded universities that do the basic research that private corporations can then capitalize on, and make their profit
s.
Private corporations already conduct their own research. It's called, Research & Development. And sure, private corporations my decide to recruit a team from these universities for the production of their next drug. It's called a grant.
Society says that it is valuable to have the population working at worthwhile projects. As you say, the corporate world cares nothing about this. Left entirely to the latter, we would have ever increasing efficiency in business, and ever higher unemployment rates, until we returned to the 19th century world of Charles Dickens. We have made a good start in that direction already.
Contrary to popular belief, economies grow to eliminate jobs. As we increase efficiency, we develop more things to do more with less effort. As a result, certain jobs are destroyed and/or replaced for other jobs. It's called productivity. If you want to return to the 19th century, or the stone-age, be my guess.
And contrary to your belief, government can create "value" in the sense of directing resources towards employment, or other goals. We could have full employment tomorrow, for example, by altering the labour laws. Of course, this is unlikely as it would create a political firestorm, especially in today's me first society.
That's not creating value. Again, that is using force. If people are not willing to create certain types of jobs with their own resources, it means people do not value these jobs types of jobs as much as other types of jobs you can create, or other resources for that matter. You'll get more of the type of employment you want, but they'll be worth less in value than the cost to produce.
That means, your plan (whatever it is) would waste resources. There are plenty of other valuable things people are willing to provide voluntarily.
Now you are being completely ridiculous. That's not even worth a reply.
Fine by me. It would save me the trouble of having to correct you. It gets repetitive after a while.
