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The moral answer is obviously no, given the context in which we live. That the moral and legal answers are completely opposite of each other is telling. Imagin
by wfo 9y ago
The moral answer is obviously no, given the context in which we live. That the moral and legal answers are completely opposite of each other is telling.
Imagine a natural disaster happens, and the strong hoard more water and food and shelter and medicine than they could ever use in a million lifetimes and protect it with guns. Then you tell the poor "in an emergency scenario, here are some options to keep you and your children alive a few more days that aren't totally safe but are better than nothing. Your makeshift roof might fall down in a bad storm, your food won't be perfectly clean, but it's better than doing nothing and waiting to die".
This is what is happening in the US. In this analogy, the natural disaster is free market capitalism, the strong are the ultrawealthy owning class, and the guns they use to protect their property are the police and legal system, who provide the violence that is inherently necessary to keep order in a massively unequal society.
- pxeboot 9y agoExcept that our current health care system isn't anywhere close to free market capitalism.
- wfo 9y agoIt is the closest healthcare system in the developed world to free market capitalism since every other country has socialized medicine; a system much more free-market than ours would create an untenable hellscape for the vast majority of the population that would be voted into oblivion or cause massive riots and death. We sit at the most extreme free-market end of possible healthcare systems that could feasibly exist in reality. Imagine a true free market healthcare system. Or just one step further than ours: no medicare. Imagine if every middle-aged middle or lower class American had to, as their parents age and require more healthcare than anyone can feasibly afford, choose: bankruptcy and permanent insurmountable debt, or watch your parents die knowing you chose not to stop it. What glorious freedom.
- conanbatt 9y agoThis all might sound like a plausible narrative, until single payer comes along, costs don't come down but go up and now we the debate will be which medical procedures will never be covered by government. Medicare costs 17% of GDP and it has 44 million people. If you expanded medicare to every single person in america (10x), how much do you think the GDP cost would be then? And what do you think will be the prescription at that point? Its also a ludicrous proposition to say that because its closer to free market, thats what makes it worse compared to socialized services. Its qualitatively different because it has tremendous regulation and rules. And the proposed solution is to add more regulation.
- freethinker777 9y agoThis is quite false on many levels. The problem is actually created by the government in the first place. If you fix the length of the patents or eliminate the patents in the first place the cost of drugs will drop close to the cost to produce them. Monopolies are well studied in economics and the effects of monopoly pricing due to government granted patents are what we see here, this is a government created problem not a free market one.
- alasdair_ 9y ago>the natural disaster is free market capitalism Government-protected monopolies (i.e. drug patents) are almost the antithesis of free-market capitalism.
- wfo 9y agoNo they are the very definition of free-market capitalism. They are property, and property rights are the entire basis of capitalism. In particular, private ownership over the means of production (which is the definition of capitalism) requires the government grant monopolies to these owners. Every property right is a government-protected monopoly; without these government monopolies what you have is an end to private property which may be desirable but is certainly not free-market capitalism, it is communism.