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1. There is definitely a difference between indirect/preventable deaths and direct deaths due to war/murder. If you died of cancer tomorrow because you couldn't

by bhupy 6y ago

1. There is definitely a difference between indirect/preventable deaths and direct deaths due to war/murder. If you died of cancer tomorrow because you couldn't afford treatment, it would be different than if I straight up shot you in the head. The cumulative deaths caused by motor accidents also outnumbers the Kosovo casualty count (by a lot), and yet we do not consider the former to be worse than the latter. Also, drug overdose deaths, while sad, are less devastating to society than war and genocide. 2. Even if indirect/preventable deaths were somehow comparable to war/revolution/genocide, this is pretty much unique to the US, whose government inefficiently allocates welfare. Canada, Germany, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Taiwan, Belgium, Netherlands etc etc etc all rely on the private sector to deliver the majority of their goods & services. The fact that the US has an inefficient welfare system is somewhat orthogonal to the issue at hand: whether the (peaceful) creative destruction yields more efficient outcomes than structural rigidity and institutional sclerosis. If the US instituted a UBI or more efficiently allocated its public health spending to include those that may be unable to afford healthcare, it doesn't change the fact that in the majority of liberal democracies that rely predominately on the private sector, structural change doesn't need to be brought about through violence, even if the governments and their institutions remain rigid.

jahaja 6y ago
1. Maybe not devastating to your particular class of society. Motor accidents are not as strongly linked to economic despair either, and certainly not an effect of ideological choice. 2. It's hard to deny that the cause of this is not fundamentally caused by an over emphasis on free market ideology.
- bhupy 6y ago
  > Maybe not devastating to your particular class of society. Motor accidents are not as strongly linked to economic despair either, and certainly not an effect of ideological choice. Yes, in fact the upper, upper-middle, and largely the (prudish) middle class of society isn't as impacted by drug overdose deaths as they are about the threat of genocide and war. The latter impacts everyone more or less equally. The former impacts a very narrow segment of society. It should then not come as a surprise that society assesses the risk (and devastation) of the two in different ways. You need to remember that the median American is NOT an opioid addict. In fact the median American is fairly rich -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income#Median https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c.... While it is truly sad that there exists poor people that are addicted to opioids (and dying as a result), we have to remember that it's a small minority of society as a whole, and the risk of becoming a drug addict isn't uniform. > It's hard to deny that the cause of this is not fundamentally caused by an over emphasis on free market ideology. "Free market ideology" is entirely orthogonal to the issue, because the issue you pointed out is isolated in the US, but "free market ideology" is the predominant ideology of the liberal world where the issue you pointed out is notably absent. In every single comparably wealthy country, the public sector makes up a (stark) minority of the workforce -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_sector_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_se... The OECD average is 21%. There are countries that have lower public sector size than the US (Netherlands, Germany, South Korea, New Zealand, Japan, Austria) that have comparable (if not higher) human well-being. You cannot compare life in those countries to life in Syria/Iraq/Afghanistan, Kosovo, Central Africa, etc etc. In the countries devoid of the kind of opioid deaths you speak of, economic freedom is among the highest, many even higher than the US -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_economic_freedom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_economic_... Since you can't reproduce that causation in other countries, you cannot conclude that there exists such a causation. It's very much a "US" problem. Put simply, the safety net in the US has some holes in it.
  - jahaja 6y ago
    I didn't expect you to double-down on "well, it's just the poor anyway" but I probably shouldn't be surprised by now. I wrote "over emphasis". Then you just go on about some irrelevant stats regarding the size of the public sector etc. While other countries realise that the "free market" needs to be curtailed in many spheres to not do too much damage, the US have decided that this isn't an issue and people need to take care of themselves on the "free market". Hence the lack of proper welfare and universal health care (and we can go on to worker benefits if you'd like, or perhaps higher education?).
    - bhupy 6y ago
      > I didn't expect you to double-down on "well, it's just the poor anyway" but I probably shouldn't be surprised by now. Yes, that is exactly the point I'm making. Strictly from a utilitarian perspective, civil war/genocide affects more people, more uniformly than drug addiction. Attacking that from "won't you think of the poors?" angle isn't a constructive argument to be made. And lest we forget, the original point of argument was that peaceful restructuring of corporation is preferable to violent restructuring through wars, coups, and genocide. "What about the drug overdoses?" is an odd argument because I don't know anyone that would say "I prefer peaceful creative destruction over war, except if there are opioid overdoses, in which case I prefer civil war and violent coups, yes." > I wrote "over emphasis". Then you just go on about some irrelevant stats regarding the size of the public sector etc. Isn't that exactly what "free market" means? Economic freedom and the size of the private sector? > Hence the lack of proper welfare and universal health care (and we can go on to worker benefits if you'd like, or perhaps higher education?). Yes, and this is a failure of government policy. The US healthcare system is the least free market there is. I write software for claims processing and healthcare pricing systems for a living, and I can tell you right now that the US's healthcare system is a byzantine nightmare. The only thing remotely "market-like" about the system is that there are an obscene amount of profits...but that's all downstream of asinine incentives brought about by policy. It isn't some grand accident of the free market. I'm in agreement with you that this needs to be fixed. However the fact that these problems exist in the US but not elsewhere suggests that it also has very little to do with "free market ideologies", and your insistence to the contrary regardless of the empirical evidence suggests that your approach to this is purely driven by ideology.
ClumsyPilot 6y ago
"drug overdose deaths, while sad, are less devastating to society" How did you come to the conclusions that, life for life, a drug user's death is any better than someone getting shot in Afganistan? Do you have anything to backup this strange idea?
- bhupy 6y ago
  > How did you come to the conclusions that, life for life, a drug user's death is any better than someone getting shot in Afganistan? Because getting shot in Afghanistan (especially during a war) is a random event, and the risk is spread evenly among society. The risk of drug overdose is concentrated. You don't accidentally trip on heroine, it takes a set of (largely predictable) circumstances to get there. Society correctly assesses this risk, which is why solving the opioid epidemic polls a lot less favorably than policing and defense. The idea that society (writ large) cares more about preventing genocide and war than preventing isolated drug deaths isn't really that controversial.

by bhupy 6y ago

jahaja 6y ago

1. Maybe not devastating to your particular class of society. Motor accidents are not as strongly linked to economic despair either, and certainly not an effect of ideological choice. 2. It's hard to deny that the cause of this is not fundamentally caused by an over emphasis on free market ideology.

bhupy 6y ago
> Maybe not devastating to your particular class of society. Motor accidents are not as strongly linked to economic despair either, and certainly not an effect of ideological choice. Yes, in fact the upper, upper-middle, and largely the (prudish) middle class of society isn't as impacted by drug overdose deaths as they are about the threat of genocide and war. The latter impacts everyone more or less equally. The former impacts a very narrow segment of society. It should then not come as a surprise that society assesses the risk (and devastation) of the two in different ways. You need to remember that the median American is NOT an opioid addict. In fact the median American is fairly rich -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income#Median https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c.... While it is truly sad that there exists poor people that are addicted to opioids (and dying as a result), we have to remember that it's a small minority of society as a whole, and the risk of becoming a drug addict isn't uniform. > It's hard to deny that the cause of this is not fundamentally caused by an over emphasis on free market ideology. "Free market ideology" is entirely orthogonal to the issue, because the issue you pointed out is isolated in the US, but "free market ideology" is the predominant ideology of the liberal world where the issue you pointed out is notably absent. In every single comparably wealthy country, the public sector makes up a (stark) minority of the workforce -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_sector_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_se... The OECD average is 21%. There are countries that have lower public sector size than the US (Netherlands, Germany, South Korea, New Zealand, Japan, Austria) that have comparable (if not higher) human well-being. You cannot compare life in those countries to life in Syria/Iraq/Afghanistan, Kosovo, Central Africa, etc etc. In the countries devoid of the kind of opioid deaths you speak of, economic freedom is among the highest, many even higher than the US -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_economic_freedom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_economic_... Since you can't reproduce that causation in other countries, you cannot conclude that there exists such a causation. It's very much a "US" problem. Put simply, the safety net in the US has some holes in it.
- jahaja 6y ago
  I didn't expect you to double-down on "well, it's just the poor anyway" but I probably shouldn't be surprised by now. I wrote "over emphasis". Then you just go on about some irrelevant stats regarding the size of the public sector etc. While other countries realise that the "free market" needs to be curtailed in many spheres to not do too much damage, the US have decided that this isn't an issue and people need to take care of themselves on the "free market". Hence the lack of proper welfare and universal health care (and we can go on to worker benefits if you'd like, or perhaps higher education?).
  - bhupy 6y ago
    > I didn't expect you to double-down on "well, it's just the poor anyway" but I probably shouldn't be surprised by now. Yes, that is exactly the point I'm making. Strictly from a utilitarian perspective, civil war/genocide affects more people, more uniformly than drug addiction. Attacking that from "won't you think of the poors?" angle isn't a constructive argument to be made. And lest we forget, the original point of argument was that peaceful restructuring of corporation is preferable to violent restructuring through wars, coups, and genocide. "What about the drug overdoses?" is an odd argument because I don't know anyone that would say "I prefer peaceful creative destruction over war, except if there are opioid overdoses, in which case I prefer civil war and violent coups, yes." > I wrote "over emphasis". Then you just go on about some irrelevant stats regarding the size of the public sector etc. Isn't that exactly what "free market" means? Economic freedom and the size of the private sector? > Hence the lack of proper welfare and universal health care (and we can go on to worker benefits if you'd like, or perhaps higher education?). Yes, and this is a failure of government policy. The US healthcare system is the least free market there is. I write software for claims processing and healthcare pricing systems for a living, and I can tell you right now that the US's healthcare system is a byzantine nightmare. The only thing remotely "market-like" about the system is that there are an obscene amount of profits...but that's all downstream of asinine incentives brought about by policy. It isn't some grand accident of the free market. I'm in agreement with you that this needs to be fixed. However the fact that these problems exist in the US but not elsewhere suggests that it also has very little to do with "free market ideologies", and your insistence to the contrary regardless of the empirical evidence suggests that your approach to this is purely driven by ideology.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago

"drug overdose deaths, while sad, are less devastating to society" How did you come to the conclusions that, life for life, a drug user's death is any better than someone getting shot in Afganistan? Do you have anything to backup this strange idea?

bhupy 6y ago
> How did you come to the conclusions that, life for life, a drug user's death is any better than someone getting shot in Afganistan? Because getting shot in Afghanistan (especially during a war) is a random event, and the risk is spread evenly among society. The risk of drug overdose is concentrated. You don't accidentally trip on heroine, it takes a set of (largely predictable) circumstances to get there. Society correctly assesses this risk, which is why solving the opioid epidemic polls a lot less favorably than policing and defense. The idea that society (writ large) cares more about preventing genocide and war than preventing isolated drug deaths isn't really that controversial.