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You’re complaining about our government’s systemic dysfunction, which is not something I’ll argue with. I think we are circling the drain and already totally fu

You’re complaining about our government’s systemic dysfunction, which is not something I’ll argue with. I think we are circling the drain and already totally fucked, honestly. So when I talk about making some aspect of our society work better (e.g. healthcare) I’m presupposing that we’ve managed to sort out a government that’s halfway interested in making things work. Put another way: it’s a false dilemma to say we can either accept the non-attempts of our non-functional government to fix issue X, or throw Americans to the capitalist wolves and trust them to build us a libertarian utopia where the free market solves all ills. The latter is extremely naive. Despite what you seem to assume about me, I do believe in capitalism up to a point, actually. I think it’s the best way to bubble up drive and vision to a place where the individuals so endowed can move us forward as a civilization. But, when we’re talking about administration of a broad application of settled technology (in the broadest sense), the advantages of capitalism tend to be subsumed by blind profit motive; this gets us monopolies, it gets us rent-seeking and racketeering, it gets us abuse of consumer “rights” and outright human rights in many cases. I really don’t buy that all of this is the government’s fault; corporations with unchecked power have done some pretty horrible things. Your claim that profit is necessary isn’t true, either, except in the broadest reference frame. One example: public transit is a huge economic enabler for dense cities where driving isn’t practical. It’s fine for it to lose money considered on its own, because it drives overall growth. Now, do we need to do a better job at the interface between public and social services (e.g. the people who run the trains) and private enterprise (e.g. the people who manufacture the trains)? Yes, we do. The same would go for an expanded socialized medicine program, or just an attempt to stop the bleeding with our current system. But this brings us back to the same place: everything is broken, and the outlook is bleak. And the proposed solution of a “well regulated” (imagine I’m waving my hands around) free market does not convince me, simply because profit motive does not necessarily align with human happiness and well-being. History is full of examples of just how incompatible those two things are, and the present has some good ones too.

robomartin 6y ago
> One example: public transit is a huge economic enabler for dense cities where driving isn’t practical. It’s fine for it to lose money considered on its own, because it drives overall growth. As I said before, and I'll add a little bit: Please, grab a spreadsheet, start to develop the financial equation for anything you care to look into and think it through. Public transportation probably has a much larger profit motive than any private enterprise. You have to look at the financial equation that drives the thing. They don't call it "profit", and yet it is exactly the same thing. What form that it take? Go research benefit and pensions. People in these government organizations get life-long pensions that they did not pay for. They also get life-long health coverage...they did not pay for. These pensions are unsustainable without the "profit" in the form of ever-increasing taxation, bonds and other methods. It's money in excess of the cost of goods sold. Same thing. Different name. I think you misunderstood my perspective on this. I am not proposing some crazy scenario where capitalism runs rampant doing as everyone might wish and make an even bigger mess out of healthcare. Not at all. My point of view is very simple: Government is bad at executing on just about everything. Their role should be to engage in creating the legal and regulatory framework within which entrepreneurs have to function in order to deliver goods and services. They should not be in the business of implementing any of it. They fuck it up more often than not. Look at the mess the Trump administration made out of the vaccine deployment as a recent and painful example. This isn't a Republican or Democrat thing, they all suck at getting things done correctly, effectively and efficiently. They should have grand debates (in public) exploring how to engineer a legal and regulatory framework for healthcare that allows our entrepreneurs to deliver excellent products to everyone. No monopolies. No exclusions. Etc. Of course, they also need to make sure their rule-making deals with all relevant elements of the financial equation. Simple example: You cannot, positively cannot, lower the cost of healthcare in the US if a medical education costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, malpractice insurance tens of thousands, and a hospital has more lawyers than doctors. It's crazy. So, again, for example, get out of the student loan business and education costs will come down. There's a lot of "structural" work that needs to be done before any insurance entity, public or private, can reduce costs. I've been saying this all along. This isn't magic. It's math. There's a financial equation for everything and you can't force lower end-user costs if the cost of goods sold is high. It's the no-free-lunch principle. Probably the fundamental law of the universe, right up there with gravitation.
- caconym_ 6y ago
  > Go research benefit and pensions. People in these government organizations get life-long pensions that they did not pay for. They also get life-long health coverage...they did not pay for. These pensions are unsustainable without the "profit" in the form of ever-increasing taxation, bonds and other methods. Yes. Public money subsidizes public transit, and that money comes from taxes etcetera. I'm not sure how any of this is supposed to contradict what I said, which explicitly acknowledged that public transit examined in a context-free vacuum is often a money loser—do you think I imagined that the funding for it pops out of thin air? The point is that mass transit is necessary for cities to function beyond a certain density, so the economic dividends of a growing city must in part be credited to it. You could probably make a reasonable argument that if workers kept more of the wealth they create then public transit could more easily operate in the black. Instead, the people least likely to use it keep most of the money the people most likely to use it might have spent on it. Holding our current (extreme) wealth inequality equal, the solution to this is to disproportionately tax the wealthy to fund it. They may make a fuss, but they (or at least we) should remember that they made their money on the back of a functioning society. Most of the very large cities in the Western world do appear to have relied to some degree on public transit to attain that status, so if you want to argue that it was actually an economic drag they'd have been better off without, the onus is on you to put together the spreadsheet (or whatever) proving that. (We also have a problem of it being extremely expensive to build public transit in our cities, much moreso than in e.g. European countries with heavily socialist policies. To me, that suggests that there's a lot more going on here than big government bad, big corporation good.) --- > Government is bad at executing on just about everything. > Their role should be to engage in creating the legal and regulatory framework within which entrepreneurs have to function in order to deliver goods and services. There's a problem here, which is that the latter is something they will have to execute on, and I bet neither of us believes our current government is up to it. So that begs the question: if we did have a government actually capable of executing well on hard problems, why should they not directly solve the public problems that private enterprise is not well suited for, i.e. the ones that do not produce tangible local profits in the short to medium term? Our government put men on the fucking moon, and IG Farben made Zyklon B for the Nazi gas chambers and bought slaves from the SS to use in lethal medical experiments. The right answer isn't easy; it may not exist at all, in the sense of having a destination and a workable route thereto through the intermediate configuration space. It's certainly not going to be as simple as people on Twitter want to imagine it is. Unfortunately, your vision of government stepping back to let private enterprise (with a gentle guiding hand) create a utopia where all people are provided for in their every need seems just as hopelessly idealistic as anything else.

robomartin 6y ago

> One example: public transit is a huge economic enabler for dense cities where driving isn’t practical. It’s fine for it to lose money considered on its own, because it drives overall growth. As I said before, and I'll add a little bit: Please, grab a spreadsheet, start to develop the financial equation for anything you care to look into and think it through. Public transportation probably has a much larger profit motive than any private enterprise. You have to look at the financial equation that drives the thing. They don't call it "profit", and yet it is exactly the same thing. What form that it take? Go research benefit and pensions. People in these government organizations get life-long pensions that they did not pay for. They also get life-long health coverage...they did not pay for. These pensions are unsustainable without the "profit" in the form of ever-increasing taxation, bonds and other methods. It's money in excess of the cost of goods sold. Same thing. Different name. I think you misunderstood my perspective on this. I am not proposing some crazy scenario where capitalism runs rampant doing as everyone might wish and make an even bigger mess out of healthcare. Not at all. My point of view is very simple: Government is bad at executing on just about everything. Their role should be to engage in creating the legal and regulatory framework within which entrepreneurs have to function in order to deliver goods and services. They should not be in the business of implementing any of it. They fuck it up more often than not. Look at the mess the Trump administration made out of the vaccine deployment as a recent and painful example. This isn't a Republican or Democrat thing, they all suck at getting things done correctly, effectively and efficiently. They should have grand debates (in public) exploring how to engineer a legal and regulatory framework for healthcare that allows our entrepreneurs to deliver excellent products to everyone. No monopolies. No exclusions. Etc. Of course, they also need to make sure their rule-making deals with all relevant elements of the financial equation. Simple example: You cannot, positively cannot, lower the cost of healthcare in the US if a medical education costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, malpractice insurance tens of thousands, and a hospital has more lawyers than doctors. It's crazy. So, again, for example, get out of the student loan business and education costs will come down. There's a lot of "structural" work that needs to be done before any insurance entity, public or private, can reduce costs. I've been saying this all along. This isn't magic. It's math. There's a financial equation for everything and you can't force lower end-user costs if the cost of goods sold is high. It's the no-free-lunch principle. Probably the fundamental law of the universe, right up there with gravitation.

caconym_ 6y ago
> Go research benefit and pensions. People in these government organizations get life-long pensions that they did not pay for. They also get life-long health coverage...they did not pay for. These pensions are unsustainable without the "profit" in the form of ever-increasing taxation, bonds and other methods. Yes. Public money subsidizes public transit, and that money comes from taxes etcetera. I'm not sure how any of this is supposed to contradict what I said, which explicitly acknowledged that public transit examined in a context-free vacuum is often a money loser—do you think I imagined that the funding for it pops out of thin air? The point is that mass transit is necessary for cities to function beyond a certain density, so the economic dividends of a growing city must in part be credited to it. You could probably make a reasonable argument that if workers kept more of the wealth they create then public transit could more easily operate in the black. Instead, the people least likely to use it keep most of the money the people most likely to use it might have spent on it. Holding our current (extreme) wealth inequality equal, the solution to this is to disproportionately tax the wealthy to fund it. They may make a fuss, but they (or at least we) should remember that they made their money on the back of a functioning society. Most of the very large cities in the Western world do appear to have relied to some degree on public transit to attain that status, so if you want to argue that it was actually an economic drag they'd have been better off without, the onus is on you to put together the spreadsheet (or whatever) proving that. (We also have a problem of it being extremely expensive to build public transit in our cities, much moreso than in e.g. European countries with heavily socialist policies. To me, that suggests that there's a lot more going on here than big government bad, big corporation good.) --- > Government is bad at executing on just about everything. > Their role should be to engage in creating the legal and regulatory framework within which entrepreneurs have to function in order to deliver goods and services. There's a problem here, which is that the latter is something they will have to execute on, and I bet neither of us believes our current government is up to it. So that begs the question: if we did have a government actually capable of executing well on hard problems, why should they not directly solve the public problems that private enterprise is not well suited for, i.e. the ones that do not produce tangible local profits in the short to medium term? Our government put men on the fucking moon, and IG Farben made Zyklon B for the Nazi gas chambers and bought slaves from the SS to use in lethal medical experiments. The right answer isn't easy; it may not exist at all, in the sense of having a destination and a workable route thereto through the intermediate configuration space. It's certainly not going to be as simple as people on Twitter want to imagine it is. Unfortunately, your vision of government stepping back to let private enterprise (with a gentle guiding hand) create a utopia where all people are provided for in their every need seems just as hopelessly idealistic as anything else.