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You're missing the forest for the trees. This is what Capitalism has always been and always will be due to its incentive structure. If you accept wealth and thu

You're missing the forest for the trees. This is what Capitalism has always been and always will be due to its incentive structure. If you accept wealth and thus power concentration, you accept market manipulation. The corps won't skip this due to some overarching ideological free-market reason. That's just naive. I mean, just look at the jungle of regulations and the vast inefficient bureaucracy of the US healthcare system. Those 15k layers of shite can only happen with just as many corps doing everything to either save their profits or trying to get as large a piece of the cake as possible. Public good be damned. Say if the US gov planned to add $100 per patient in some grant for whatever reason. How much do you think would actually trickle down to the patient? I'd be like nervously donating $100 to a dodgy charity in a corrupt developing nation in the 1960s.

kragen 5y ago
This is an absolutist fallacy. The fact that no capitalist market has ever been free of market power doesn't mean that they all function just as badly as Brezhnev-era Soviet "markets" or the US healthcare "market". There are actually existing markets that are more capitalist and less capitalist. Markets mostly organized around government-granted monopolies are by definition failing at capitalism. I think that very little of your hypothetical US$100 would benefit the patient, precisely the opposite of giving US$100 to every consumer in a capitalist market.
- cloudfifty 5y ago
  > This is an absolutist fallacy. Why? You haven't really answered anything with regards to the incentive structure of Capitalism to manipulate the market ASAP. What good "free markets" segments of society even exists today? Restaurants? No, the big chains lobby intensely there as well - less profits if employees earn a living wage. > I think that very little of your hypothetical US$100 would benefit the patient, precisely the opposite of giving US$100 to every consumer in a capitalist market. You're missing the point entirely. The comparison if ofc with what would happen if e.g. a Nordic government would do the same thing under a system of universal healthcare.
  - kragen 5y ago
    Almost the entire world economy, by value, consists of more competitive markets than US healthcare. Restaurants, yes, but also the rest of retail, energy, agriculture, transportation, mining, metals, automobiles, clothing, shipbuilding, forestry, fishing, custom manufacturing, industrial food processing, scientific instruments, electronics, electrical equipment, and the financial markets. Some of these sectors don't engage in wage-labor production, or aren't dominated by it, and so aren't capitalist, while others are. Actors in all of these sectors, even the noncapitalist ones, engage in lobbying and other forms of anticompetitive behavior, but they generally aren't successful in obtaining monopoly or monopsony power and thus ending capitalism where it exists. Sectors that lack competitive markets include the military, healthcare in much of the world, banking, and most of telecommunications. I agree that business (not just capitalism!) creates incentives to destroy free markets, just as politics creates incentives to destroy democracy. When actors succeed in following those incentives, that ends capitalism by eliminating competitive markets, which prevents the price system from being used to allocate resources. Competitive markets and the price system are central characteristics of capitalism; where they fail to exist, what you have is not capitalism, but something else. At this point I'm starting to repeat myself, because I've already explained this about as clearly as I know how, and you still apparently don't understand.
    - cloudfifty 5y ago
      That's like saying that a Leninist system stops being Leninist when its vanguard inevitably becomes corrupted, because its vanilla state is - in theory - democratic. But that's ridiculous, each system should be held accountable for the outcome of its incentive system, not just its vanilla state.
      - kragen 5y ago
        If a Leninist system institutes free-market capitalism, as in China, it stops being Leninist, however dictatorial it may still be. As it happens, in this case the incentives usually run to the preservation of the system rather than its extinguishment. The two examples are temporal inverses of one another. In the situation of capitalism collapsing into government-granted monopolies, free-market capitalism is the first stage, and state central planning is the second stage. In the situation in China, the first stage was a vanguard-party-led society governed by a dictatorship of the proletariat that carries out state central planning, and the second stage is mostly free-market capitalism. I don't think that anyone ever tried to use "Leninist system" to mean "a system where the government is not corrupt", but maybe I just haven't read enough of Lenin?

kragen 5y ago

This is an absolutist fallacy. The fact that no capitalist market has ever been free of market power doesn't mean that they all function just as badly as Brezhnev-era Soviet "markets" or the US healthcare "market". There are actually existing markets that are more capitalist and less capitalist. Markets mostly organized around government-granted monopolies are by definition failing at capitalism. I think that very little of your hypothetical US$100 would benefit the patient, precisely the opposite of giving US$100 to every consumer in a capitalist market.

cloudfifty 5y ago
> This is an absolutist fallacy. Why? You haven't really answered anything with regards to the incentive structure of Capitalism to manipulate the market ASAP. What good "free markets" segments of society even exists today? Restaurants? No, the big chains lobby intensely there as well - less profits if employees earn a living wage. > I think that very little of your hypothetical US$100 would benefit the patient, precisely the opposite of giving US$100 to every consumer in a capitalist market. You're missing the point entirely. The comparison if ofc with what would happen if e.g. a Nordic government would do the same thing under a system of universal healthcare.
- kragen 5y ago
  Almost the entire world economy, by value, consists of more competitive markets than US healthcare. Restaurants, yes, but also the rest of retail, energy, agriculture, transportation, mining, metals, automobiles, clothing, shipbuilding, forestry, fishing, custom manufacturing, industrial food processing, scientific instruments, electronics, electrical equipment, and the financial markets. Some of these sectors don't engage in wage-labor production, or aren't dominated by it, and so aren't capitalist, while others are. Actors in all of these sectors, even the noncapitalist ones, engage in lobbying and other forms of anticompetitive behavior, but they generally aren't successful in obtaining monopoly or monopsony power and thus ending capitalism where it exists. Sectors that lack competitive markets include the military, healthcare in much of the world, banking, and most of telecommunications. I agree that business (not just capitalism!) creates incentives to destroy free markets, just as politics creates incentives to destroy democracy. When actors succeed in following those incentives, that ends capitalism by eliminating competitive markets, which prevents the price system from being used to allocate resources. Competitive markets and the price system are central characteristics of capitalism; where they fail to exist, what you have is not capitalism, but something else. At this point I'm starting to repeat myself, because I've already explained this about as clearly as I know how, and you still apparently don't understand.
  - cloudfifty 5y ago
    That's like saying that a Leninist system stops being Leninist when its vanguard inevitably becomes corrupted, because its vanilla state is - in theory - democratic. But that's ridiculous, each system should be held accountable for the outcome of its incentive system, not just its vanilla state.
    - kragen 5y ago
      If a Leninist system institutes free-market capitalism, as in China, it stops being Leninist, however dictatorial it may still be. As it happens, in this case the incentives usually run to the preservation of the system rather than its extinguishment. The two examples are temporal inverses of one another. In the situation of capitalism collapsing into government-granted monopolies, free-market capitalism is the first stage, and state central planning is the second stage. In the situation in China, the first stage was a vanguard-party-led society governed by a dictatorship of the proletariat that carries out state central planning, and the second stage is mostly free-market capitalism. I don't think that anyone ever tried to use "Leninist system" to mean "a system where the government is not corrupt", but maybe I just haven't read enough of Lenin?