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>the fastest way to find out is free market experimentation >exposed their schooling system to free market competition not all things can be effectively put u

>the fastest way to find out is free market experimentation >exposed their schooling system to free market competition not all things can be effectively put under free market framework. Bottom line optimization and profit maximization, natural main objectives of the known free market implementations, don't work well for nuclear weapons maintenance, law enforcement ... healthcare and education for that exact reason that the main objectives in all these areas aren't the bottom line and profit maximization. For example, private prisons and healthcare in the US is highly profitable enterprises, while they serve their main objectives worse then their non-free-market counterparts in comparably developed countries.

yummyfajitas 15y ago
It is a bit disingenuous to compare private goods (healthcare, education) with public goods (law enforcement, defense). In the case of public goods, the mechanism of freeloading prevents an optimal level of provisioning of them from a free market. What mechanism prevents competition and free markets from providing good performance in health care or education?
- Retric 15y ago
  The private vs public good debate is arbitrary. The social cost of free high quality ___ may vary well be negative based on ____. You have costs and both public and private benefits and that my change based on cost over time. EX: There is significant evidence the cheapest way to improve the public education system is to provide free, healthy, and tasty foods to students. Students are both better behaved, have better attendance, and are better able to learn. However, people seem more willing to pay for apple laptops than apples.
  - yummyfajitas 15y ago
    A good is either rivalrous and excludible, or it's not. If it is, it's private. If it is neither rivalrous nor excludible, it's public. This has nothing to do with the "social cost" (whatever that is).
    - Retric 15y ago
      Edit: I am aware that's a common economic definition of the term, it's still crap. The definition breaks down for some of the earliest forms of public goods like irrigation systems. Roads and bridges are either 'rivalrous and excludible' or at best a major grey area. So, unless you want to really twist the definition it's simply a poor metric. PS: Digital copy's of music is another area where excludible is debatable. Library books are another example where they are considered a public good even though they are both 'rivalrous and excludible'.
- yequalsx 15y ago
  The goal of a healthcare system ought to maximizing the health of the people. The goal of an educational system ought to be maximizing learning. Perhaps a free market system (used very loosely) with the goal of pursuing profits would, as a byproduct, maximize the health of the people or of learning. I see no evidence that this is the case or that it should be the case. Indeed, in the case of healthcare I have very strong evidence that profit seeking isn't a great motivator. The U.S. spends by far the most on healthcare as a percent of GDP. It spends far more for certain drugs than socialized systems, has worse health outcomes, and far greater health access inequality. There is also a moral aspect. It is morally wrong for someone to profit from denying someone else healthcare. Unless a free market system can be devised in such a way that maximizing profit = maximizing healthcare then such a system is immoral. Cartels and cartel pricing come to mind as something that would prevent such a system from ever being successfully implemented.
  - SamReidHughes 15y ago
    > The goal of a healthcare system ought to maximizing the health of the people. Everybody disagrees with this. A more plausible statement would be that it ought to offer the best health/price trade-off. But even then only crazy fascists think that would be ideal. Go watch that Sliders episode where the CDC rules America. > The goal of an educational system ought to be maximizing learning. Really? Lots of people would disagree. You've avoided the question of what's worth learning, and I'd say it's far more important that an educational system instill a strong work ethic and a sense of morality that I can tolerate. > Perhaps a free market system (used very loosely) with the goal of pursuing profits would, as a byproduct, maximize the health of the people or of learning. You have created an impossible standard. No system you describe in three words is going to maximize your utility function, especially not one as absurd as yours. Also the free market vs. non-free market dichotomy is completely silly. With all the government funded research and state schools, you can't say that America's universities are a "free market". But they do have an important free market feature that lower-level public schools lack: choice of what school to attend. > It is morally wrong for someone to profit from denying someone else healthcare. I profit by not financing a tunnel through the mountain to the hospital. Sometimes an emergency vehicle takes too long to get to the hospital and this causes the patient to die. How is my behavior morally wrong? > Indeed, in the case of healthcare I have very strong evidence that profit seeking isn't a great motivator. No you don't.
- yequalsx 15y ago
  I don't see how law enforcement is more of a public good than education. There is enough wealth in the country, and enough means to provide decent education to everyone and decent law enforcement. Why is education not a public good when law enforcement is?
  - JoshTriplett 15y ago
    > I don't see how law enforcement is more of a public good than education. There is enough wealth in the country, and enough means to provide decent education to everyone and decent law enforcement. Why is education not a public good when law enforcement is? I don't see how law enforcement is more of a public good than donuts. There is enough wealth in the country, and enough means to provide decent donuts to everyone and decent law enforcement. Why are donuts not a public good when law enforcement is? What, you don't agree with the use of public funds to supply the basic human right of donuts? Too bad, you have to pay anyway whether you like it or not. If that sounds ridiculous to you, you now understand how many people feel about other uses of public funds that you happen to agree with.
    - yequalsx 15y ago
      I think you don't understand what a public good is. A public good is not something that is paid for by public funds. Here is a reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good
      - JoshTriplett 15y ago
        I understand quite well how you'd like to frame the topic, yes. To use the terminology of the page you linked to: education quite clearly qualifies as both rival (since it has non-zero per-student costs) and excludable (since each student participates in education individually), which makes it not a public good by the definition you linked to.
        yequalsx 15y ago
- msluyter 15y ago
  Well, it's arguable whether public education is a public good. Wikipedia says: Law enforcement, streets, libraries, museums, and education are commonly misclassified as public goods, but they are technically classified in economic terms as quasi-public goods because excludability is possible, but they do still fit some of the characteristics of public goods. Since ERs can't turn away indigent patients, health care also has some degree of non-excludability, in practice. Perhaps the question of whether or not it's a public good lies at the heart of the health care debate. Here's the argument in favor: http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2009/08/is-health-care-a-public-good.html http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2009/08/is-health-care-a-public-...
- rayiner 15y ago
  The distinction between private goods and public goods is somewhat artificial. It's more useful to think in terms of externalities. Education doesn't just produce a private benefit, like a piece of cake. It produces a large positive externality.
cwe 15y ago
I'm pretty tired of this argument. Or at least, including education and healthcare in there. Law enforcement is very different than education. A monopoly of the use of force is soooo different than optimal learning. A school that has only profitability as it's goal will be outed as such in a free market, and will not be chosen by consumers that care more about their children's experience. Schools that provide the best long-term experience for the students will have the best profits, no shady practices required. If healthcare really was in a free market, then consumers could choose to avoid the providers that try to bend them over backwards for their own bottomline.
- yequalsx 15y ago
  Phoenix Online provides a very good counterexample to your belief that "A school that has only profitability as it's goal will be outed as such in a free market, and will not be chosen by consumers that care more about their children's experience." Consumers make bad choices. They do so frequently. Besides there is a moral aspect to this. Suppose a school is very bad. People discover this and go to a competitor school. In the time it takes for people to wise up to the school's terribleness damage has been done to society. I don't see how the free market would be any better at determining this than the current system in the U.S. As to healthcare; think cartels. What there is no choice for consumers to choose a provider that doesn't "try to bend them over backwards for their own bottom-line"?
  - crander 15y ago
    One of the things a free-market education system would offer is competition on reputation - allowing customers to choose schools before ever going there based on short feedback loops of many individual customers attending and reporting. This is already done with the public-private college system we have now - and yet you argue it's not possible to determine the quality of a school without going there, finding out it's bad and then being damaged? If you don't understand how markets better allocate resources than top down rationing systems I suggest you go take economics at the nearest community college. One of the concepts in the micro-economics principles class you will learn is that education has positive external benefits (beyond the market). In other words there is a marginal social benefit to education that exceeds the market demand. The best way to address this is not to have public school system monopolies of supply and take the cost to near zero - a much more efficient mechanism is to harness (superior) market resource allocation through demand subsidies.

yummyfajitas 15y ago

It is a bit disingenuous to compare private goods (healthcare, education) with public goods (law enforcement, defense). In the case of public goods, the mechanism of freeloading prevents an optimal level of provisioning of them from a free market. What mechanism prevents competition and free markets from providing good performance in health care or education?

Retric 15y ago
The private vs public good debate is arbitrary. The social cost of free high quality ___ may vary well be negative based on ____. You have costs and both public and private benefits and that my change based on cost over time. EX: There is significant evidence the cheapest way to improve the public education system is to provide free, healthy, and tasty foods to students. Students are both better behaved, have better attendance, and are better able to learn. However, people seem more willing to pay for apple laptops than apples.
- yummyfajitas 15y ago
  A good is either rivalrous and excludible, or it's not. If it is, it's private. If it is neither rivalrous nor excludible, it's public. This has nothing to do with the "social cost" (whatever that is).
  - Retric 15y ago
    Edit: I am aware that's a common economic definition of the term, it's still crap. The definition breaks down for some of the earliest forms of public goods like irrigation systems. Roads and bridges are either 'rivalrous and excludible' or at best a major grey area. So, unless you want to really twist the definition it's simply a poor metric. PS: Digital copy's of music is another area where excludible is debatable. Library books are another example where they are considered a public good even though they are both 'rivalrous and excludible'.
yequalsx 15y ago
The goal of a healthcare system ought to maximizing the health of the people. The goal of an educational system ought to be maximizing learning. Perhaps a free market system (used very loosely) with the goal of pursuing profits would, as a byproduct, maximize the health of the people or of learning. I see no evidence that this is the case or that it should be the case. Indeed, in the case of healthcare I have very strong evidence that profit seeking isn't a great motivator. The U.S. spends by far the most on healthcare as a percent of GDP. It spends far more for certain drugs than socialized systems, has worse health outcomes, and far greater health access inequality. There is also a moral aspect. It is morally wrong for someone to profit from denying someone else healthcare. Unless a free market system can be devised in such a way that maximizing profit = maximizing healthcare then such a system is immoral. Cartels and cartel pricing come to mind as something that would prevent such a system from ever being successfully implemented.
- SamReidHughes 15y ago
  > The goal of a healthcare system ought to maximizing the health of the people. Everybody disagrees with this. A more plausible statement would be that it ought to offer the best health/price trade-off. But even then only crazy fascists think that would be ideal. Go watch that Sliders episode where the CDC rules America. > The goal of an educational system ought to be maximizing learning. Really? Lots of people would disagree. You've avoided the question of what's worth learning, and I'd say it's far more important that an educational system instill a strong work ethic and a sense of morality that I can tolerate. > Perhaps a free market system (used very loosely) with the goal of pursuing profits would, as a byproduct, maximize the health of the people or of learning. You have created an impossible standard. No system you describe in three words is going to maximize your utility function, especially not one as absurd as yours. Also the free market vs. non-free market dichotomy is completely silly. With all the government funded research and state schools, you can't say that America's universities are a "free market". But they do have an important free market feature that lower-level public schools lack: choice of what school to attend. > It is morally wrong for someone to profit from denying someone else healthcare. I profit by not financing a tunnel through the mountain to the hospital. Sometimes an emergency vehicle takes too long to get to the hospital and this causes the patient to die. How is my behavior morally wrong? > Indeed, in the case of healthcare I have very strong evidence that profit seeking isn't a great motivator. No you don't.
yequalsx 15y ago
I don't see how law enforcement is more of a public good than education. There is enough wealth in the country, and enough means to provide decent education to everyone and decent law enforcement. Why is education not a public good when law enforcement is?
- JoshTriplett 15y ago
  > I don't see how law enforcement is more of a public good than education. There is enough wealth in the country, and enough means to provide decent education to everyone and decent law enforcement. Why is education not a public good when law enforcement is? I don't see how law enforcement is more of a public good than donuts. There is enough wealth in the country, and enough means to provide decent donuts to everyone and decent law enforcement. Why are donuts not a public good when law enforcement is? What, you don't agree with the use of public funds to supply the basic human right of donuts? Too bad, you have to pay anyway whether you like it or not. If that sounds ridiculous to you, you now understand how many people feel about other uses of public funds that you happen to agree with.
  - yequalsx 15y ago
    I think you don't understand what a public good is. A public good is not something that is paid for by public funds. Here is a reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good
    - JoshTriplett 15y ago
      I understand quite well how you'd like to frame the topic, yes. To use the terminology of the page you linked to: education quite clearly qualifies as both rival (since it has non-zero per-student costs) and excludable (since each student participates in education individually), which makes it not a public good by the definition you linked to.
      - yequalsx 15y ago
msluyter 15y ago
Well, it's arguable whether public education is a public good. Wikipedia says: Law enforcement, streets, libraries, museums, and education are commonly misclassified as public goods, but they are technically classified in economic terms as quasi-public goods because excludability is possible, but they do still fit some of the characteristics of public goods. Since ERs can't turn away indigent patients, health care also has some degree of non-excludability, in practice. Perhaps the question of whether or not it's a public good lies at the heart of the health care debate. Here's the argument in favor: http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2009/08/is-health-care-a-public-good.html http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2009/08/is-health-care-a-public-...
rayiner 15y ago
The distinction between private goods and public goods is somewhat artificial. It's more useful to think in terms of externalities. Education doesn't just produce a private benefit, like a piece of cake. It produces a large positive externality.

cwe 15y ago

I'm pretty tired of this argument. Or at least, including education and healthcare in there. Law enforcement is very different than education. A monopoly of the use of force is soooo different than optimal learning. A school that has only profitability as it's goal will be outed as such in a free market, and will not be chosen by consumers that care more about their children's experience. Schools that provide the best long-term experience for the students will have the best profits, no shady practices required. If healthcare really was in a free market, then consumers could choose to avoid the providers that try to bend them over backwards for their own bottomline.

yequalsx 15y ago
Phoenix Online provides a very good counterexample to your belief that "A school that has only profitability as it's goal will be outed as such in a free market, and will not be chosen by consumers that care more about their children's experience." Consumers make bad choices. They do so frequently. Besides there is a moral aspect to this. Suppose a school is very bad. People discover this and go to a competitor school. In the time it takes for people to wise up to the school's terribleness damage has been done to society. I don't see how the free market would be any better at determining this than the current system in the U.S. As to healthcare; think cartels. What there is no choice for consumers to choose a provider that doesn't "try to bend them over backwards for their own bottom-line"?
- crander 15y ago
  One of the things a free-market education system would offer is competition on reputation - allowing customers to choose schools before ever going there based on short feedback loops of many individual customers attending and reporting. This is already done with the public-private college system we have now - and yet you argue it's not possible to determine the quality of a school without going there, finding out it's bad and then being damaged? If you don't understand how markets better allocate resources than top down rationing systems I suggest you go take economics at the nearest community college. One of the concepts in the micro-economics principles class you will learn is that education has positive external benefits (beyond the market). In other words there is a marginal social benefit to education that exceeds the market demand. The best way to address this is not to have public school system monopolies of supply and take the cost to near zero - a much more efficient mechanism is to harness (superior) market resource allocation through demand subsidies.