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Ha, my reading comprehension fail - I missed that GP explicitly said food. I apologise for saying you were straw-manning, your comment was apposite. I think w

by psd1 3y ago

Ha, my reading comprehension fail - I missed that GP explicitly said food. I apologise for saying you were straw-manning, your comment was apposite. I think where you and I differ is that you define action by any organisation, be it pharma corp or city government, to be ipso facto collectivist, whereas I will characterise actions by organisations and individuals as individualistic or collectivist on a case-by-case basis. I agree with the principle of individual agency in the default case, but town planning is a prime example where this doesn't work - absent a population with a strong collectivist culture. I've spent time in a rural part of Spain and, please know, the towns are a mess - traffic arteries go down to one lane and detour around houses that someone decided to build where they pleased. It only takes one individual to ruin a good thing. In terms of healthcare, your thesis would stand a hundred years ago, when medical skill was the prime differentiator and drugs were simple and cheap. That is not the case today. For any given condition, the treatment is often a monopoly or has little competition. Abuse of monopoly - a fundamentally individualistic behaviour, as I see it - is one of the elements that makes American healthcare such an international joke. These companies have a captive market, and the cost of entry is enormous. Respectfully, the idea that what you need is _more_ individualism does not stand up to inspection. You may have individualism as your highest value, in which case avoidable death in penury is a price you are willing to pay. Most of the world finds that incomprehensible. The common solution in other countries is single-payer. This has the disadvantage that it levies the healthy to pay for the sick, but the advantage that the levy is affordable. It's not as if there is no benefit to the healthy - it is valuable in itself to live free from medical worry. Did you know that the public cost of the US healthcare system per capita vastly exceeds that of every other nation, despite Americans _also_ paying thousands every year in private insurance? Your principle is a very expensive one. And it's not as if pharma is struggling in Europe. Strange hill to literally die on.

pdonis 3y ago
> you define action by any organisation, be it pharma corp or city government, to be ipso facto collectivist No, I define actions that are dictated from the top down based on collective information (such as population statistics) to be collectivist. Of course not all actions taken by large organizations are collectivist in this sense. Nor are all actions taken by individuals not collectivist in this sense. > It only takes one individual to ruin a good thing. A good thing from whose perspective? If everyone in the rural village you describe agrees that something is not a good thing, they should be able to work that out at the individual level. If not everyone agrees, then on what basis are you claiming that it's a bad thing and should be stopped? Of course individuals take many actions that affect others. But that doesn't mean you need to be "collectivist" to manage that. In the vast majority of actual cases, individual behavior is regulated by individual interactions with other individuals. > Abuse of monopoly - a fundamentally individualistic behaviour, as I see it I disagree. If a monopoly exists, you have to first ask where it came from. In the case of health care, it came from government regulation. (In fact, historically, this is almost always where monopolies come from. The original meaning of the term "monopoly" was a royal grant of the exclusive right to sell a particular commodity.) And what was the government regulation based on? Collectivism--a top down dictation of rules based on collective information. So abuse of monopoly is a consequence of collectivism. Of course the individual people who head the corporations that are taking advantage of these government granted monopolies are acting individually. But there are always individuals who want to abuse power and take advantage of others. The question is not how to get rid of such people but how to limit the damage they can do. And collectivism does not do that--it does the opposite, by doing things like granting such people monopolist positions where their abuses can cost billions or trillions of dollars and affect an entire country, instead of them being limited to only affecting the relatively small number of people they directly interact with. > You may have individualism as your highest value I have said no such thing. Individualism is a value, but it is not the only value. Americans also value patriotism, meaning the willingness to make personal sacrifices for the good of the country. We just often disagree with people in other countries about which personal sacrifices are actually worth making for that goal. Our deep suspicion of collectivism is part of that: based on human history, we have a deep distrust of the idea that top-down dictation of rules based on collective information can improve society. We would much rather let individuals work things out by individual, bottom-up interaction, holding each other accountable for the impacts our actions have on others. > Did you know that the public cost of the US healthcare system per capita vastly exceeds that of every other nation, despite Americans _also_ paying thousands every year in private insurance? Yes. I just disagree with your contention that this is due to too much individualism. It's not. It's due to too much collectivism. See above.
- psd1 3y ago
  This is a prank. Well played, I guess, but I didn't like it.

by psd1 3y ago

pdonis 3y ago

> you define action by any organisation, be it pharma corp or city government, to be ipso facto collectivist No, I define actions that are dictated from the top down based on collective information (such as population statistics) to be collectivist. Of course not all actions taken by large organizations are collectivist in this sense. Nor are all actions taken by individuals not collectivist in this sense. > It only takes one individual to ruin a good thing. A good thing from whose perspective? If everyone in the rural village you describe agrees that something is not a good thing, they should be able to work that out at the individual level. If not everyone agrees, then on what basis are you claiming that it's a bad thing and should be stopped? Of course individuals take many actions that affect others. But that doesn't mean you need to be "collectivist" to manage that. In the vast majority of actual cases, individual behavior is regulated by individual interactions with other individuals. > Abuse of monopoly - a fundamentally individualistic behaviour, as I see it I disagree. If a monopoly exists, you have to first ask where it came from. In the case of health care, it came from government regulation. (In fact, historically, this is almost always where monopolies come from. The original meaning of the term "monopoly" was a royal grant of the exclusive right to sell a particular commodity.) And what was the government regulation based on? Collectivism--a top down dictation of rules based on collective information. So abuse of monopoly is a consequence of collectivism. Of course the individual people who head the corporations that are taking advantage of these government granted monopolies are acting individually. But there are always individuals who want to abuse power and take advantage of others. The question is not how to get rid of such people but how to limit the damage they can do. And collectivism does not do that--it does the opposite, by doing things like granting such people monopolist positions where their abuses can cost billions or trillions of dollars and affect an entire country, instead of them being limited to only affecting the relatively small number of people they directly interact with. > You may have individualism as your highest value I have said no such thing. Individualism is a value, but it is not the only value. Americans also value patriotism, meaning the willingness to make personal sacrifices for the good of the country. We just often disagree with people in other countries about which personal sacrifices are actually worth making for that goal. Our deep suspicion of collectivism is part of that: based on human history, we have a deep distrust of the idea that top-down dictation of rules based on collective information can improve society. We would much rather let individuals work things out by individual, bottom-up interaction, holding each other accountable for the impacts our actions have on others. > Did you know that the public cost of the US healthcare system per capita vastly exceeds that of every other nation, despite Americans _also_ paying thousands every year in private insurance? Yes. I just disagree with your contention that this is due to too much individualism. It's not. It's due to too much collectivism. See above.

psd1 3y ago
This is a prank. Well played, I guess, but I didn't like it.