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I don’t think it’s smart to proactively back track without being very careful. One thing that’s needed is for corporate death to be allowed to occur. Right now

I don’t think it’s smart to proactively back track without being very careful. One thing that’s needed is for corporate death to be allowed to occur. Right now the downsides of risky behavior is bailed out for large enough risk. Then the companies that fail aren’t robust and the ones that don’t are but bailouts let non robust companies keep going. Otherwise “robustness” is a property without a measure which means that you’ll get robustness theater where actions are being taken in the name of being robust but it’s not actually making a difference at best and could be making things worse. As for society itself being robust, it’s a much harder property. Being robust is nice but no one actually wants to live in a metered society where there’s insufficient resources - they’d generally rather kill for resources greedily and let others fail without helping them. That’s why socialized healthcare struggles - while it guarantees a minimum of care for everybody, the care provided has longer wait times and most people are not willing to wait their turn.

WalterBright 2y ago
The usual cycle for business in a free market is it appears young and fresh, lacking any parasites. It grows rapidly, displacing existing mature businesses. Then, it accumulates bureaucracy and parasites, becoming less and less efficient, strangled by bloat and inability to adapt, and slides into bankruptcy, replaced by the next generation of new businesses. The remains of the business are then reallocated to the next generation of businesses. (This is quite unlike the common view that businesses inevitably grow to take over the world.) I.e. business is much like a living organism. Problems set in when the government bails out failing businesses. Even worse are government "businesses". They are not allowed to fail, and the inefficiencies, parasites, corruption, grow and grow. When can you remember a government agency being abolished? Eventually, the government will collapse.
- normie3000 2y ago
  > When can you remember a government agency being abolished? In the UK the last I specifically remember is DFID, which shut down in 2020.
- vlovich123 2y ago
  > Even worse are government "businesses". They are not allowed to fail, and the inefficiencies, parasites, corruption, grow and grow. When can you remember a government agency being abolished? In Commonwealth countries and the UK itself there are plenty of businesses called “crown corporations” which are owned by the government. Change in attitudes towards more liberalism led governments to deregulation and selling off bits and pieces or the entire corporation. Here are some Canadian examples: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-post-it-innovapost-sci-logistics-selling-off-e-commerce-1.7091267 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-post-it-innovapost-s... https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/march-2024/mulroney-welfare-state/ https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/march-2024/mulroney... America is a relatively young country and has very peculiar philosophies sometimes not found in the rest of the world. Be very careful extrapolating an American perspective abroad or as capturing some elemental truth of the universe.
- LorenPechtel 2y ago
  Not just government agencies. Everybody wants their finger in the pie to justify their job. And every politician wants to do things their voters like. I'm thinking of a reasonably recent article I saw that was talking about helping people navigate the 30+ assistance programs they might be eligible for. There's your problem right there--there should not be 30+ programs doing approximately the same thing! That's an awful lot of duplication of effort. Or look at what happens with business licenses. Two things I see: 1) They want their $ from entities that shouldn't really be "businesses" in the first place. Around here an awful lot of licensed professionals have to have a "business" license--never mind that the nature of their work means they're inside some other entity that actually is reasonable to license. And that means a sales tax registration which has an annual minimum that such people almost certainly will never reach. (Sales tax includes use tax--but it's their office that actually engages in such transactions.) 2) Businesses that perform their work on-site have to have business licenses for every license area of the metropolitan area they work in. Hey, guys, get together and define the superset of the rules of your area and allow someone to get a license that covers the whole area based on that superset. The Republicans are "right" in that we have far too many regulations. But they are very wrong in wanting to take an axe to them--most of the rules are individually sensible (and when they produce nonsense it's often situations where it's not worthwhile to special case), there is a horrible problem of duplication of effort and fingers in the pie. It's not chopping that's needed, it's organization.
fireflash38 2y ago
One of the primary reasons people bail out companies are the knock-on effects. People losing jobs, etc. If society itself is robust enough to cover for people in those situations, we could let companies fail far more.
- ghaff 2y ago
  There's a sentiment on here often that, even if a company has been essentially blown up by technology or market change, they should have transformed themselves to adapt. But that implies they probably needed to rototill their workforce in any case. At some point, you're probably better off just declaring bankruptcy and starting fresh or letting someone else do so.
- nradov 2y ago
  True, but for some companies there are also national security concerns. If we lose the domestic supply chain for certain items then that limits our freedom of action and leaves us vulnerable to supply disruptions.
  - AdrianB1 2y ago
    If you depend on a single company to supply certain items, you have a big problem already. Pouring money in that company will mostly help the executive bonuses, not the national security.
- karmonhardan 2y ago
  People los jobs anyway, from the knock-on effects of the bail out. The bail out is more about controlling who loses jobs.
wongarsu 2y ago
In a free market economy we shouldn't demand robustness, we should create a system that promotes and rewards robustness. A strict commitment against bail-outs would certainly be part of that. Companies (and private people) can decide to lower their risk exposure (at the cost of efficiency/profit) or take out insurance against risks. And if they go the insurance route they have to assess how likely their insurance is to go insolvent at the next insurance event. That's how you reward those that are actually resilient. Healthcare is more complicated. It can never work as an efficient free market since nobody goes comparison shopping for the hospital with the best value-for-money when they have a car crash. That's why socialized healthcare achieves much better results per dollar spent. But it's often hamstrung by attempts at efficiency. I think a better societal example is disaster relief: helping people back up after they have been hit by a hurricane is the humane thing to do, but how much is that encouraging people to settle in high risk areas with insufficient precautions?
- whatshisface 2y ago
  I don't see why people can't comparisons shop for hospitals before they get in a car crash. Unless I am literally unconscious I would go to the hospital in my area that I trust the most, and I have plans for which urgent care, clinics and hospitals I would take someone else to if they needed a driver. In fact I think a pretty small fraction of patients arrive at the ER unconscious.
  - RandomLensman 2y ago
    How would develop the "trust" and why would it be correct? How would you diagnose yourself or others before selecting a hospital if those have different trust for different things? How do you balance urgency vs different trust levels if the hospitals are not all the same distance?
    - mikeyouse 2y ago
      It also ignores that huge swaths of the country have no choice at all and the only hospital within a hundred miles is only viable due to huge Federal subsidies. We’ve been helping a close family member navigate that scenario and sure, he could vote with his dollars but it would involve a three hour drive to a neighboring state for an 80-yr old. I’d rather just enforce minimum quality standards on everyone like most other civilized countries rather then relying on “the free market” which so far in my experience has just led to PE goliaths swallowing entire health systems to focus on bill collection and union busting.
RandomLensman 2y ago
Socialized healthcare seems to kind of work in many developed economies - where does it struggle and by what metrics regarding the health outcomes?
- AdrianB1 2y ago
  I would love to see a good proof that it works, all the discussions, rumors and anecdotal evidence suggest the contrary. I am open to learn the truth, with hard numbers. Very long waiting times are the first thing that comes to mind regarding such failures, with UK and Canada at the top spot. It is not uncommon to die waiting for a consultation to be diagnosed in 1-2 years.
  - RandomLensman 2y ago
    I don't think you'd see that kind of waiting times in Germany, for example (but Germnay also is at the high end of healthcare as %GDP). Edit: I would also add that it is probably better to look at health outcomes, e.g., survival rates for cancer.
  - Adrox 2y ago
    What do you wanna good proof of? Life expectancy? What population health metrics do you want? Almost all EU countries with socialized healthcare beat US and even UK. Canada is more near EU level. Do you also want US anedoctal evidence? What’s the consultation time for diagnose in the US for people without insurance/ insurance doesn’t cover/insurance says it doesn’t cover/no money?? Never? How does that affect the average/mean? Life Expectancy: Italy 83.7; Spain 83.7; France 83.3; Sweden 83.3; Canada 82.6; Portugal 82.4; Germany 81.4; United Kingdom 81.3; United States 79.3; Poland 78.6; https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-unwpp?tab=table&time=latest&showSelectionOnlyInTable=1&country=DEU~FRA~HUN~ITA~PRT~POL~ESP~SWE~GBR~USA~CAN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-unwpp?tab...
- QuiteSocialized 2y ago
  Sometimes insufficient capacity and long wait times can be the result of a government's agenda. Here in BC, we have (mandatory) auto insurance provided by a crown corporation with a monopoly. The neo-liberal government before the current more socialist leadership hated it and wanted desperately to privatize car insurance. The problem is that ICBC is dearly loved by most residents here. There is a playbook for this problem. They appointed a fairly incompetent civil servant to run things, and also started raiding the fund, to the tune of billions of dollars. After about a decade of this, the company was a mess and nearly broke. They were forced to raise rates. The premier characterized the situation as a "dumpster fire" and editorials started popping up arguing for privatization. That government was defeated, and the new leadership sorted it all out. Within a couple of years, drivers in BC were getting cheques in the mail because ICBC was making too much profit. There are powerful interests very interested in getting a piece of healthcare in Canada, and some of the shenanigans you see here smell a lot like a set-up to make things become broken enough that the voters will demand privatization. Just for one example, in the last few years staffing agencies have been hiring away nurses by offering higher wages and then contracting them back to the health authorities at ~$130/hr. This has cost billions to taxpayers and lead to great resentment within the regular staff. Some folks somewhere allowed this to happen. Why?
yuliyp 2y ago
The problem with this is principal-agent problems. The owners of the business don't want it to fail. The people working there want to make money. They generally live their life and enjoy what money they make before the chickens come home to roost. It can be hard for the owners to realize the business is fragile before that fragility becomes apparent. In the mean time the people running the business made a bunch of money, potentially jumped to other jobs or retired or died. And the owners could have sold when the business was propped up by unknown fragility. Human lives are too short for these kinds of feedback loops to be all that effective.

WalterBright 2y ago

The usual cycle for business in a free market is it appears young and fresh, lacking any parasites. It grows rapidly, displacing existing mature businesses. Then, it accumulates bureaucracy and parasites, becoming less and less efficient, strangled by bloat and inability to adapt, and slides into bankruptcy, replaced by the next generation of new businesses. The remains of the business are then reallocated to the next generation of businesses. (This is quite unlike the common view that businesses inevitably grow to take over the world.) I.e. business is much like a living organism. Problems set in when the government bails out failing businesses. Even worse are government "businesses". They are not allowed to fail, and the inefficiencies, parasites, corruption, grow and grow. When can you remember a government agency being abolished? Eventually, the government will collapse.

normie3000 2y ago
> When can you remember a government agency being abolished? In the UK the last I specifically remember is DFID, which shut down in 2020.
vlovich123 2y ago
> Even worse are government "businesses". They are not allowed to fail, and the inefficiencies, parasites, corruption, grow and grow. When can you remember a government agency being abolished? In Commonwealth countries and the UK itself there are plenty of businesses called “crown corporations” which are owned by the government. Change in attitudes towards more liberalism led governments to deregulation and selling off bits and pieces or the entire corporation. Here are some Canadian examples: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-post-it-innovapost-sci-logistics-selling-off-e-commerce-1.7091267 https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-post-it-innovapost-s... https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/march-2024/mulroney-welfare-state/ https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/march-2024/mulroney... America is a relatively young country and has very peculiar philosophies sometimes not found in the rest of the world. Be very careful extrapolating an American perspective abroad or as capturing some elemental truth of the universe.
LorenPechtel 2y ago
Not just government agencies. Everybody wants their finger in the pie to justify their job. And every politician wants to do things their voters like. I'm thinking of a reasonably recent article I saw that was talking about helping people navigate the 30+ assistance programs they might be eligible for. There's your problem right there--there should not be 30+ programs doing approximately the same thing! That's an awful lot of duplication of effort. Or look at what happens with business licenses. Two things I see: 1) They want their $ from entities that shouldn't really be "businesses" in the first place. Around here an awful lot of licensed professionals have to have a "business" license--never mind that the nature of their work means they're inside some other entity that actually is reasonable to license. And that means a sales tax registration which has an annual minimum that such people almost certainly will never reach. (Sales tax includes use tax--but it's their office that actually engages in such transactions.) 2) Businesses that perform their work on-site have to have business licenses for every license area of the metropolitan area they work in. Hey, guys, get together and define the superset of the rules of your area and allow someone to get a license that covers the whole area based on that superset. The Republicans are "right" in that we have far too many regulations. But they are very wrong in wanting to take an axe to them--most of the rules are individually sensible (and when they produce nonsense it's often situations where it's not worthwhile to special case), there is a horrible problem of duplication of effort and fingers in the pie. It's not chopping that's needed, it's organization.

fireflash38 2y ago

One of the primary reasons people bail out companies are the knock-on effects. People losing jobs, etc. If society itself is robust enough to cover for people in those situations, we could let companies fail far more.

ghaff 2y ago
There's a sentiment on here often that, even if a company has been essentially blown up by technology or market change, they should have transformed themselves to adapt. But that implies they probably needed to rototill their workforce in any case. At some point, you're probably better off just declaring bankruptcy and starting fresh or letting someone else do so.
nradov 2y ago
True, but for some companies there are also national security concerns. If we lose the domestic supply chain for certain items then that limits our freedom of action and leaves us vulnerable to supply disruptions.
- AdrianB1 2y ago
  If you depend on a single company to supply certain items, you have a big problem already. Pouring money in that company will mostly help the executive bonuses, not the national security.
karmonhardan 2y ago
People los jobs anyway, from the knock-on effects of the bail out. The bail out is more about controlling who loses jobs.

wongarsu 2y ago

In a free market economy we shouldn't demand robustness, we should create a system that promotes and rewards robustness. A strict commitment against bail-outs would certainly be part of that. Companies (and private people) can decide to lower their risk exposure (at the cost of efficiency/profit) or take out insurance against risks. And if they go the insurance route they have to assess how likely their insurance is to go insolvent at the next insurance event. That's how you reward those that are actually resilient. Healthcare is more complicated. It can never work as an efficient free market since nobody goes comparison shopping for the hospital with the best value-for-money when they have a car crash. That's why socialized healthcare achieves much better results per dollar spent. But it's often hamstrung by attempts at efficiency. I think a better societal example is disaster relief: helping people back up after they have been hit by a hurricane is the humane thing to do, but how much is that encouraging people to settle in high risk areas with insufficient precautions?

whatshisface 2y ago
I don't see why people can't comparisons shop for hospitals before they get in a car crash. Unless I am literally unconscious I would go to the hospital in my area that I trust the most, and I have plans for which urgent care, clinics and hospitals I would take someone else to if they needed a driver. In fact I think a pretty small fraction of patients arrive at the ER unconscious.
- RandomLensman 2y ago
  How would develop the "trust" and why would it be correct? How would you diagnose yourself or others before selecting a hospital if those have different trust for different things? How do you balance urgency vs different trust levels if the hospitals are not all the same distance?
  - mikeyouse 2y ago
    It also ignores that huge swaths of the country have no choice at all and the only hospital within a hundred miles is only viable due to huge Federal subsidies. We’ve been helping a close family member navigate that scenario and sure, he could vote with his dollars but it would involve a three hour drive to a neighboring state for an 80-yr old. I’d rather just enforce minimum quality standards on everyone like most other civilized countries rather then relying on “the free market” which so far in my experience has just led to PE goliaths swallowing entire health systems to focus on bill collection and union busting.

RandomLensman 2y ago

Socialized healthcare seems to kind of work in many developed economies - where does it struggle and by what metrics regarding the health outcomes?

AdrianB1 2y ago
I would love to see a good proof that it works, all the discussions, rumors and anecdotal evidence suggest the contrary. I am open to learn the truth, with hard numbers. Very long waiting times are the first thing that comes to mind regarding such failures, with UK and Canada at the top spot. It is not uncommon to die waiting for a consultation to be diagnosed in 1-2 years.
- RandomLensman 2y ago
  I don't think you'd see that kind of waiting times in Germany, for example (but Germnay also is at the high end of healthcare as %GDP). Edit: I would also add that it is probably better to look at health outcomes, e.g., survival rates for cancer.
- Adrox 2y ago
  What do you wanna good proof of? Life expectancy? What population health metrics do you want? Almost all EU countries with socialized healthcare beat US and even UK. Canada is more near EU level. Do you also want US anedoctal evidence? What’s the consultation time for diagnose in the US for people without insurance/ insurance doesn’t cover/insurance says it doesn’t cover/no money?? Never? How does that affect the average/mean? Life Expectancy: Italy 83.7; Spain 83.7; France 83.3; Sweden 83.3; Canada 82.6; Portugal 82.4; Germany 81.4; United Kingdom 81.3; United States 79.3; Poland 78.6; https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-unwpp?tab=table&time=latest&showSelectionOnlyInTable=1&country=DEU~FRA~HUN~ITA~PRT~POL~ESP~SWE~GBR~USA~CAN https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-unwpp?tab...
QuiteSocialized 2y ago
Sometimes insufficient capacity and long wait times can be the result of a government's agenda. Here in BC, we have (mandatory) auto insurance provided by a crown corporation with a monopoly. The neo-liberal government before the current more socialist leadership hated it and wanted desperately to privatize car insurance. The problem is that ICBC is dearly loved by most residents here. There is a playbook for this problem. They appointed a fairly incompetent civil servant to run things, and also started raiding the fund, to the tune of billions of dollars. After about a decade of this, the company was a mess and nearly broke. They were forced to raise rates. The premier characterized the situation as a "dumpster fire" and editorials started popping up arguing for privatization. That government was defeated, and the new leadership sorted it all out. Within a couple of years, drivers in BC were getting cheques in the mail because ICBC was making too much profit. There are powerful interests very interested in getting a piece of healthcare in Canada, and some of the shenanigans you see here smell a lot like a set-up to make things become broken enough that the voters will demand privatization. Just for one example, in the last few years staffing agencies have been hiring away nurses by offering higher wages and then contracting them back to the health authorities at ~$130/hr. This has cost billions to taxpayers and lead to great resentment within the regular staff. Some folks somewhere allowed this to happen. Why?

yuliyp 2y ago

The problem with this is principal-agent problems. The owners of the business don't want it to fail. The people working there want to make money. They generally live their life and enjoy what money they make before the chickens come home to roost. It can be hard for the owners to realize the business is fragile before that fragility becomes apparent. In the mean time the people running the business made a bunch of money, potentially jumped to other jobs or retired or died. And the owners could have sold when the business was propped up by unknown fragility. Human lives are too short for these kinds of feedback loops to be all that effective.