5 ms·

Where do you draw the line? What shouldn't we socialize?

aaronblohowiak 12y ago
Things that don't have a natural monopoly.
toomuchtodo 12y ago
Excellent question. Anything that doesn't have a natural monopoly. I can say with certainty that the following should be socialized or delivered in non-profit ways: * Water * Sewer * Power * Internet * Healthcare * Fire * Police * Roads * Education (added per /u/CodeMage) Feel free to chime in if you can add anything I forgot.
- josh2600 12y ago
  Not a bad list. Cheers. I'll note that we should have explicit public subsidies for Internet and that I would much prefer to have public networks with private operators (to my mind that's heaven for competitive markets but politically impossible in the US).
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    I completely agree with you. The last mile should be public, with anyone permitted to provide service to customers (similar to the old DSL/CLEC/ILEC model).
  - tacticus 12y ago
    Or you could have public last miles with openaccess requirements providing competition on the parts that can see competition.
- CodeMage 12y ago
  Excellent list. I'd like to add education to it.
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  I'd just like to point out that Adam Smith himself (the "Carl Marx of Capitalism") agrees with you for fire, police, and roads at the very least (I haven't read everything he wrote). If he were born today rather than in 1723 I suspect his list would look very much like yours.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    I will take that as a compliment! Thank you!
- malkia 12y ago
  Prisons Orphanages Mental institutions Defense
- notdonspaulding 12y ago
  Education, Police, Fire, Healthcare do not have natural monopolies. Still a good list to have around so we can argue about where the line should be drawn. Kudos!
  - arjunnarayan 12y ago
    Education doesn't, but police and fire definitely do: police because beat cops reduce crime for everyone, so they're a natural monopoly. Fire as well, since stopping houses burning down helps stop the entire neighborhood (especially when you have close-together row houses) burning down. Healthcare is arguably a public good, at least as far as vaccinations and contagious diseases go, since herd immunity is a large way to fight them (especially for contagious diseases for which we have 80%-90% effective vaccines). Not so sure about other illnesses (like cancer) though. I'm personally for socialized medicine for other reasons (humanitarian), but I agree that the natural monopoly argument is not applicable there.
    - Tossrock 12y ago
      A natural monopoly doesn't mean it provides a public good, it means that a single entity can provide the service more efficiently than multiple competing entities.
      - arjunnarayan 12y ago
        Yeah you're right. I'm conflating the two and being confused. I apologize.
  - altcognito 12y ago
    Healthcare is a highly imperfect market, and that's what makes it subject to either huge amounts of regulation, or outright external management. Consumers are very ill informed. Ccosts are not displayed, treatments options are not well defined, and knowing all of the options and understand them requires more time and education than is reasonable for most cases. Education is tricky, and honestly, I don't know any better than the next guy how to solve the issue. What's important to one parent may not be important to another. Second language? Art? Music? Sports? Recess? Lectures? History? Religion? Critical thinking? What outcomes are important? Good test scores? Writing?
- Silhouette 12y ago
  It's interesting that you seem to view providing Internet access as a natural monopoly. While (from what I see as an outsider) it seems to be common in the US for households to have only one practical ISP available, that is certainly not the only model possible. For example, here in the UK, we have the formerly nationalised telephone network provider required to allow individual ISPs access to key parts of its infrastructure via local loop unbundling, so those ISPs compete for the contracts with individual customers. And while that infrastructure is indeed common and so in a sense a monopoly at that level, there are also multiple cable companies and mobile networks with completely independent infrastructure all the way down. There have even been a couple of impressive success stories where installing high speed broadband infrastructure was too expensive or risky in a certain geographic area for any of the big commercial providers to take it on but the local community devised their own solution, sometimes even finishing up with a better connection than what most of us get in big cities. In other news, prices for Internet access in the UK seem to be dramatically cheaper than most places in the US.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    > And while that infrastructure is indeed common and so in a sense a monopoly at that level, there are also multiple cable companies and mobile networks with completely independent infrastructure all the way down. There have even been a couple of impressive success stories where installing high speed broadband infrastructure was too expensive or risky in a certain geographic area for any of the big commercial providers to take it on but the local community devised their own solution, sometimes even finishing up with a better connection than what most of us get in big cities. This is what I'm advocating for. A public last mile that any service provider can use.
  - tomp 12y ago
    What you describe is the definition of a natural monopoly. However, the monopoly comes from physical wires, not whatever flows over them. So, the infrastructure should be a public good (most infrastructure, really, not just wires, since it's more efficient and less wasteful to build a single network and keep it in excellent condition than to build multiple networks providing the same service at a lower quality), but whatever flows over it can be provided privately and competitively (also, each ISP would have to build it's own servers/routers, etc.)
TeMPOraL 12y ago
Things that work better when they are socialized than when they are privatized. Like healthcare.
- cookiecaper 12y ago
  Health care only works "better" when socialized if you believe that health care really should be so expensive that they have to print extra money explicitly to pay for it. There's no reason that has to be an integral property of health care. Turns out that most of the time, we don't need hospitals the size of college campuses (incidentally another thing that is completely unaffordable). The reason things cost so much is because true costs are obscured, just as they would be in a socialized system, by insurance. IMO non-catastrophic insurance should be abolished, the government should overcome the supply chain cycle ("Sorry, I have to charge $500 for this MRI because this machine cost me $4 million") by producing its own functional medical equipment and selling it at or under cost, and health providers need to get back to reality and charge face rates that real people can pay directly. And we all need to come to terms with the fact that some of the extravagance probably needs to be toned down.
  - hga 12y ago
    "Turns out that most of the time, we don't need hospitals the size of college campuses (incidentally another thing that is completely unaffordable)." However people are not willing to accept the consequences of hospitals that can't surge in catastrophes. When an EF-5 tornado hit my city 3 years ago, it took out one of our two hospital complexes. Things got ... rather intense at the other (http://stormdoctor.blogspot.com/2011/06/first-response-mode-may-22-2011-joplin.html http://stormdoctor.blogspot.com/2011/06/first-response-mode-...) but it being big, and stocked with otherwise excess inventory of all sorts of things, kept the death toll at ~160 instead of a likely 1,000 or so.
Iftheshoefits 12y ago
I draw the line at things that people need in order to fully participate in society. If a good or service doesn't meet that threshold, a private market only solution is likely just fine. Otherwise there ought to be at least some socialized option available. My list would include: non-elective healthcare, food, housing (same as for food), electricity, water, local/regional transportation (e.g. for commuting to work), internet access and possibly basic internet-capable mobile phones. Basically "natural monopolies" are certainly all candidates for complete socialization.

Things that don't have a natural monopoly.

Excellent question. Anything that doesn't have a natural monopoly. I can say with certainty that the following should be socialized or delivered in non-profit ways: * Water * Sewer * Power * Internet * Healthcare * Fire * Police * Roads * Education (added per /u/CodeMage) Feel free to chime in if you can add anything I forgot.

josh2600 12y ago
Not a bad list. Cheers. I'll note that we should have explicit public subsidies for Internet and that I would much prefer to have public networks with private operators (to my mind that's heaven for competitive markets but politically impossible in the US).
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  I completely agree with you. The last mile should be public, with anyone permitted to provide service to customers (similar to the old DSL/CLEC/ILEC model).
- tacticus 12y ago
  Or you could have public last miles with openaccess requirements providing competition on the parts that can see competition.
CodeMage 12y ago
Excellent list. I'd like to add education to it.
jjoonathan 12y ago
I'd just like to point out that Adam Smith himself (the "Carl Marx of Capitalism") agrees with you for fire, police, and roads at the very least (I haven't read everything he wrote). If he were born today rather than in 1723 I suspect his list would look very much like yours.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  I will take that as a compliment! Thank you!
malkia 12y ago
Prisons Orphanages Mental institutions Defense
notdonspaulding 12y ago
Education, Police, Fire, Healthcare do not have natural monopolies. Still a good list to have around so we can argue about where the line should be drawn. Kudos!
- arjunnarayan 12y ago
  Education doesn't, but police and fire definitely do: police because beat cops reduce crime for everyone, so they're a natural monopoly. Fire as well, since stopping houses burning down helps stop the entire neighborhood (especially when you have close-together row houses) burning down. Healthcare is arguably a public good, at least as far as vaccinations and contagious diseases go, since herd immunity is a large way to fight them (especially for contagious diseases for which we have 80%-90% effective vaccines). Not so sure about other illnesses (like cancer) though. I'm personally for socialized medicine for other reasons (humanitarian), but I agree that the natural monopoly argument is not applicable there.
  - Tossrock 12y ago
    A natural monopoly doesn't mean it provides a public good, it means that a single entity can provide the service more efficiently than multiple competing entities.
    - arjunnarayan 12y ago
      Yeah you're right. I'm conflating the two and being confused. I apologize.
- altcognito 12y ago
  Healthcare is a highly imperfect market, and that's what makes it subject to either huge amounts of regulation, or outright external management. Consumers are very ill informed. Ccosts are not displayed, treatments options are not well defined, and knowing all of the options and understand them requires more time and education than is reasonable for most cases. Education is tricky, and honestly, I don't know any better than the next guy how to solve the issue. What's important to one parent may not be important to another. Second language? Art? Music? Sports? Recess? Lectures? History? Religion? Critical thinking? What outcomes are important? Good test scores? Writing?
Silhouette 12y ago
It's interesting that you seem to view providing Internet access as a natural monopoly. While (from what I see as an outsider) it seems to be common in the US for households to have only one practical ISP available, that is certainly not the only model possible. For example, here in the UK, we have the formerly nationalised telephone network provider required to allow individual ISPs access to key parts of its infrastructure via local loop unbundling, so those ISPs compete for the contracts with individual customers. And while that infrastructure is indeed common and so in a sense a monopoly at that level, there are also multiple cable companies and mobile networks with completely independent infrastructure all the way down. There have even been a couple of impressive success stories where installing high speed broadband infrastructure was too expensive or risky in a certain geographic area for any of the big commercial providers to take it on but the local community devised their own solution, sometimes even finishing up with a better connection than what most of us get in big cities. In other news, prices for Internet access in the UK seem to be dramatically cheaper than most places in the US.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  > And while that infrastructure is indeed common and so in a sense a monopoly at that level, there are also multiple cable companies and mobile networks with completely independent infrastructure all the way down. There have even been a couple of impressive success stories where installing high speed broadband infrastructure was too expensive or risky in a certain geographic area for any of the big commercial providers to take it on but the local community devised their own solution, sometimes even finishing up with a better connection than what most of us get in big cities. This is what I'm advocating for. A public last mile that any service provider can use.
- tomp 12y ago
  What you describe is the definition of a natural monopoly. However, the monopoly comes from physical wires, not whatever flows over them. So, the infrastructure should be a public good (most infrastructure, really, not just wires, since it's more efficient and less wasteful to build a single network and keep it in excellent condition than to build multiple networks providing the same service at a lower quality), but whatever flows over it can be provided privately and competitively (also, each ISP would have to build it's own servers/routers, etc.)

TeMPOraL 12y ago

Things that work better when they are socialized than when they are privatized. Like healthcare.

cookiecaper 12y ago
Health care only works "better" when socialized if you believe that health care really should be so expensive that they have to print extra money explicitly to pay for it. There's no reason that has to be an integral property of health care. Turns out that most of the time, we don't need hospitals the size of college campuses (incidentally another thing that is completely unaffordable). The reason things cost so much is because true costs are obscured, just as they would be in a socialized system, by insurance. IMO non-catastrophic insurance should be abolished, the government should overcome the supply chain cycle ("Sorry, I have to charge $500 for this MRI because this machine cost me $4 million") by producing its own functional medical equipment and selling it at or under cost, and health providers need to get back to reality and charge face rates that real people can pay directly. And we all need to come to terms with the fact that some of the extravagance probably needs to be toned down.
- hga 12y ago
  "Turns out that most of the time, we don't need hospitals the size of college campuses (incidentally another thing that is completely unaffordable)." However people are not willing to accept the consequences of hospitals that can't surge in catastrophes. When an EF-5 tornado hit my city 3 years ago, it took out one of our two hospital complexes. Things got ... rather intense at the other (http://stormdoctor.blogspot.com/2011/06/first-response-mode-may-22-2011-joplin.html http://stormdoctor.blogspot.com/2011/06/first-response-mode-...) but it being big, and stocked with otherwise excess inventory of all sorts of things, kept the death toll at ~160 instead of a likely 1,000 or so.

Iftheshoefits 12y ago

I draw the line at things that people need in order to fully participate in society. If a good or service doesn't meet that threshold, a private market only solution is likely just fine. Otherwise there ought to be at least some socialized option available. My list would include: non-elective healthcare, food, housing (same as for food), electricity, water, local/regional transportation (e.g. for commuting to work), internet access and possibly basic internet-capable mobile phones. Basically "natural monopolies" are certainly all candidates for complete socialization.