While you were a child? How did you aquire enough money at the age of 2 to pay your own medical bills?
While you were a child? How did you aquire enough money at the age of 2 to pay your own medical bills?
1) Poor people exist now.
2) Remove education, job training, and good health, from the poor people.
3) ???
4) All the poor people become rich.
Please fill in step 3.
Voters wouldn't have to steal from each other in this case. The benevolent dictator would simply take wealth from those who have it and give it to those at the bottom of the ladder until they rise above some arbitrary line defined as "poverty." Emulating this society would invariably result in some sort of wealth redistribution as poverty is a relative comparison and any Capitalist system will produce the wealthy and the impoverished as a result of its natural function.
Well said. Perhaps #3 is that the poor lose their lives and are fewer in number, making it easier for the few remaining to get resources.
Yes, I was born into a poor family while I was a child. I did not have medical insurance as a child, my parents paid out of pocket. I rarely visited any medical facilities. When I became an adult I chose to go to college. I chose to graduate and I chose to make lots of money.
What? Is it free or not?
If it's free you're going to have to admit that you are, to some extent, a socialist.
Pure luck. If you'd had a serious injury or illness (read expensive) you and your parents would have been out on the streets in an ultra-capitalist world.
Does socialist philosophy only apply to production?
Do you consider healthcare to be production?
How is education not a service?!?
You're all over the place man. Rethink your shit and get back to me.
That completely ignores the monopoly scenario. In my utility monopoly scenario, my two options in a free market are to not take the service or submit to the requests of the monopoly. Not taking the service limits my productivity and my access to tools which can aid my engagement in the free market (things like the internet to search for work, or research to reduce information asymmetries, etc). One might also consider a situation where electricity is required by medical equipment or in the preparation of food products. One can clearly see that here I am worse off than in the collective ownership model (the obvious Pareto superior alternative). You've maximized transactional liberty but severely curtailed it in other ways for those affected by externalities.
My other alternative is to simply submit to the request and sacrifice my liberty to freely practice a religion of my choosing to maintain my current service. Clearly a liberty minimizing option for myself compared to current circumstances.
I haven't even touched on the topic of price. For services and commodities like utility and healthcare, demand is relatively inelastic and the cost of entry is relatively high. This creates a perfect situation where a monopoly agency can extort as much wealth from me as possible. The barriers to entry simply gives the monopoly player the perfect opportunity to easily crush any competition.
I simply don't get it. Ayn Rand created an idealized scenario to make a moral argument. Fine. This is not completely different than arguments made for Socialism before her. Neither of these justifications are correct in the real world because the real world is not ideal. My only conclusion is that people are taking ideas such as perfect markets, perfect competition, rationality, utility maximization and considering them as gospel without also looking at the assumptions used by these various models. Perhaps they don't recall these conditions from Econ 101 or perhaps our schools don't do a very good job at teaching theory. Economists have a hard enough time explaining rationality as it pertains to both physiological and cultural influences (see results of the Ultimatum Game), yet we have people promoting an economy that we hope to result in a liberty maximizing perfect market (despite that the two are not related) when there are HUGE preconditions such as no externalities, no barrier to entry, no cost of transaction, rationality, and perfect information. We already know that some of these conditions can never be met and in at least one, while at least one we can't even really define. Capitalism and Socialism are tools that are meant to allocate resources. To not see that both are required to compensate for the weaknesses of the other is to be blind.
Bitek
Lifer
- Aug 2, 2001
- 10,676
- 5,239
- 136
OK.
The owner of my large company is the great grandson of someone who did something clever when creating the company, so that said grandson can spend his life twittering around the world chasing rare flamingoes, but at least had the good sense to hire (for a penance of what he earns) people far more clever and useful than himself to run the company.
For this all us scientists and engineers etc invent, create, market, distribute and sell these products we create while he sits back and does jack shit. (Tho according to Rand he is the creative producer, and we are the leaches who commute and toll at work all day, apparently with our thumbs up our asses, and exist by his kindness and generosity of allowing us to make him tons of money for very little of it in return.)
However, the masses of old ladies, housewives, immigrants and uneducated people who sit on the packaging endless hours of day stuffing these things in boxes for the measly wage of $7/hr with no healthcare coverage or benefits at all are the immoral ones stealing from said grandson? Really?
And any of us, should misfortune fall and we get laid off or are fired, should lose all of our healthcare coverage and not be able to treat our cancer, and instead decide that we want to vote in a better medical risk distributive model that isn't so susceptible to the tides of the quarterly sales figures and the whims of the managers or twittering trustfund babies or foolish Wall St bankers... that is immoral? ...?
Do you call yourself a Christian by chance?
Bankruptcy is Socialistic. You simply push the costs to the people that can afford care. In fact, one of the current problems with healthcare is that people can't afford care but receive it and in turn declare bankruptcy. Hospitals must absorb this cost, which it does by passing this cost onto people that can afford it. You would've committed a wealth redistributing act (an inefficient one at that).
In a Laissez-faire economy, you'd simply be allowed to die. Don't run away from this fact, embrace it. Laissez-faire economies rely on this sort of Darwinistic selection. That's the point.
Bitek
Lifer
- Aug 2, 2001
- 10,676
- 5,239
- 136
Oh come now... surely he could have become a beggar or sold to an orphanage, or perhaps a young sister sold to a wealthy businessman for money like in some of those less horrible big gov't socialist oppressive countries around the world ...
You are just being melodramatic now
Thank goodness he was given the opportunity to be educated in state run public schools free of charge, graduated and went to a state funded and subsidizes University (possibly paid in part w/ state subsidized loans) and become a more useful and productive member of society that.... wait.. ohhh!!! Damn you you socialists and your evil Hitlerian plots to create useful and educated citizens capable of working and contributing to the prosperity of all! Tricked us again!
sandorski
No Lifer
- Oct 10, 1999
- 70,791
- 6,350
- 126
Good post :thumbsup:
I think many envision a Tribal Society as Ideal, which is why they feel the way they do. That kind of Society certainly is much closer to the Black/White world they think exists. Unfortunately it is also the type of Society where the Technology of today can not exist. They just haven't figured that part out yet.
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