Collectivism is Inherently Selfish

The way that you are phrasing this is misleading, and the very essence of what you're trying to say is inaccurate as well. What I keep bringing up, and what you have not thusfar addressed is the division of labor. Some people are good at some things while other people are good at others. People who work at a company are not chosen by their ability to elect leaders, rather they are there because they can effectively perform certain tasks that do not include the election of their leaders. Therefore this is a destruction of the division of labor and the very thing that makes modern society possible. There is no reason to think that these individuals would be effective at electing leaders. Beyond the truism that they are not qualified to do so, I have continually brought incentive and knowledge problems that intensify these issues. Therefore everything would indicate that workers would choose poor leaders

This brings me to the other part of my post which you didn't address that deals with your claim that we'll never know unless we try. The same could be true for any other cases of leadership. Maybe 14 year old street urchins are massively more likely to be fair and equitable leaders, you can't know for certian that they wouldn't be, yet I don't see you advocating for this system, yet you support representative democracy in the workplace which is equally arbitrary.

This should immediately tip you off as to how unlikely this is. Your proposition is supposedly more efficient then modern workplace management, yet it has never been implemented by anyone in 200+ years of capitalism. This indicates that it is not an effective system of management.

Yes we do, and I keep reiterating it. Furthermore I don't see you advocating for my street urchin idea. Why not? I could come up with a thousand different systems that are as or even less unlikely to work than your concept of democracy, but I don't think you'd be interested in testing them. Also, you couldn't effectively use the government as a test site since its a public institution anyway and it doesn't face the same challenges as a private firm would. It would be all about skimping on what was produced and levying the government for more money, not about providing a quality service to the consumer. It would run into the same perverse incentives that all government organizations have.

If you want then I will just give you a list with all your suggestions for workplace democracy and you can attempt to critique them.

Savings would probably (not certainly) go down significantly. Richer individuals are renown for saving more of their money than the common man.

No reason to not have the extra safety for the customers though.

Yes there is. It adds costs to providing care and decreases competition by introducing new requirements that are not brought about by the market. Why not have a government authorized surgeon present at every private surgery to determine that the proper procedure is being performed? Why not have have a lawyer, several bureaucrats, a lawyer, a cameraman, and seven surgeons at any public surgery in socialized healthcare nations? Customers would certainly be safer and be more able to fight for their money is malpractice was done, but costs would go through the roof. What the market determines is proper for coverage is almost always proper because it is what has been proven to work. What the government imposes on others is not what consumers demand, and if it were the most efficient then it would merely align with the market decision by pure chance. The best the government can do is to perfectly emulate the market, something that the market necessarily does.

@Underlined section

That's bull(*)(*)(*)(*). There are plenty of problems with universal healthcare systems and I could complain about them all day, as could most who have experienced their care.

Secondly, in no country do the rich receive the same quality of care as the poor. In Sweden and Canada the rich usually have private health insurance and they're able to receive higher quality private healthcare than what the public quality the poor must receive. Furthermore, what you consider to be uncivilized is entirely your business, but I think that it's really uncivilized to force people to give you money in order to pay for something you think is civilized, and kill them if they refuse to do so, which is exactly what you're advocating.

[MENTION=3991]BOLD[/MENTION]ed section. Once again you're applying selective logic to the matter of healthcare in order to justify your preconceived beliefs. Why are people any less informed about healthcare than the TV, computer, or car repair that they receive? You could go into any number of things which people buy that they aren't fully informed about, yet the market will naturally arrive at the best solution. Even if people are perfectly ignorant and skimping on coverage begins to happen, advisers can still be hired to help individuals out in making the decision making process and poor quality hospitals would receive no business. More importantly this would probably happen even without any sort of advising process. If individuals received poor treatment at high costs at a hospital or from a specific doctor then the reputation of this doctor/hospital would go down the tubes and there would be an incentive on behalf of other companies to lower costs/provide a higher quality care in order to boost demand.

You are not thinking like an economist. In your assertion about democracy you're presenting individuals has having capabilities and incentives where they lack in both department. When you're talking about the market you're not seeing the adaptive system that the market is and how it naturally gravitates towards positive results.

Finally, sure there are problems that arise in a public healthcare system. First of all your assertion that doctors only function on altruistic tendencies is just that, an assertion. Secondly you're assuming that doctors still have the ability to try new treatments, any incentive to do so, which they probably don't. The incentive to provide new and improved care in private industry is high, but in public industry it's practically nonexistant. Formal institutions are renown for being stubborn and conservative. The market provides a way that good ideas will always flourish, because it doesn't matter how stubborn you are, if you're a carriage producer in 1900 Ford is going to put you out of business. No such mechanism exists in the public sector. Bad ideas can persist for decades. Furthermore in a public system of any kind (including the U.S) there must indeed be a very rigid bureaucratic structure in order to promote either safety or efficiency. In the public sector you have no incentive to be efficient with your care, and the repercussions aren't too strong if you act poorly. Therefore regulations and rules must be very intense in order to ensure efficiency protocols and prevent malpractice. This enforces conservatism and prevents new and better ways of providing treatment from coming about. In your own words doctors in the public system are supposed to be altruistic and they would want to shower their patients with high quality care. Therefore if they were given free range healthcare costs would skyrocket. This means that there is no incentive within the public system to be efficient and it must be artificially enforced by the government itself, which is both inefficient and conservative.

From everything that I can tell healthcare quality in the United States has been renown for being the best in the world for the last decade. Furthermore my point is not that it would look entirely identical to that system, but it is a more accurate representation. The government had already implemented a system that took healthcare away from millions of people (see fraternal societies in the United States), and there's no reason that in the modern day a private system couldn't provide healthcare to everyone at approximately these costs.

Finally, what constitutes as having access to healthcare can be tricky. Just because you don't have health insurance doesn't mean that you don't have access to healthcare, especially because back in those days you had churches, communities, and even just doctors who were much more willing to attempt to provide healthcare for those who couldn't afford it for themselves. Out of pocket expenditures would also be much more doable. If you cut current healthcare costs in the United States by 2/3rds then healthcare becomes a lot more affordable at any level you choose to receive it. But my point is that in a truly free market healthcare costs could fall far below that using modern treatments, social cooperation, and entrepreneurship. By increasing the division of labor within the healthcare industry and increasing the number of doctors in general costs would most certainly fall dramatically. We could also band together and provide intelligent and even efficient (producing economies of scale) care for all people within society. Implementing something like the fraternal societies in healthcare today could certainly be a step in getting to this point.

 

Good lord, that's a lot of text to respond to.

I guess you're right that whether this is a problem or not could depend... just like corruption. It's a problem in some places, and not in some. Not sure that it would be because of homogeneity though. Well, in that case you would have to have other rules in the US.

No to both questions?

26!? 40 is standard. The total sum of all worked hours in one year is on average about 1650 in Sweden. In the US it's around 1800. Assuming you start working at 20 and stop at 65, that becomes about 74 000 in total in Sweden and 85 000 in the US if you retire at 67 (15% more). But I don't see how that's related to the social safety net? This is just an effect of the retirement age, amount of payed vacation etc.

Imagine this: each time it's time to reevaluate the management everyone has the opportunity to apply for being part of choosing it (in that way, those who aren't interested or doesn't feel informed enough wouldn't even be part of the process). Then, an entirely random lot of, say, 30- 50 people depending on the size of the company are drawn at random from those who have applied. These do then work together with hired economists (probably specialized at this) to evaluate the candidates and pick the one most likely to serve the company well. The economists would provide professional advice and the interests of the employees would become way more important. I doubt they would just ignore the economists if they said that their choice would be unwise, since the last thing they want to do is to lose their jobs, but the candidates would have to have strategies for improving the situation for the employees more than they do now. The point is to make the management a part of the company hired for it's services just like any other instead of being owners.

If "we don't know unless we try" was the only argument that would be true. But that's not the case. The workplace democracy system do at the very least have other support in the form of logical arguments (as well as having logical arguments against it, of course). I don't see any logical arguments in favor of the 14- year-old urchin system.

So? It took way longer than 200 years for feudalism to develop into the market economy. New systems and ideas are invented all the time. That something doesn't exist isn't proof that it shouldn't.

Well, schools here are paid with vouchers and still faces competition with each other. And they can't just ask for "more money" either.

You make it so complicated. Let doctors and surgeons etc pay a fine if it's found out that they haven't met the minimum criteria, just in case hurt reputation isn't enough, and put them out of business for good if they turn out to be a complete quack.

If you make a short and concise list I'll try to take them on.

Even the right wings in Sweden support universal healthcare, mostly. There are a few on the far right who don't, but they don't want public attention to that since they wouldn't get any votes then, and don't try to remove it. "Healthcare after need and on equal conditions" is considered a human right by most.

Yeah, sure, there's always a few who can afford expensive private doctors and to fly abroad to get special treatments and so on, but the vast majority are equal in the aspect of healthcare.

No one is killing anyone here. And in a democracy, I wouldn't be able to do much without the consent of the people.

They aren't. That's why Apple is the biggest computer company. They trick people into believing their stuff is somehow better with their marketing, even though it's mostly actually worse and always at least twice the price. If it weren't for Microsoft, Linux would have replaced Windows and we would have better operating systems. There's several things making tech industry develop slower than it could have, but it's more or less impossible to solve (and should certainly not be attempted by the government if you think that's what I would say).

This effect isn't be big enough to have scandal- like consequences or even be noticed at most, and when it is, people mostly don't bother doing anything. I'm talking about pretty small things.

There is more than one type of economists. Neoliberal economics are becoming increasingly outdated.

Markets are awesome, but one must realize that they are limited and have shortcomings. I've taken this example on this forum before, but overfishing is one example. It's more profitable to fish as much as you can instead of fishing an amount that lets the fish populations recover, resulting in us winning short- term but losing long- term.

Not only, but they wont not do their best out of sheer laziness as I've said.

That's simply not true. A lot of treatments has been developed in countries with universal healthcare, and Sweden was for a long time among the leading countries in medical science. We've fallen a bit behind now though (due to savings and stuff), but that's another question. And there's many other downsides to commercially financed science, such as results that are not in the interest of the company are being hidden, and that science that there is no immediate profit in wont happen.

There's democratic control over them. And how well that works out depends on what sector you're speaking of. The public sector being responsible for extracting natural resources? Probably no greater problems. The public sector being responsible for making people's clothes? No thank you.

Not really... I couldn't find the numbers for Sweden, but in Finland and the UK is apparently the administration only responsible for 2- 3% of the total cost of healthcare.

Apparently not.

It's at rank 38 in the world. You're beaten by almost all of Europe. You're even behind Saudi Arabia... by more than 10 places. The healthcare of the United States is the bad example of the industrialized world.

I don't know what you're talking about and I don't have the time to look it up right now. Could you provide a short summary?

There has still not been any information presented here about the actual quality of that healthcare. And that system still fails to provide to each according to need.

It's possible to have modern treatments, fresh ideas and division of labor in universal healthcare as well. There's nothing stopping one from increasing the number of doctors if one would want to. One can still invest in and test new treatments. And, again, there would be health care to each according to need.

 

Collectivism is fine as long as people voluntarily agree to it. We are first and foremost individuals, and we each get to determine whether or not we want to surrender part of our decisions to a collective body.

Collectivism becomes a problem, however, when certain people force others to be a part of their collectivist system when they do not want to take part.

 

I had two Japanese working for me. One had been in the states for 3 years and I asked what he saw were the differences between the US and Japan - his answer was there were many more rules. What I realized is Japan is so homogenous that many of their "rules" are imbedded in their culture. The US needs rules to keep cultures from clashing. I suspect Sweden is less homogenous than Japan, but more so than the US.

We agree. I'm not sure your reason, I'm concerned about servicing the debt when interest rates return to historic levels, and I don't want my kids and grandkids saddled with debt they received no benefit from.

At 40 hours times 48 weeks, 1920 hours for the US.

Why does the number of hours impact the social safety net? We live ~ 440,000 hours. Your lifetime productivity has to at least equal your (and your spouse if they don't work) lifetime consumption (your parents take care of you as a kid, you take care of your kids). Add in the impact of the safety net, and your productivity has to equal your lifetime + the productivity required for that social net.

200 years ago , we didn't have the productivity, so we never had the conversation.

If collectivism gains a big enough foothold, productivity will plummet, and we won't have this conversation in the future either.

 

Have you ever read some of Reivers posts. He (says he) is an economist that consults for companies - I sure wouldn't have bought his "expertise".

One thing I learned a long time ago is really good engineers usually make lousy engineering managers, and really good sales people make lousy sales managers, etc.

The skill set that a good manager needs is different than the typical employee has. Try doing personnel reviews, or firing someone, it isn't easy. Try motivating a person, a team. Try dealing with company politics (or even politics in any group of people) - I watched a perfectly good company crash and burn just do to politics (because the president wasn't strong enough to fire the idiots).

Management get paid more than average, because they effect more than average. A good manager knows how to get far more out of their people than and average one, and a bad one not only gets less, but creates hate and discontent in a bigger group than they manage.

Do you think those being managed understand all that? Do you think the rest of company does? (I assume every votes, not just the managed).

Nothing stops workplace democracy from being tried, except that the employees have to buy their job (as their contribution to the capital equipment / facility / working inventory, etc.) that isn't provided by the capitalist.

How many employees can afford to buy their job? How many would? How many have?

Our system turns out well paid retirees, and lousy students.

How are medical costs controlled?

What happens to those that refuse to pay taxes?

Apple is the biggest company because they have provided a product people prefer better than the others, and they are willing to pay more for it. Nokia didn't develop the smart phone until it was too late, then attached themselves to Microsoft - did Apple do that?

Have you tried running Linux? I have spent the last week trying to get a laptop's WiFi working, and I'm a EE. Microsoft has the market share because it doesn't require much from the user. Apple's OS requires even less.

That isn't the market - that is the tragedy of the commons, which can be fixed by the market. That is how the nature preserves in Africa were "fixed".

What is the difference?

How can you be sure? The government here does a great job hiding their cost.

How long do you wait for a CAT scan? an MRI? An X-Ray? How long is the wait for elective surgery? What types of medical care are denied?

 

I'm sorry it took me so long to respond.

Joar,

I think that you're falling into a lot of logical errors here. I will address what I find to be the largest ones

You're desperately trying to make the democratic system work in face of all the odds. The fact is that no matter how many ways you reinvent the system there will still be major problems. For instance in the above case you would have the problem that worker's chosen are still likely to be rather uneducated in matters of deciding managers, and once again their own vote matters relatively little, particularly because in any decent sized corporation the effect on their decision upon their own wages would usually be relatively minuscule (unless the company goes out of business, of course). And furthermore it makes a lot more sense for the worker to go with the conservative path that he knows than anything new.

I also don't understand the point of the economists. If we assume that the economists know best (they probably at least know better than the workers), then they will be prime targets for bribes, favors, and the very politics that you said would not be present in this sort of democratic system above. If you're going to have the economists who know best, who cannot be influenced, to give advice to the workers then why not make a technocratic system where economist advisers control the economy/just turn over the choice of management to the economists? Finally, economists aren't investment gods. There's a reason why you have business and econ separate, and although there are certainly some prominent business people and investors with economics degrees, not all of them have one. Investment and choice of strategy/leader (same thing to a degree since your choice of leader will probably in large part depend upon his plans for the company) is about estimation of future events and risk taking. An understanding of how a markets or market work in general is not the same thing as this. Therefore one will not necessarily grant you the other, and economists are likely to be of limited usefulness in actually choosing a general strategy even if they are incorruptible. I'm sure you could look up a million incorrect economist predictions, such as Keynes' infamous quote "We will not have any more crashes in our time" a mere two years before the great depression.

There is a way to avoid all this, and it is by having the free market system where leaders are, generally and by and large, selected by merit through their ability to attain profit by satisfying consumers, something that aligns with their own self interest.

If I so chose I could make any number of arguments for the 14-year-old street urchin. I could say that they are younger and more open to ideas, and therefore they would be much more willing to see new ways of approaching things/listen to new ideas. I could say that they would be younger and more pure and would therefore sympathize with those working in the company. Similarly they have had hard and poor lives, so they will both attempt to help the workers attain the highest standard of living possible, as well as maximizing their own profits and succeeding in the world. If you raise an objection, I could simply change the system to have them be guided by economists or something along those lines.

This is a particularly scary chain of reasoning to me. While the free market system could have been formed at any period of time within humanities history, it was never given the chance to because governments, invading hoards, or highly conservative citizens with some militaristic/political clout were able to prevent it from happening. The market was constantly prevented from functioning by political forces. A major reason why the free market system is so effective is that it allows for better ideas to come to fruition. All it takes is a man with a dream, or a group with a dream, and the world can be changed forever. The same was not true in pre-capitalist eras, where what mattered wasn't so much that an idea was right, but that it has extensive political support in the midst of ultra-conservative interest groups.

If you make the claim that a democratic system of firm organization is more effective and a traditional hierarchical one, you better have a good reason why it has never been adopted even though it has had a test ground of billions of people over the span of two centuries, and why it would have to be enforced by the government.

You're equally off-base here. Most government services DO NOT run on a voucher system. A police forces, fire departments, driving accreditation facilities, and so on don't run on a system of competitive vouchers. The only way that government systems are capable of working is through some degree of direct bureaucratic control. Give state workers power and they don't have an incentive to do a government job, they have an incentive to maximize their own income, and there are relatively few repercussions at providing poor services

And until recently (probably even now it's not the majority) the left in the United States didn't usually support a fully universalized healthcare system. Very few in the 1800's supported universal healthcare, while most were racist. Public opinion at any one time is relatively useless, and will someday likely be considered outdated

If I don't pay my taxes and I attempt to defend my person from incarceration, and my property from confiscation I will likely be killed in the struggle, or maybe I'll get of easy and I'll just be imprisoned for effectively the rest of my life. This isn't a humane system. Any claim to taxation is a claim to the property of others and the initiation of force

Then that's not at all a big deal. If it adds up to a noticeable difference then people will take note and choose superior doctors. If not, then it really just amounts to cost saving on behalf of the medical practitioners.

Being anti-market, or having a different view on things, doesn't necessarily make you any type of economist. Markets, with a handful of exceptions are almost universally considered positive, and you have not shown why healthcare is at all different from this. Pointing to computers as an example of confusion by the consumer proves too much. You can't determine why linux took off, or why macs are popular. Most mac owners I know understand that there isn't a huge amount of difference, but they like the operating system, its feel, and its polish. Most people have access to PC's, and can determine if they like them more or not. For what normal people do, I think that they understand that either will work pretty well, and some just prefer to use macs. Any reason you're going to name for linux not being adapted is probably going to deal with imperfect competition, but healthcare is much larger and more competitive. At any rate, if linux was actually vastly preferred by the populace and it wouldn't have cost a significant amount of money to transition then I wouldn't doubt it would have been adopted.

Also, your overfishing example is a case of an externality caused by a lack of property rights, and introducing property rights into the system could have solved the problem easily. This is just saying that market aren't perfect, but the knowledge that something isn't perfect doesn't mean that any specific case is imperfect, healthcare, for instance

Once again, I think that healthcare throughout the world is awful. The United States has long been the leader in health science, research, and education, and this is even with its abysmal present system. Saying that there were a lot of medical discoveries and innovations doesn't tell us how much there could have been, or even how effectively patients are being seen to at the present time.

That's not an effective control. I have explained to you why democracy is a poor system of management throughout my entire correspondence. I do agree that some industries are better run by the government than others, the clearest being natural resources, but even then when governments attempt to do this they almost always do so through private firms that are heavily under state control, not direct state control, and there's a whole other set of problems here. Now how is healthcare like this.

I wasn't talking about necessarily a very heavy bureaucracy (even though I'd be surprised if it was actually this low), rather costs caused by bureaucracy surrounding sub-par treatments.

The reason why the United States is so low is due to the absurd cost, not the quality of the care. The United States generally has the best hospitals in the world as well as the best care when you can actually get it

http://www.healthcareglobal.com/top_ten/top-10-business/top-10-hospitals

Now I realized that I just pulled this off the internet, but if you have conflicting sources then please present them, since this approximately represents what I believe to be the case. You'll notice that out of the six that matter (1, 3-6 and , four of them are in the United States out of the rest of the developed world

http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/2011/sep/05/top-100-universities-world-medicine-2011

Similarly if we look at best the best schools for healthcare in the world the United States dominates the list. I'll also point out the Saudi Arabia is not on the list. Bash the system of provision in the United States, do not bash the care that is provided

Short summary:

http://www.freenation.org/a/f12l3.html

 

No your sources are right. In every major category of health care we are tops when it comes to saving lives. Best cancer treatment rates, heart attack survival rates, trauma rates. Dead and undiagnosed patients are cheap to treat. The ones sitting on waiting lists that die are a windfall for the government trying to balance a budget. American's lifestyle choices negate the quality of healthcare, but that is the price you pay for living in a mostly free country. The FDA needs to meddle with your food to keep you safe. Let them eat pink slime!

 

The reason why the US is rated so low in health care delivery and costs are so high is because the US health care system does violates a most basic principle that allows markets to function, the ability of participants to discover prices. In fact many health care system providers and insurers take the position that pricing agreements are trade secrets. This prevents anyone and everyone else, including individuals economists and the government from discovering the actual prices paid for health care procedures without the exertion of extreme efforts, like legal action.

The Attorney General of Massachusetts had to threaten court orders to produce a legislatively mandated survey of prices that providers actually charged for their services. The resulting survey was a clear indication that the pricing of health care is completely arbitrary, bearing no discernable relationship at all to provider costs, supply and demand, or competition. One interesting finding was that the increasing number of MRI machines in the area could be directly correlated to the rising price of an MRI. In every other market an increase in availability of a product causes prices to decline.

Health care in the US is some sort of economic entity but it is certainly not a market since markets, by definition, discover prices through a dynamic of open competition over supply and demand.

 

Eh, I'd argue that there is a lot more to the market than that, but at any rate I haven't been defending the U.S healthcare system. One can go on forever about how screwed up it is, but that doesn't meant that some claims about why it is screwed up aren't false.

 

Why is this the case? It started when government limited what employers could pay after WWII. Employers added benefits, including health care, as a way around that regulation. How many of us know what our employer pays for health care - mine pays $15K a year for me, my wife and daughter, I pay an additional $5K a year in premiums.

Now, government defines what an insurance provider must cover, so I must pay for acupuncture and pregnancy. Government further kills the market by limiting the number of insurance providers in each state. And, those insurance companies must pay out 70% of what they take in - there is no motivation for the insurance company to push back if a doctors doubles their fees - not a free market.

Want to lower costs substantially, change our "pay for everything" insurance to catastrophic care, and pay for the rest out of pocket. Check the price increases for Lasik and cosmetic surgery, lower than inflation - insured health care, far out paces inflation.

What would car insurance cost if it covered everything? A trip to the car repair shop, a $10 co-pay, gasoline, a $10 co-pay, a new car $10K, no matter the make and model. Don't have time to change the oil - no problem, a new engine just a $10 co-pay. Why worry about gas mileage, gas is just $10 a fill up (want to bet gas tanks would get bigger?).

 

Don't forget the government decides how many seats in medical school and what degrees you need before you can click the green button on the MRI.

 

And, what is required for a doctor from another country, needs to do to work in the US.

Corporatism - monopoly by regulation......

 

The American Medical Association is the major obstacle to freedom in treatment.

 

In many states there was no regulations on what insurance must cover so a lot of people ended up paying premiums for insurance they could not use. There is no law that limits the number of insurance companies in any state. States can only require that all insurance companies in their state abide by the state's laws and regulations that apply to all insurers in the state. Obamacare has set the payouts of insurance companies at 80% of premiums with the states free to impose even higher limits with excess receipts rebated to premium payers. I got a $400 rebate check from that.

The best way to lower costs is to make the market for health insurance more transparent as was recently demonstrated in Oregon, where insurers who wished to participate in the state run insurance exchange submitted premium schedules for prescribed levels of coverage. Immediately after the prices went public some insurers applied to reduce their offered premiums by 15% or more to meet the prices offered by competitors, which were some 40% lower than the average individual insurance premium available for the same coverage previously.

I live in Massachusetts and pay for my own health insurance which I buy through the state run individual insurance exchange. The exchange sets a schedule of comprehensive coverage with various levels of deductibles, co-pays and maximum out of pocket expenses. It is open to all insurers and insurers who wish to participate are free to set whatever premiums they want for this coverage. This year the exchange will be opened to small businesses. The exchange is already a boon to the many small start ups around here since they are now able to attract people who were afraid to leave their jobs because they would lose their health care coverage. For a single person in their late 20s the premiums are less than $100 a month, there is no exclusions and no waiting period, no denial for existing conditions.The rates have actually declined slightly over the past few years and are projected to continue to do so into the future.

What you really need to understand is that the health insurance on the exchange is not subsidized by the government or anyone else. All the government does is set a level playing field for a market, participation is completely voluntary.

I have paid out of my own pocket for my own personal health insurance for years and the best thing that ever happened was the exchange. Before that the only way to shop for individual health insurance was through insurance agents, who would visit you at work or at home and give you the hard sell. It was extremely difficult and time consuming to compare coverage and prices. Before the exchange it was really hard to find out what was actually covered by my insurance policy and it was impossible to figure out if I was getting the best deal because all the policies were so different in what they covered. At the exchange the coverage is exactly the same with only three different levels of co-pays deductibles and max out of pocket, which has an absolute limit of $5,000. Now that the exchange is open and all the coverage is exactly the same I can compare prices and deductibles etc and choose the plan that fits me best. I am paying less than half what I paid before with far more comprehensive coverage with deductibles co-pays and an out of pocket maximum that I decide.

That is a decision that businesses need to make since they are the ones who pay for a majority of the health insurance in the US. In the past many businesses self insured, paying for workers health care themselves. Some even operated their own health care facilities. Other companies negotiated with the labour unions to provide health care for union members and their families. These days there are only a few companies that pay for health care directly, most negotiate secretly with insurers for employee coverage. They do not appear to have been bargaining very hard lately, maybe because they are able to pass any cost increases on to employees, who seem increasingly willing to give up wages to maintain health care benefits.

It appears that employers have created a big disconnect between price paying employees and price setting insurers. In a recognition of this some large employers have begun setting up their own private insurance exchanges, opening their health care plans to competition. Preliminary indications are that individual employee expenses are going down while coverage is improving simply because insurers are now forced to compete more openly. This is a huge step away from the closed door secret negotiating process that was the long established practice for company wide health insurance deals.

All this is beginning to have a effect on providers too, whose immunity from market forces is eroding as their paymasters, the insurers, are forced into more open competition. They, in turn are pushing providers into more open pricing while legislatures are considering ways to end the sorts of provider cost shifting that have create ten fold differences in the prices paid for procedures inside the same facility.

A shift of insurance to a strictly catastrophic model will do little to nothing to reduce health care spending increases, but will do a lot to increase the number of people who cannot afford to go to the doctor or pay for medicine. What would health insurance cost if health care providers were required to publicize their charges and charge everyone who came through their doors the same price?

 

Does the AMA prevent doctors from other countries from practicing medicine in the US. If so, by what authority? Regulation.....

 

No, the AMA decides that and they are a totally private organization of Medical Doctors that decides what US schools are accredited and how many doctors they can train. The reason there is so many foreign doctors in the US is that the AMA has limited the number of US trained doctors for so long that the government had to create a mechanism for foreign trained doctors to get certified to fill the shortage.

 

Who gives them the power to do it? Special government laws for the AMA, who gets to set licensure etc... Same thing. Government delegation to a body to tell you what to do is no different then them doing it themselves, don't be so easily tricked. That is like saying the ABA isn't a part of government, it just decides policy.

 

I do agree, partially. A system that is not at large supported by those part of it is pretty worthless. However, I don't think that it's a violation of human rights to create certain rules without the approval of every single one affected by the rule.

http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=ANHRS

I do, honestly, not quite get your reasoning here. You're basically saying that a safety net cost money, which is of course correct. Then you seem to from that draw the conclusion that this means that a social safety net plummets productivity?

I'm not saying that we shouldn't have people specialized at management, just that they should be employed according to merits just like everyone else and that they shouldn't be the ultimate authority in the company or deciding their own salaries.

Yes, of course, but it's not like they're worth what they're actually paid. They give themselves these salaries because they can.

That's another good point on why this haven't happened widely.

I believe it's the local authorities.

They'd have the money taken from them by force, but they wouldn't be executed.

Yes, and this is because of marketing, not because it's better. If Apple had had their marketing switched with another company a decade ago or so, this company would likely mostly be in the position Apple is in now, given that their products were at least sufficient.

I'm on Linux right now. Even if a very simple and locked- down distro was created, I doubt people would get Linux, and that is mainly because most people don't even know what Linux is. I wouldn't be surprised if most people didn't even know what exactly an operating system is.

Digging up metals and selling it. It's very easy to measure how well that is done and competition would likely not affect the process at all. Pricing would be affected, though, but as long as the market is globalized the different countries would compete with each other with the prices, balancing forth the correct pricing. It would, however, be next to impossible for a government institution to keep up with what kind of clothes people want (since it's based on taste) as fast as or even close to as fast and efficient as a market.

I think Sweden is actually overall slower than the US for mid- income people, but there is countries with socialized health care that's way faster than the US as well, so whether health care is socialized or not does not seem to, in itself, make the waiting lines longer.

First of all, I do think that you're seriously underestimating people's mental capacity. The fact that someone is not educated or informed in the field of management doesn't mean that they would be completely unable to tell some who is from someone who isn't. What's so difficult about simply employing someone with good merits? Maybe this couldn't work nicely in a company consisting mainly of workers with a low level of education/intelligence. Then you'd have to let those be run according to the current model. But I see no reason to why this couldn't work in a company made up from fairly informed not completely ignorant people. Employ people with a history of well- made investments to make investments. Employ someone with good merits in the field of management to take care of the management. It's simple, really. What makes no one but share holders capable of this?

The current model for ownership of companies has many bad side- effects (mostly that the interests of the employees is always second to the interest of the share holders) that I believe this could solve. Those who have built up a company should be the ones owning it, ie the employees. A collective ownership requires some sort of democratic management. I am simply proposing different models that could be used to achieve this in the best way possible. Smaller representative groups could potentially be better than having everyone take part, since the latter would require a lot more time from a lot more people and be way more tedious, while the former just takes time from a few for a more limited amount of time. The economists would, I guess, be mainly for assistance in analysing the merits of the candidates.

I see no reason to why this wouldn't be the case in a democratic/collective system?

A 14-year-old street urchin would maybe have good intentions, but would also in no way be authorized to, or be believed to hold the necessary skills to, run a company. Having them completely directed by an economist would remove the entire point of it.
I am not suggesting that non- managers should take care of the management, just that the members of the company should own said company, and employ the management.

The point is that you cannot assume that a system is superior just because no other exists. Maybe my example was a bit bad, but surely has the absolutely optimal and best solution for something not been formed and adopted as soon as the possibility arose every single time?

There is right now actually a few thousand smaller companies following the principles of democracy. The fact that most people would consider it too much of a risk to be worth it is reason enough that it hasn't spread. Most people would just rather go along with how they have it now even if they believed in worker- owned companies. It's also possible that their (the current democratic companies') models for it includes (fixable) flaws.
And I'm not saying that this would have to be government enforced, just that they are probably good for creating a good, efficient functional model for it and make the public aware of it's existence. If a rich socialist or a number of comitted individuals did it instead that would be just as good. People should then adopt it by free will. Joint- stock companies shouldn't be illigalized or something. I just want to make the concept a way more popular and by all aknowledged alternative.

When I wrote that I was talking about specifically schools, not fire departements. It is correct that testing in most government institutions couldn't fully emulate the challenges a company would meet in a market, but it would probably give sufficient indications on what would probably work out and not. Especially testing with voucher- paid government services, such as the Swedish schools.

You wrote that most people who have experienced public health care has complaints about it, which is an incorrect claim.

Can you seriously be executed for tax fraud in the US?

It's not that big of a problem, no, but it still removes money that could have been used for treatments and turns it into profit insead.

That almost all economically educated people consider markets to be the best way of producing health care is simply a lie. And I have made several points on why market created healthcare would be worse.

Precisely, they choose with feelings. Those feelings are invoked mainly by marketing and how the computers/phones chassis looks. Higher prices also creates a sense of exclusivity.

I wonder how many that even knows what linux is? I actually think linux is the most popular kernel if you take all computers into account (servers, phones, tablets and so on) though. The linux kernel is objectively superior in every way I know. The user- friendliness and the different GUIs is an entirely different business. Besides, as long as you don't start using the command line, I don't see Ubuntu as any less user- friendly or difficult to use than windows. The problem is that many do not know of it, and that it has a low level of support from software companies since it's not that popular for desktops.

That markets CAN provide worse results whatsoever is a step towards the conclusion that that is the case in this case.

You are only showing that the best few hospitals and institutions in the world are from the US. That says nothing about the general quality of the care most people gets. The healthcare of the US is still not especially good even if you don't count the high prices:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/opinion/12sun1.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

It would still be the same doctors with public healthcare. The provision would be changed, though.

I don't fully get how this is much different from a regular insurance?


So, to summarize the question of public vs commercialized healthcare, I don't think that you've managed to provide a single valid argument against public one really, since public health care is cheaper or, under the best of conditions, about as cheap, while it is not necessarily slower, nor worse. The quality is not affected, and new treatments can be developed just as effectively. And, of course, it provides affordable health care to everyone, so you can get all the care you need regardless of economical situation.

 

It may not be a violation of human rights, but it would be a violation of individual rights.

 

I would say that Marxism is the most materialistic and selfish political philosophy ever made. They essentially dwindle down our existence to dollars and cents.

 

I feel that our correspondence, Joar, is coming to a close. Once again I don't think that you have given adequate answers to the matters at hand, nor do I think that you would know what one looks like. Indeed I think that you were mostly talking past a few of the sections you quoted. In particular how hard I hit your advocacy of democracy in the workplace, whether I was right or wrong, was clearly not fully dealt with by yourself.

Once again, focusing upon those most important sections

So how do you want to go about saying what companies would and would not be run democratically? You started off our discussion with this:

Human beings are incredibly flawed beings at the best of time, but what's worse is that I've displayed again and again that even fully rational creatures would run into difficulty within your proposed system due to built in failures of incentives. Democracy is generally an awful system, and it should generally be avoided. Workers are chosen based upon their abilities to perform specific tasks, not to democratically lead an organization or to choose leaders. Within a democracy a vote generally only counts for a small amount and therefore there isn't much reason to devote a great deal of effort and attention within an election. Within a democracy there will many times be entrenched groups that will vote only for what they see will benefit them, not what will benefit the whole company.

You keep trying to address these problems, but more just keep popping up.

The current system, while not without flaw, ensures a more competitive and entrepreneurial environment that means that even if the owners of a company are neglecting its employees wages are bid up through competition.

This is just incredibly off base. The workers are not the ones who invested their money into a company. They are not the ones who took the risk of starting a company instead of investing into more secure forms of bonds. It was not the workers who would have faced massive losses if the company failed. It was not the workers who take a dent if there's a loss in the company. The workers had no initiative, the workers received a steady stream of income, because that's how the system is structured. Capitalists and entrepreneurs take risks while the workers merely perform tasks and have a guaranteed income, whereas the capitalists may have to wait years before they actually see a return off of their investment.

Yet you're saying that the most conservative individuals in society, those who did not take a risk and did not have initiative, those who did not forward their money into an endeavor where they might lose the entire thing but instead were given income by these individuals, it is this class who didn't start the company that are its true owners? What claim do they have to a company when they merely provided their time which was justly compensated, not their money which could be invested elsewhere?

Furthermore, what of those who did invest their money into this system, who provided the lifeblood to actually make it work? Do they truly have no claim to the company?

If I tweaked the urchin system I'm sure I could find a solution to the problem you just raised. The workers don't know how management should be structured, but somehow they know who has the best plan for structuring management?

This doesn't invalidate my point

That's fine. I have no problem with this solution if it is really voluntary and more effective, but as soon as you make it government enforced then this shows that the above two factors are not true.

Then see my original comments. A democratically run government agency would run the state dry

That's not what I said, nor how what I said should have been interpreted.

This is the worst part of your entire response. I don't expect most of what I'm saying to actually reach you, but this you should understand. If you advocate taxes then you are willing to kill people because they don't pay their taxes. At absolute best you are willing to kidnap people and throw them into prison because they don't allow you to extort them. This is what statism is, and it doesn't matter what country you're in. It's just as true of your Sweden as in Communist China For this, let's run a quick thought experiment:

1. What happens if you don't pay your taxes?

2. What happens if you don't pay your taxes for an extended period of time?

3. What happens if you resist the attempts of police to incarcerate you and/or confiscate your property, with deadly force on your own side?

4. What happens if you resist thugs coming to your house to kidnap you and/or confiscate your property, with deadly force on your own side?

My answers:

1. You are charged with tax fraud and you are fined

2. Policemen are sent to send you to jail and/or to confiscate your property

3. The police either use deadly force against you, severely harm you, or if you're lucky they just incapacitate you. You are then taken to prison and some portion of your property is confiscated. If you survive you are looked at as a scoundrel under the law and after you are released from prison you must either pay your taxes or the same thing will happen again. The policemen are looked at as righteous enforcers of the law attempting to bring a miscreant to justice

4. The thugs either use deadly force against you, severely harm you, or if you're lucky they'll just incapacitate you. You are then kidnapped or some portion of your property is confiscated. If you survive you are looked at as an innocent victim who did nothing to deserve such treatment. You will be able to sue the wrongdoers for the evil they have done to you. The wrongdoers look like scoundrels under the law who broke the peace and attacked the innocent.

When you advocate taxation you are advocating theft, and possible death if individuals resist you. Accept what you are doing and the inherent double standards you put on society.

So then it's generally negligible and shouldn't be focused on

I never said that most economists say that markets are superior at producing healthcare, I merely said that YOU need to show why markets are less efficient. I have dealt with the

Therefore the higher prices themselves are a part of the good and the company is, in this peculiar instance, providing a service by charging a higher price. Furthermore marketing is not an effective way to influence how someone feels after they have been using an operating system for a while. If it's just bad then they will switch.

This is like saying that evidence that circles are round is evidence that squares are round.

Do you know where that article gets its sources? Furthermore this still doesn't all add up with America being at the head of all medical research.

It's a system of mutual insurance that came about from individuals voluntarily joining together to provide for their own medical care without any sort of corporate apparatus. By ensuring certain doctors customers they were able to cut down on medical costs. If you're looking for real voluntary socialism, then here it is, or rather was before the government banned it. By freely coming together low-cost healthcare for the poor was provided during a very poor time in America's history, and the history of many other countries. These organizations were unobtrusive and still allowed the market to function, and they did all this wholly in the absence of the government.

Such a system is still perfectly possible, but for it to occur we need to put our efforts into fixing our problems in a real communal way, not by focusing on the government to do it with all its perverse incentives.

You have shown none of these things. You have only shown that it is better than the fully distorted system of the United States, which is not commercial and is thoroughly disturbed and poked through with holes with government intervention. Therefore we have no way to actually compare how good medical care is in socialized countries with how it could have been in a free market. Even my 60's example still held down the quantity of doctors in the market and therefore raised prices, there were also other disturbing factors that made it different from a free market system.

You have not dealt with a single incentive problem that I laid out which is inherent in the medical field under socialized medicine, and indeed under most government organized systems. You merely point to cases of what has happened, and therefore claimed that a factor is not at work. Even if healthcare is good under a socialized system (and let's point out that there are very clearly better and worse cases of these systems. Some developed systems clearly have worse care than others) this does not mean that it could not be great under a private system in which the market mechanism was allowed to properly function, just as it does in most every other area of the economy with quite positive results, and where the government has traditionally failed to effectively provide services. You have shown little to the contrary besides admitting that a socialized system is probably better than a corpratist/highly interventionist system and that a private system MAY have negligible skimping on coverage.

 

We consume for our entire lifetime. If we haven't earned what that consumption costs, then someone else has to pay for our consumption (the social safety net).

What happens when everyone expects someone else to pay for their consumption?

Where do you get the idea that a manager sets their own salary? Even the president of a privately owned company is limited to what the company earns and the materials, and pay required.

My son did set his salary when he started his company, he set it a $0. 10 years later he makes a good income, so do his employees (with a 401k and full medical). He can't increase his selling price, can't reduce his employees income, can reduce the non-employee costs - where is this extra money supposed to come from?

But, years in prison is OK?

Apples "marketing" is their product quality, and their products intuitive ease of operation.

If Apples magic was their marketing, why has no one else copied it, or outbid Apple and stolen their marketing employees?

I understand an operating system and created my own batch files in the days of DOS, did a lot of programing in HP basic.

With Windows, I install the ASUS 1000HE drivers.

With Linux I am told to:

Any wonder why Windows dominates - Linux isn't ready for prime time.....

I have watched "engineers" that could talk a good game, but couldn't do the work, keep bad managers convinced they were good. The company wasted money, and lost business, due to bad management.

What do you do that you have such a limited understanding of how a company works?

What interests do you think the employees have?

Remove the founding entrepreneur, and most companies will whither and die. I have worked for two companies where the kids took after the founding father retired. The kids didn't have the fire in the belly, so the companies went into a slow death spiral until they hired good management.

If this was better, it would be used.

There are a lot of entrepreneurships, bought by the employees (my sister helped set these up). They were small companies, and stay small companies, because socialism only works in small groups. Once they get big enough that people can loaf without being obvious....

The nice thing about the free market is that like nature, it selects for the best solution.

I repeat:

There are a lot of entrepreneurships, bought by the employees (my sister helped set these up). They were small companies, and stay small companies, because socialism only works in small groups. Once they get big enough that people can loaf without being obvious....

No, that extra money rewards excellence.

Making a point isn't the same as winning a point.

Rarity creates exclusivity, difficulty creates rarity, driving higher prices. Watch this video, starting at 5 min 30 seconds.

http://www.apple.com/iphone/#video

See my post above - being used everywhere doesn't mean it is ready for novice users - and it is the novice user that drives volume and profits.

I have sat on several industry standards for developing USB and LAN. A "solution" is excepted only if it is easy for someone's grandmother to use it.

 

I have an Asus Netbook and have been running Ubuntu on it since 10.4 and never had any problems with the wireless. I also read the release notes and am not crazy enough to upgrade to the next release right away, which is normal procedure with any version of Linux. I enjoy not getting viruses and malware and not having to defrag or repair the registry or hunt down drivers. All my PCs run Linux and are faster and more stable today than they were when I got them. I also have some old PCs that cannot run the latest versions of windows but work just fine on the latest versions of Linux.

Android is Linux based and has become dominant in the world smart phone and tablet markets. Windows days of domination are dying along with the PC. Tablet sales are predicted to pass PC sales by 2015 at the latest. Big business has been trying to move away from Windows for years because those Windows PCs are dangerously insecure front ends to the back office servers.

 

I think the point where the view private property is theft was far higher in the 1920s and 1930s with the rise of communism around the globe, in large part brought on by the ravages of the great depression.

We could be reaching a point were collectively, greed is peaking.

 

I would love to figure out what I need to do, and I will - but it is low on my priority right now.

And Apache is the dominate software for internet server.

Open source is a far superior way to create safe software, but Linux doesn't generate the revenue to justify making a truly consumer friendly version.

Why do you think I am trying to install Linux.