Please Stop Demanding Socialized Healthcare
It's been a little while since the 2016 presidential election here in the US where Bernie Sanders stormed the front pages of the news. Naturally, the clamoring for free everything has died down a bit, but I'm still running into socialists demanding that the state provide free healthcare, among other things, to all people.
Image courtesy of Pixabay.comI'm from Romania. I was born in 1987 but I was too young to remember the horrors of socialism leading up to the December Revolution in 1989. However, my parents were not. Both born in the mid-1960's, they were able to witness the failure of socialism firsthand, and one of those failures was in healthcare. Now, I can already hear the chorus of voices screaming "That wasn't real socialism," but bear with me. That was just to illustrate my personal experience and first-hand accounts of such a scheme.
If you can be certain of one thing, it's that the government is terrible at providing services or goods of quality or with any kind of efficiency. The Guardian wrote about the inefficiencies of the National Health Service, with multiple doctors citing lack of funds for sometimes emergency medical treatment because of mismanagement of care and funds resulting in a cash shortage. This should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention. Central planning, as Mises famously wrote, consists of nothing more than letting "the government alone choose and enforce its rulings by the apparatus of coercion and compulsion." What happens when bureaucrats, armed with nothing more than their individual, incomplete understanding of what works and what doesn't, are the ones making choices for you? Your choices are necessarily limited by their imagination, and they'll use violence to keep you in the bounds of those choices.
Unfortunately, when it comes to centrally planning any market, that means that goods and services are going to be lower quality and cost more. Contrary to the cries of socialists the world around for more nationalization of industries, socialist markets and economies do not operate more efficiently or expand service. The calculation problem inherent in central planning - that an individual or small group of individuals will never have enough information to accurately make economic decisions for everyone in a given area - is especially evident in the provision of necessary services. Look no further than the Veterans' Administration here in the US. Shortages of care are common, and subpar medical care is the standard. Not sure about about you, but I have no interest on relying on the VA on a national scale.
This is to say nothing of the gross abrogation of private property and persons by the state through such a system. Charlie Gard's case is a vivid illustration of this. Rather than allowing his parents to take him back to the US for experimental treatment, the UK's NHS decided for them. According to his doctor's, the treatment that his parents were seeking wouldn't help (not sure how they made that assertion or why it was relevant, given Charlie's terminal status) and that their child should die in the hospital. As expected, the British Supreme Court upheld the decision of the state doctors. In this story about smokers and the obsese, the NHS is cutting funding for elective surgeries, such as knee and hip replacements. Rationing care is cited as the only way that the NHS can effectively manage its funds. Surprise surprise; centrally planned services aren't flexible enough to operate at net positive and incur a huge amount of waste.
I'm not heartless; my premiums for health insurance and for my daughter are astronomical. But the cause is not greed, or capitalism, or some other catchphrase that most people don't understand outside of a slogan. The problem is the government attempting to control and predict how health services and products can be most efficiently provided. Human innovation is a constant, and, if left to its own devices, human innovation will provide the best service, the highest quality products, for the lowest price to the most people.
For those who think government run health care of for all would be a good idea, have you ever been to a DMV? Just image what it would be waiting in those lines while you are bleeding.
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This would lead to rationing of health care, look to Canada for case studies, and more people suffering . Let the free market do it's thing and costs will go down while service will go up. If you let him, that little green gecko would sell you health insurance and it could save you 15% or more.
I spent two years in Hungary from 87-89, right before the Berlin Wall came down, and the Iron Curtain was dismantled. I've seen socialized medicine. No thanks, I'll just die.
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Very true. But here in South Africa millions is dependent on the free health care of the government but in lots of cases it is not quality care.
I know the poor need to be taken care of. There are programs already in place in the US, through the charity of come hospitals and through government help like Medicaid. just as in SA, it's probably not the best of care, but it's run by bureaucrats. If they eliminated the fraud that's in the existing government programs they would be able to take care of a lot more deserving people!
I'd suggest looking at why so many people are dependent on free healthcare. You'll be surprised to see what's going on causing this issue.
I'm with you there. We live in a society where too many believe that others owe them a living.
You need to look no farther than Steemit where so many think it's OK to take stock images that photographers have worked hard to produce through legitimate businesses with overheads! I've even been told that the work is not really mine because it's just a bunch of pixels and I can't own pixels. LOL!
I'm all for help for those who are down in their luck but not for the enforced type of socialized medicine. Look no farther than Medicare! The US government can't run that properly, so we know they would not be able to run some universal program!
Well, to be fair, I don't believe in IP laws regarding organization of pixels. You can own the medium upon which an idea (in this case, art) is imprinted on, but you can't claim your ownership was violated if someone uses a copy of a copy. Copying doesn't impinge on your ownership of the original.
However, you're absolutely right. The government is incapable of properly administering anything, including the military, which is ostensibly the only legitimate purpose it could serve.
So, if I am hearing you right, you think that I have no rights as a stock photographer to license my property in the same way anyone can rent out any other property they rightfully own? Have you ever rented a hotel room (it's only space, so why should any one charge for space and air?)
I'm the one who has invested thousands of dollars in my business over the years, so you think it is perfectly OK for others to benefit from my hard work without them having to spend a dime? I have to pay small business taxes and all other business related expenses, not the person using my work for free.
As you said, why should we pay for everyone to have healthcare? Also, why should my peers and I have to pay for others to have free eyecandy to make them money? Just like you are not in the business of paying for the healthcare of others, I am not in the business of providing free work for others either. It is the same mentality - give me something for nothing and let others do the work!
If I owned only the medium, as you suggest, that would mean I have the right to sell or license that one CF Card with the original images on it? I can't imagine the business headaches that would create! I would be able to shoot only one image per CF card, because no one is going to want to "buy" or license every image I shoot!
The conclusion has to be, that you don't think I have a right to my business in this free country of the USA, but others do have a right to take what I created because they want something for nothing! Something is very wrong with this picture.
I think I may write a blog post that says "Please Stop Demanding Socialized Images!!" LOL!
"in the same way anyone can rent out any other property they rightfully own? Have you ever rented a hotel room (it's only space, so why should any one charge for space and air?)"
No. Not in the same way at all. A much more apt comparison would be if I owned a hotel and you built a replica of that hotel on your own property with your own materials, then I sued you for stealing my intellectual property.
Ideas are not property. They're not scarce, nor are they rivalrous, so they lack the fundamental qualities that make property rights applicable. Does a copy of your work remove the original from your possession?
Now there's nothing wrong with creating licensing agreements for using your work, which would prohibit use outside of agreed upon terms. I'm all for that. However, that's not the crux of your argument. The crux of your argument is that you own the work that you put into producing these images. You don't own labor. You own the product of your labor. You also don't own copies others make that haven't entered license agreements with you. It's not theft. No one's stealing from you. You can't steal something that doesn't exist yet (future earnings).
I think that's a crazy argument. LOL! I'm not going to debate it any longer though. I know my legal rights, and know I legally own my images. You have opinions about those rights, and you are entitled to that! The blogger who recently had to pay up $7,500 for using an image she had no right to use, found that out the hard way.
You can laugh all you want, but you can't provide a logically consistent moral argument in favor of your position that derives from private property ethics. Since you clearly believe in private property, you need to think through your positions, rather than utilizing the government to prosecute people for perceived injustices.
I'm not saying you shouldn't be paid for your images, nor that you shouldn't shout down plagiarists every chance you get, but a copy isn't theft. It's not. It simply doesn't meet the criteria for being theft.
Love it. Well met my an-cap friend!
I do what I can. In the meantime, I have actual Marxists on here trying to argue that investing in the platform is basically evil.
Lol. I actually came looking for the marxists. I like to observe them in the wild.
I wish I could just observe them. But fuckin' a, man. Their post-scarcity idiocy is aneurysm-inducing.
Lol! We were watching Kong Skull Island tonight because I love a good B-Flick Creature Feature, but when they saw the natives, John C. Reilly is all "They don't have war. No one owns anything" and hubby and I just burst out laughing. Like "OMG! It's PARADISE! Anyone can shit in a hole and wipe their ass with leaves. Any leaves they want because no one owns the leaves!"
Sign me up, bitches!
The problem is that you've wholly bought the utter rubbish talked by the right. In fact, the cost per head of healthcare delivery in the UK is orders of magnitude lower than the cost of healthcare in the US, both before and after the half-arsed attempt at humanitarianism that Obama introduced. The reason that the NHS is so starved for cash is precisely a result of the fact it is far cheaper than any privately-funded healthcare system that has ever existed. The fact that successive governments have repeatedly failed to increase state investment is a problem, yes, but the evidence from the US and other locales rather suggests that private healthcare systems invest even less in real terms. The rise in costs in the NHS has been due the sale into the private sector of many small sections of the NHS, leading to, for example, poorly paid, poorly trained cleaning staff employed by the private sector turning off life support system in order to plug in their cleaning equipment (that really happened), decline in cleanliness leading to a rise in infections in hospitals and increasing deaths... And we can compare before and after, and the results of that comparison are that although costs have gone up, deaths from preventable causes have also gone up, all attributable directly the sale of parts of the NHS into the private sector. As each bit is privatised, problems that were non-existent prior to privatisation have been observed.
I appreciate that you grew up Romania under an abhorrent regime, but you have to understand that that regimes was as far from western social democracy as Stalin was from Marx... Well, further, actually... So although the extreme version of socialism under which you grew up was an utter failure, it is increasingly becoming clear that the extreme version of neo-liberalism under which the UK (sick man of Europe) and the US (once global leader now falling from its position) has failed just a truly.
The problem is extremism, of whatever kind. So asking for state provision of basic human rights is perfectly reasonable, rational, and in all of our interests. Asking for the state to run everything is unreasonable. So is asking it to run nothing - if it runs nothing, then what is it for?
As a final point - as one of the leading textbooks preaching neo-classical economics admits, the labour market can only work on a neo-classical model if "some benevolent dictator redistributes all finance at the end of each working day." Hardly sounds like a functional system to me, does it to you? :)
Oh, and you're just factually wrong on Charlie Guard - even the US doctors, on examining the case properly, admitted that nothing can be done.
And even if the NHS refusing to pay for it was wrong, who was going to pay for it without the NHS? Nobody. Because no private insurance exists for such cases, not in the UK, the US or anywhere.
What, indeed. The state doesn't provide rights. It can only ever infringe upon them. Moreover, health care - the provision of service and products - is not a right.
You're conflating rising costs with some sort of defect in the system. Centralized provision of any service or good will always distort prices, regardless of what degree of centralization occurs. The degree merely determines the size of the effect. Mises wrote about this, it was expanded upon by Hayek, Rothbard, and others.
And what are you talking about with your last paragraph? Competition drives down prices and increases quality. This has been demonstrated empirically over the course of human history, and it can be deduced logically as well. So unless you have a counter argument that can refute both methods of proving this to be true, I don't see what you're driving at. Mind unpacking that for me?
I'd also love to know what you mean by "neo-liberalism" in this sentence:
Both of those countries are socialist countries.
No, I'm not talking about rising costs in terms of the UK US comparison. I'm talking about total cost per head of population of the model. The US model of healthcare costs more, per capita, than does the UK version, yet the UK version delivers a free at the point of need service and the US version does not, meaning millions are excluded from healthcare in the US whereas everyone gets care in the UK.
The best healthcare system in the world, according to those who know, is, I believe, France, which is almost totally state-funded too.
Socialism requires that the state owns everything. In both the US and the UK, the state owns very little, certainly compared with most of Europe. However, in both of those countries, most things are owned by a small number of highly wealthy individuals who would all argue that they got where they are by merit. I assume you'd accept that as reasonable.
Hayek is hardly a source of reliable economics. I've not read anything of his that made any kind of logical sense.
Could you give me some examples of the historical evidence of which you speak? I have seen some evidence, both historically and contemporaneously, that competition can drive down cost and increase quality. I have also seen the precise reverse. As I'm sure you're aware, asking me to prove the reverse of your statement is somewhat of a fallacy, so where is your evidence in support? Historically, humans have lived in small units (under 250 people) and cooperated for success. I'd love to know what the compelling historical evidence is that humans work better under conditions of hard competition, please post it :)
In fact, I'd love to post a full response to not just your post, but a number I've read over the past few weeks, so if you're up for this, can we continue this debate here, but once I've put a little flesh on the bones of my arguments (and found a couple of pretty pictures to make it appealing to steemit!) I'll tag you in a post? I love robust debate, so would greatly value your input on my future post too :)
Fine by me! Respond to me here with the link (since there isn't any way to get notifications for tagging someone in posts here in this UI), and I'll comment over there!
Cool - yeah, the UI still needs work, doesn't it? :)
Will probably post tomorrow or Monday, I'll post the link here for you. Nice one!