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Comment by slphil | Hacker News Reader

Healthcare is an obvious exception, and religiously fundamentalist capitalists won't admit to that, but the reason is simple. Healthcare has virtually infinite demand, and the demand for more expensive solutions is intense. It is one of the few sectors of the economy where traditional capitalist price optimization algorithms don't function properly. I wish people would admit this and move towards more rational healthcare considerations, but I also wish people would stop using obvious exceptions to argue against rules.

(Healthcare is also an ethical battleground in a sense that many industries never can be. Should a hospital administrator be willing to spend a million dollars to save one life, or should that money go to equipment that could save more lives? The answer seems obvious, but most people react with a sort of justifiable horror at the thought of letting some poor child die so the hospital can buy some new machines.)

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Defense, transportation infrastructure, and scientific research are just a few other areas were the rules fall apart.

There are many more. Maybe there aren't any near univeral rules and we should look at thinks on a case by case basis.

Defense and infrastructure are inherently the responsibility of the state. I'm not a small-government libertarian. Market forces should be used here whenever possible (military-industrial complex, etc) but there obviously can't be competing national militaries or competing national highway systems.

Scientific research: maybe, it depends. Innovation is complicated and there's no linear investment-to-payoff in research. People concerned with profit at least are discouraged by the profit motive from dumping huge amounts of money into failed research. At the same time, some critical research isn't market-profitable.

Universal rules definitely exist in the form of things like supply/demand curves. I would rather live in a hardcore capitalist hellhole than in the shambles of a failed society that would result from the alternative. We should be wary of assuming that non-market intervention is necessary, but we shouldn't shy away from acting when that intervention is necessary.

>Universal rules definitely exist in the form of things like supply/demand curves.

There are no universal rules for economics in reality. There are generally useful models, that often fail spectacularly. All the universal rules you can think of depend on simplifications that never actually hold--rational actors, perfect information, perfect competition etc...

>I would rather live in a hardcore capitalist hellhole than in the shambles of a failed society that would result from the alternative.

That really depends on the alternative. USSR?, North Korea?, Cuba?, Feudalism? I can think of some pretty bad failure states for capitalist hellholes.

> We should be wary of assuming that non-market intervention is necessary, but we shouldn't shy away from acting when that intervention is necessary.

Sounds rational to me.

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