Hacker News Reader

Comment by ako | Hacker News Reader

Dogmas are a disease.

We have different economic & market tools. We should use the right tool for the problem.

Some markets are best served with a free market system, others with a single payer system, others with a monopoly.

There are studies (no reference) which indicate that every euro spent by government on education has a 10 times return on investment: better educated people, have better jobs, pay more taxes, create more companies, create more jobs, attract more companies, have less health issues, etc.

Making people pay for their own education, and thereby limiting the education level of the population of a country, a country is doing itself a disservice.

View on HN

> Dogmas are a disease… We should use the right tool for the problem.

It's bizarre to me how rare this stance is.

I understand disagreement over what exactly the "right tool" is, because these things are complex. But people who believe there is only one right tool for every job -- big government, small government, free markets, more regulation, whatever -- strike me as intellectually lazy.

Completely agree. The problem is not that capitalism is just blanket bad, or something reductive like that, but instead: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20956786

Capitalism specifically enables a meta-game of spreading as dogma.

There are negative side effects of capitalism for sure, but it's possible to identify these effects and work to counteract them.

In a democratic country, the populace regularly campaigns for new regulations to counteract some of the bad behavior incentivized by capitalism and the negative externalities produced by capitalism. We're chatting in a thread about California banning private prisons, for example.

In fact, I'm not even sure regulation by a state is something opposed to capitalism. Rather, regulation enables capitalism.

One could view capitalism as a system of regulations that attempts to limit the ways that people can profit from one another, ideally by limiting them to value-creating activities, but at a minimum blocking them from nefarious and value-destroying activities. If you want money, it's far easier to take it by force, or trickery, or monopoly, or coercion, or bribery, or espionage, or cutting corners, or nourishing addiction, or any number of unsavory things.

Capitalism is an attempt to cut off these options, at least to the extent that many people abandon them, and instead decide to create value for others instead.

The US system is actually the worst of both worlds (capitalist and socialist). It combines heavy regulation costs, high litigation costs, high public funding, AND profiteering. Literally anything would be better. It's based on a government-protected trade union married to a system of geographic monopolies... yet it's still allowed to charge whatever it wants to a captive market - and then price discriminate on top! It's overburdened with CYA and barrier-to-entry regulations, yet falsely labelled as "free-market" and "capitalist" by its status-quo PR & lobbyists to get that political support. Same thing as Universities.

If it was truly "capitalist" then literally anyone would be free to hang a shingle and provide medical services (kind of like car mechanics), there would be competing professional accreditations (trademarked brands) as well (kind of like private technical certificates). But when the "market" is so perverted, "capitalism" (whatever is left of it) gets a bad rap because the incentives are fked to begin with.

It's rare because it's hard. It's much easier to just pretend you have a hammer and treat everything like a nail.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com