Comment by germandiago | Hacker News Reader

Comment by germandiago | Hacker News Reader

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> Cuba gives free healthcare to its people

I think you do not have basic notions of economy. How can something be free? If it is free, it is because someone is doing the work (the doctors). If the doctors do not get paid a market price they are being exploited (forced to work for less). So that is where it is paid. You get it for free, yes, at the expense of those people that could have a better life and in the name of the good for everyone else they are converted into a simple tool for the propaganda of their leaders.

I wonder if that is ethical. I mean: forcing others to do a work that you consider good for the rest without giving them a chance for alternatives. Are those people worse than the people that deserve that health care? Should they be a means to a goal? There are two kinds of humans? The ones that are a means (doctors, rich people, etc.) and the ones that get benefits from them (the users or receivers of those things). No, I say no. Noone should be the means of anyone else. If we want something we ask for permission or cooperate. The rest is just propaganda.

I think you do not have basic notions of economy and what you just said is just propaganda.

There's no two kinds of humans - from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. The doctors will get free healthcare too, if they need it. Trying to put market value on medical care is inhumane and prioritizes an economic system over human life.

I'm not sure why you're talking about rich people here, but because you brought it up - the accumulation of capital is what's truly exploitative.

Value doesn't come from speculative markets, but from the sum of labor put into it. Rich people realized that if they use some of their capital to provide the means of production, they can skim off surplus value from the workers putting in the labor.

In other words, even though they don't do anything productive to create the value, they still take value that others created. That is exploitation.

I will explain to you again, I have researched this topic deeply and for a long time. "will get free healthcare too". In order to get healthcare, someone provides it.

1. if a doctor spends time to provide free healthcare because a regime says they must, they are exploited. This is one option. 2. if a doctor does it and is paid, someone has to pay that bill for the doctor. If the doctor is free for you, someone else is paying. 3. you can pay yourself.

Those are essentially the three options. None of those are free. In 1. the doctor pays, in 2. a third person pays and in 3. you pay directly. No matter how hard you try, in every option you come up with someone will pay the bill. With time or with money or with any other exchange or will be pointed with a gun to do it.

"Free" as in "my neighbor has an apple tree".

>the accumulation of capital is what's truly exploitative

When I think of "accumulation of capital" in modern society, semiconductor fabs are the ultimate example.

I can't imagine disagreeing that the building of such factories encompasses most of the world via supply chains and most of the exploitation in it.

But I feel like there's an ambiguity and I don't understand what is to be our goal.

Should we not have "accumulations of capital"? That is, should we tear down (and hopefully recycle) all of the incredibly expensive factories?

Or should we have accumulations of capital that are not owned by specific people? What is ownership?

I don't know about the real Mafia, but in fiction, there is the trope of the wealthy mob boss who owns nothing on paper, in order to avoid the law, but relies on relationships to define what he has.

On the other hand, many large companies are presently not majority owned by any human being, but mainly by collective entities like index funds. Is that good enough? Or is that irrelevant to an economic system because some people own more index funds than others?

Accumulation of capital is in the context of ownership, yes. Capitalism is a system in which ownership of capital is indistinguishable from any other property, which makes it possible to accumulate it indefinitely. The end result, in the absence of some countervailing force (such as anti-monopoly legislation), is its concentration in the hands of a few oligopolies. Which translates to concentration of power, and strangles democracy.

Corporations are also "collective entities" (of shareholders). The real question in this case is who effectively controls the entity. If the entity represents thousands of people, but is controlled by a few, you still get oligopolies and concentration of power. Something like a co-op is another story, although even there it all depends on how its governance is structured.

I think the means of production should be owned by the workers.

In this case, this could either be through a coop (e.g. those factories are directly owned by the workers working in them, decisions are made democratically) or through a worker's state (the factories are owned by the state as a representation of the workers - this is what the USSR tried to do, but failed miserably at).

I think any other scenario has people leeching off the work of the folks actually producing those semiconductors - e.g. exploitation.

Index funds don't do anything to help this - just cause it's a bigger group of strangers stealing the products of the worker's labor doesn't make it any less exploitative.

And nobody's saying we should tear down the factory, we just shouldn't let it be owned by people who have nothing to do with the work being done so they can make money from nothing but the fact they had money already.

>Index funds don't do anything to help this - just cause it's a bigger group of strangers stealing the products of the worker's labor doesn't make it any less exploitative.

I had a hard time understanding this, but I think I got it.

You are saying that if I work for, say, Xerox, I should own a portion of Xerox, because their capital belongs to me, because I use it to create value.

This is better, you are saying, than me owning an index fund that has a little of every company. Because if I do that, then I am exploiting all the workers in all the other companies.

As a self-contained system of belief, I guess it has a certain logic to it.

But if Xerox goes down the tubes then I don't want to lose my job and all my retirement savings!

I also think I see an inconsistency. If owning part of another company is exploiting their workers, then I should also be concerned that any form of ownership by workers at my company could involve exploitation.

Simply because we do different jobs using different amounts and types of capital. Averaging things out must be exploitation of workers by workers in the same way as owning mutual funds and such.

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