Maybe it doesn't make sense for you, but it makes their buddies in the private sector a lot of money. And that's the game in capitalism, making a lot of money.
The government competing with affordable options for everyone against the private sector is "bad for business".
It doesn't matter how you structure things you end up with some way to climb the hierarchy. The problem with pure communist systems is they try to prevent all hierarchies. Human nature attempts to circumvent this, the only way to do so is via corruption and political power. Corruption and political power exist in abundance in free markets as well, but there is another outlet for personal ambition. People can get rich. The hope is that you can build a system that incentivizes people to get rich by providing value for everyone. You can have private for-profit healthcare but you have to make sure that people get a good deal out of that. Normally we rely on competition to ensure customers always get a good deal. I don't think that works in this setting. Healthcare is tricky, I don't think we've found a good way to setup incentives for heath systems to have the best outcomes. We will need strong government regulation no matter what we do. Competition will not provide sufficiently good outcomes.
In the US you have great hospitals but at astronomical costs, the entire system is distorted by insurance companies and massive bureaucracies. Here in NZ the hospitals are terrible underfunded socialist messes. We can't hold on to staff because we don't pay enough. Emergency waits are hours. My friends wife just spent 3 days before getting emergency surgery to reattach nerves and tendons in her hand. She had to travel 3 hours to another city to get that care. The last two times I required emergency care the wait was over 8 hours. I can't pay for better service and there is no private emergency option.
That is a massive non-sequiter though, nobody is suggesting that factory workers rise up and sieze control of the hospitals. Or even that nurses do so. The proposals for healthcare usually involve the oligarchs being in control and the public enforcing standards. Which typically turns out to be unsustainable because the middle class is where the people who know how to run things come from and they just got cut out.
The problem here is excessive centralisation where if (more practically, when) the government becomes corrupt or makes a bad decision it becomes illegal to do something different to the regulatory standard.
Politics by people with communist leanings isn't helping the situation, but the fundamental issue here is people keep proposing 'solutions' that don't work and effectively block people from actually solving the problems. Eg, I bet someone with a good idea of how to organise an independent emergency healthcare service wouldn't be allowed to do it in England.
I agree that centralization causes huge problems.
My main point was that I don't think we've found a good system for providing hospital care and whatever that solution is I don't think it lies at either extremes of the left - right political spectrum.
Unbelieavable wealth and seeking power is gene survival. More wealth more survival resources. More power more survival and reproductive resources.
Genes drive everything that is "wrong" with the way things are.
So it's more like "they remain mired in poverty because of the United States' predilection for predatory capitalism."
This is regime change /that we know about/. Intelligence agencies haven't made a huge habit of discussing their covert successes.
> Venezuela has been hostile to the US, yet they are still there.
Yes, because the international response would be quite severe if the US decided to what - destroy Venezuela?
Foreign occupations and coups decimate countries who then have to deal with the effects for generations. The new regime is usually beholden to the powers that put it there (or the old one has to abide by the occupier's demands), permanently crippling the government or the economy or both. Many countries continue to suffer under the conditions created by their overthrowers, so maybe they share some blame but it's largely the longlasting effects of foreign incursions.
> You have to try harder if you want to blame their issues on the US.
It's really not that difficult to understand cause and effect here. If you destroy a country's economy, divide its people, cripple it's infrastructure, and install an authoritarian government, it's going to take a long time to recover.
I.e. there's no evidence.
It's not like the CIA likes to document its dark-ops in Latin Am. on wikipedia as proof for you.
This is still not proof of anything happening, just because someone wants something to be true doesn't make it so.
"Argentina’s Long Road to Ruin A century’s worth of corruption and leftist politics devastated this once-rich nation."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/argentinas-long-road-to-ruin-hy...
Also, your article is unfortunately paywalled, but an op-ed from someone at the WSJ isn't going to change my mind.
ended 40 years ago. The article I cited is today.
> but an op-ed from someone at the WSJ isn't going to change my mind
Not very open-minded to close your mind to something you haven't read. Do you know what is happening to Argentina today?
I'm no liberal. And I used to read the Wall Street Journal every day before Murdoch.
Now it's a pack of lies all the time.
The descendants of those families still have huge wealth and influence in South America.
And IIRC, a lot of people in power in the USSR made a lot of money out of the collapse of the USSR.
Heck, there's some mid-level KGB dude who made $200 billion off it.
Solution: Give more power to politicians! Lack of power corrupts, need to give them more until they stop being corrupt!
Not sure why anyone thinks that would work.
Socialism, however, requires altruistic behavior, and very few people are consistently altruistic and self-sacrificing for the common good.
Are we going to pretend that free market capitalism and its magical benefits haven't been pounded into all of our heads from every angle from the moment we were being taught anything about how the world works? It's not difficult to understand, it's difficult to see in a world where companies commit crimes and collapse in mountains of debt, but no one goes to jail. Not a situation that Adam Smith would approve of.
The reason the benefits capitalism are spread out to any degree is because there are riots when they aren't, so you need to at least reward the people responsible for putting those riots down through violence, technology, and bureaucracy. Hence, the middle class.
> Socialism, however, requires altruistic behavior, and very few people are consistently altruistic and self-sacrificing for the common good.
"Socialism" requires cooperation, and people do it just fine. Even capitalists are socialist amongst themselves when it comes to keeping out competition.
Progressivism conquered America a century ago. Antitrust law. Central bank. Income tax. Universal suffrage. Old age pensions. Public education, research grants. National parks. Interstate highways. Welfare, public housing. Equal opportunity employment. Disaster relief. Socialized medicine for the poor and elderly. Workplace safety. Automobile safety and emissions standards. Space shuttle.
Recently, a flirtation with Universal Basic Income.
You're concerned about what? Free Prime delivery?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extre...
My dad was a professor of finance in a midwestern college. He'd have students coming up to him saying "I didn't know there even was a case for free markets!"
> "Socialism" requires cooperation, and people do it just fine.
Both socialism and free markets require cooperation. The difference is that socialism requires forcible cooperation, and in free markets the cooperation is voluntary.
People innately like to compete and will do so over the dumbest things, like who can get the little puck in the net with sticks the most, or who can correctly guess the sum of a pair of dice.
Market capitalism coopts this most basic of human instincts,not greed, and selfish greed is actually the root of many failures of capitalism endeavors, and human endeavors in general.
For example, how long do you think McDonald's would last if its McBurgers tasted bad? McDonald's success is extremely tied to customer satisfaction.
Tossing the ball back to you, under socialism, why would the socialist service care if you're pleased with the service or not?
Every country that tried having the government run food production produced starvation.
Every one.
> The goal of the capitalist isn't to make their customer happy, its to extract as much of their available disposable income as possible.
True, but the way to get that money is to please the customer, because the company cannot force them to buy.
Those goalposts were just fine where they were, put them back and address the actual argument. Nobody was advocating for 'government run food production'.
That's why it's the poster boy for socialism's failures.
Plus your quip is a little bit dated honestly. The soviets had famines because they literally didn't support evolution for quite some time. They believed Lysenko and allowed him to execute his critics. Meanwhile today, look at China the past few decades when modern agricultural practices were finally well established around the world. Another 600 million people in 50 years. Huge population growth doesn't happen because of starvation.
Ah, the arrogance of knowing what is best for others. (Of course, I know what's best for everyone else, too, but my arrogance stops at taking the next step of being entitled to force it on them.)
> The soviets
You can make excuses for the Soviets. But you gotta explain the starvation from every other communist country. The starvation in Jamestown when they tried communist agriculture. The starvation in the Pilgrims' first year when they tried communist food production. The failure of the Kibbutzen in Israel to feed themselves without government subsidy.
It goes on and on.
P.S. China stopped starving when the stopped collectivist agriculture.
Now for the flip side. Which was the first country to eliminate famine? The US, around 1800, with free market agriculture. Next, which free market agricultural system has suffered from a famine?
lol you misspelled "ran by corrupt authoritarian governments that don't give 2 shits about the public unless they can exploit them"
You can ding corporations... but the real world socialist examples are worse.
Corporations aren't perfect (and we don't live in pure capitalism anyways. Common sense controls exist for good reason). But they are better than socialist governments.
Industrial democracy, where workers own and control the company, backed by a robust welfare state, is socialism.
Besides, the US under free market agriculture produced the tallest people in the world up until WW2. It's kinda hard to believe that Americans grew that tall from eating garbage.
Capitalism, like democracy, is the worst form of government, except for all the others. To believe that the US brand of capitalism can do no wrong is to be as deluded as the communists were. If the free market were perfectly efficient, there would be no such thing as conmen or MLM scams, and every consumer would be 100% informed and perfectly rational. That's ridiculous, so the government needs to step in at times, to promote a freer market than one without regulation.
Go eat at a restaurant in Times Square. They exist only because of their location, and the fact that tourists don't stay long. So their food is bad AND they don't need to try and harder because it doesn't hurt their business. They're a total ripoff and a tourist trap and that's with capitalism's vaunted free market backing the enterprise.
> They're a total ripoff and a tourist trap and that's with capitalism's vaunted free market backing the enterprise.
If you think they're a ripoff, don't patronize them. Nobody is making you.
That seemed obvious to most observers, up to the Cold War.
It can't account for international trade, which functions on mutual self-interest.
There’s a reason why Five Guys, etc are everywhere. People who want a good burger go there.
Imagine if that co-worker that doesn’t contribute or might even drag the team down can just quit and play PS5. Glorious.
How do I know people don’t need coercion or even pay to produce great products? Open source software. Windows is capitalism and Linux is socialism. Which do you prefer?
Consider not being rude next time. Flagged.
> Guess who is corrupting government
How are they corrupting the government? Is the private sector deciding who gets power in the government somehow? Sounds like your democracy doesn't work then. Giving all the power to politicians when the democracy doesn't work just leads to the same scenario as in Soviet.
Bribing the government isn't "corrupting" them, a politician who accepts bribes or tit for tat deals is already corrupt.
And then what happens to minority interests?
How about we have a national vote on what phone you get? Which car you get? Whether carrots or tomatoes get produced? What movies get produced? What clothes are produced? Which diseases get funding? What apartment you get? How many ounces of meat you get per week? What music you get to listen to?
What could go wrong with that?
Not sure if giving the corrupt government more money and power is a good idea in that case.
yeah, but in real capitalism, this is done by consumers voluntarily choosing a product. What we are seeing here is crony capitalism play out.