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Comment by revelio | Hacker News Reader

>> so _everyone_ has as access to basic goods and services for free, like education/health/transport/…

Access? UK tries this. High taxes and high borrowing to fund a large public sector. Result:

- People can't reliably see dentists or get doctor's appointments because the nationalized health system can't manage capacity properly.

- People can't reliably move around the country because the public sector transport workers are constantly going on strike, despite Tube drivers earning £56k/yr, only a bit less than that of a software engineer.

Putting the public sector in charge doesn't guarantee access to anything, it can easily lead to the opposite, which is why the USSR was constantly being wracked by bizarre shortages especially for anything that mattered to the general public like consumer goods. And now the UK suffers massive healthcare shortages. Same problem.

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> People can't reliably see dentists or get doctor's appointments because the nationalized health system can't manage capacity properly.

Not accurate in the slightest, this is due to the current administration deliberately funding the NHS less than it needs to function effectively.

> People can't reliably move around the country because the public sector transport workers are constantly going on strike

Only currently true because of similar reasons, it's not structurally true of that sector.

> Putting the public sector in charge ... And now the UK suffers massive healthcare shortages. Same problem.

Not accurate at all.

In the UK dentists are mostly private, it hasn't increased the quality or availability in the least.

Public transport is actually a fairly small part of the nation's transport, the UK is very car-centric so the strikes largely inconvenience commuters and drive even more people onto the roads, unless they can WFH.

Strikes are also a very recent phenomenon, just in the last 6 months or so, so this is quite a new thing driven by inflation.

Problems with the NHS are very much poor management by the last run of governments where there is a quite a growing suspicion they are deliberately trying to run down the NHS in order to make a case for to privatise it, following e.g. America's disastrous model.

This is a forced imageproblem try to get privatizations look better than state run, by defunding public sectors and claiming all kinds of weird stuff upto straight lies some people want to believe.

Don’t buy into that propaganda, look at the US how privatization ends up: still lots of tax money, additionally people can’t afford stuff, and a few assholes getting insanely rich in the process by siphoning money out of the society.

Try to ensure appropriate money is used to make the NHS effective again, including wages that allows people to live where they work (<1h commute).

Most communist shortages came from being cutoff from international trades with wealthy countries, and having to start from ruins or nothing at all btw. These are different problems, and you might learn in the process why capitalism is going to end soon. :-)

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