Isn't trading higher profit for +11% more deaths also violence?
I have a friend who firmly believes that speed limits higher than 50MPH are violence because they lead to increased deaths. He argues that if we cared about people's lives we would impose a strict 50MPH limit on the roads and even force all cars to top out at 50MPH from the factory.
There are millions of tradeoffs in the world where we could reduce deaths, but there's never and endpoint where it's truly done. It's really easy to imagine revenge on PE firms by crushing their profits for a noble cause, but the conversation becomes a lot murkier when the impact starts hitting closer to your own paycheck or lifestyle.
Combined with a hard 50mph limit imposed on vehicles. You buy a new car, it can't go faster than 50mph, period.
The movement has roots in Ralph Nader going back to the 50s https://nader.org/1970/12/11/the-american-automobile-designe...
Now I can probably understand how one can take such radical position, when living in a place that doesn't restrict cars as much as they are restricted here. It's like being so much disillusioned with US that USSR propaganda starts to be appealing and belieaveble. I guess?
None of this is to say that PE firms squeezing vital hospitals aren't morally culpable. Just that there's a meaningful distinction between immoral decisionmaking and violence.
Life is considered valuable in integer quantities but fractional life is considered value-less.
People are free to do, endorse, concoct and peddle all sorts of things that waste people's time (life) or waste people's money on the basis that it "saves lives" because it prevents lives from being lost in whole numbers but the sum total of the little fractions ad up to more.
Consider that when speeding, you might cause an accident. Such an accident would most likely impact a small number of people other than yourself.
When a PE firm engages in extractive hospital management, it provably increases mortality rate, and it does so at scale.
The first choice carries possible risks of lower magnitude, the second choice carries guaranteed risk of higher magnitude.
“Risky behavior” vs “ruthless greed”, the latter feels much closer to violence.
Thus, I have no trouble asserting that PE firms commit intentional violence against patients.
Indirection allows you diffuse the responsibility into the anodyne 'immoral decisionmaking' while social murder remains as it ever was.
It isn't 'all the drivers' fractionally at fault (others can quibble about that), it's the people who create the moral hazard. The car industry and politicians that decided that the ungoverned car, the road, and the parking lot will be the only way to traverse Dallas or LA lo those many years ago, the ones that affirm that system with 'one more road' using tax dollars year after year, knowing that more people will die as a result. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... <- the line goes up.
They have a duty of care as representatives that they are failing to meet. Compare that to cities in Europe or the North East. When you make policies that serve the few and sacrifice the bodies of the many, that act is violence.
Likewise, with PE. When they intentionally understaff a hospital, no single doctor is responsible for killing the patient that died bleeding in the waiting room. It is the choice that we allowed that PE firm to make. Are you comfortable with a fresh MBA using excel to ensure that your local hospital should have four less doctors than strictly necessary to treat you in a timely manner? Society doesn't need to be organized this way, we can and should demand better.
Imagine the reverse, a municipality decides to privatize their water and sewage treatment, but puts no restrictions on the results as long at those wealthy enough are not inconvenienced. This is precisely how you get Flint. Or redlined cities that put the 'undesirables' in industrial waste parks. These acts are violence.
I'm sure the concept has a lot of utility philosophically, but when you try to distill it down to "PE firm owners are murderers" you wind up in pretty crazy places unless you supply a lot of motivated reasoning and special pleading.
Everything is not everything else. Scale not only matters, it's almost the only thing that matters.
I mean, is Hitler a murderer? Is your run of the mill burglary gone wrong worse than the Holocaust? Obviously not. So there has to be some kind of understanding of organized death.
The concept being - organized or institutional crimes are real, and can be much, much, MUCH more severe than murder.
If you really want to stir shit ask him what we enforce those speed limits with.
(hint:violence, but with extra steps)
You contemplate this new world... Is this... violence? It must be... manufacturing regulations are violence against businesses (people)! You relax a little. You imagine someone 'woke' being angry at your incisiveness, you are calm.
I open the hood and add a resistor across the input sensor so that it thinks I'm going 20% slower than I really am.
I start driving at 60mph.
How does society enforce the speed limit regulation against me? (Hint: the threat of, and eventually the use of, violence.)
What a wonderful argument for never trying to improve the world you also reside in.
"your own paycheck or lifestyle."
If excess mortality is required for your lifestyle, change how you live. Do you deny insurance claims for fun? Are you the human avatar of GE and Raytheon? Do you need to manufacture child-vaporizing bombs to maintain your 'lifestyle'?
Genuinely, what is wrong with you? PE firms are not people to take vengeance on. They are not necessary, if they vanished from the Earth tomorrow, the 'worst' outcome is the wealthy owners and workers would need to find new, less violent, employment.
German article: https://www.spiegel.de/auto/tempolimit-120-koennte-58-mensch...
Surely the hapless landscaper is substantially less responsible for any violence, death, etc, etc, he benefits from than say a lobbyist who gets paid to get the laws to favor his employer.
We don't need to figure out an exact formula in order to be able to conclude some parties leverage violence far more than others.
We all ingest some level of arsenic, and are "universally" exposed to radioactivity, but just because something is falls on a continuous spectrum, doesn't mean all levels are equal, there is a point where it becomes too much. That point will not be the same for everyone, but it exists.
> Is it some number of hops from the person who dies that makes the difference?
Not according to the Nuremberg trials.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
2. Is that what you call 10^6 micromorts?
All of this can be (is!) bad. But it's not violence in any meaningful sense of the term.
This is a hospital. A building designed for differentiating life and death and(hopefully) attempting to steer towards the former.
This isn't a speed limit or some other market where there's no ethical consumption. One doesn't choose going to a hospital. It's a place you go when you are at metaphorical gunpoint.
On top of that, people will give them social cover for making this decision. Because, y'know, its just capitalism/business or whatever. It's not like they murdered someone, they just told their worker bees to do something they knew would kill more people than they had to.