bravo22

This is very true, and not at all what I mean when I say "choice". In free market choice means alternative vendors. Do you have other choices for getting chemo besides the one hospital?

You may be surprised to know that 80% of hospitals in the US are non-profit. The evil profit motive isn't the reason their bills are so outrages.

In the 60's US healthcare expenditure was 5% of the economy and it is close to 20% right now.

That's not entirely accurate and that's not even the meaning of free market.

Water is also a necessity as is food and you can have a free market for those.

The questions are: 1. Does the buyer have enough choices or alternatives to choose from when it comes to healthcare? 2. Do those who offer services have a monopoly on the service?

When you look at the US market you'll find that it doesn't meet those criterias. Market forces are prevented from acting and being able to reduce costs.

The fact that there is a captive audience, as you suggest, means that we cannot just shovel money into it. You end up exactly where you are. Costs go up because it is a necessity. Same reason food prices go up when there is a shortage. It is not a luxury.

You are assuming that healthcare is a free market. There is tremendous regulation, encouraged by incumbants, to keep away the competition.

You should look at historical healthcare expenditure by the US.

The problem isn't providing healthcare for all... it is the method and the cost. Universal payer is one way. It is not the best way and in fact Medicare is one reason costs are currently high. It is a bit like a car that used to get 30MPG and now gets 15MPG, and getting worse, and the solution being offered is for all of us to collectively chip in and buy gas for those who can't -- which is not tenable in the longterm because you're spending more and more of the GDP on transportation.

There are other ways of giving everyone coverage. One scheme, would be giving people money. Enough to cover average cost of healthcare plans and say education plans. The individual is then responsible for their own healthcare and has the funds to purchase health insurance. Then you have a healthy market and have mechanisms for the costs to come down.

That's if it is equally applied to everyone. Examples, similar to yours, are used as basis of racial discrimination lawsuits when the evidence shows that it is selectively applied to a group of people.

Alternatively people just want to be very fucking good at their job and there is an exec or a contract lawyer doing this as a way of being better than other execs or contract lawyers at the company. Add to that the fact that the main purpose of any large organization (and organism) is to survive and perpetuate itself and you get this. The shareholders and heck even the CEO don't need to be in on this or even care.

A corporation is the instrument of its shareholders. The shareholders are the ones pursuing unlimited profits. Joel Bakan's argument makes it seem like humans -- people -- who own the corporation are blameless.

They have now that it has come to the forefront. My point was they could have run the article along with the note.

GG can publish his article and the readers can be the judge.

The issue is that we're not privy to the editor and their motives or the strength of Greenwald's evidence. It could very well be that he has a solid story. In this case you have a well known journalist claiming that his editors are censoring him on an important story.

The editors can run the story with a disclaimer outlining their concerns as Greenwald argues.

Exactly.

Or they can push narratives and stories to manipulate their audience? If the main search engine in a country was controlled by a foreign entity that would be cause for concern.

Signal integrity. High speed signals degrade with even slightest mismatch in trace length or stubs. For high-speed signals you use a chip which is essentially an electrical repeater to redirect the output to port A or B.

Re: posts with false information.

The cynic in me thinks that HN is not immune to astroturfing by foreign or domestic actors anymore than Reddit or Facebook are.

You would actually have a flat tax across the system ideally. Eliminates unproductive capital deployment to reduce tax burden.

You take X% off the top of the economy and distribute it to everyone who needs it on a sliding scale basically below a certain income level Y.

The government doesn't foot the bill. People and businesses do. We pay taxes. Government has no money.

The transfer payment is taken from the entire economy through a tax. A slice off the top.

If a business has higher profits it would also pay larger portion of that transfer to low income persons.

A key feature is indexing the maximum amount i.e. what a person with 0 income would receive to typical cost of living at state or country level. This way it auto adjusts. Then it is in the interest of everyone paying taxes to figure out ways to reduce costs of living.

Minimum wage creates distortions. For example industries that are labour heavy are impacted disproportionately to others that are more automated.

That actually does not satisfy free market. Free market is freedom from coercion. When you have monopolies you're not free to participate in the labour market.

Freidman and Hayek both emphasize this point in their works.

Which is why instead of mispricing labour through minimum wage you can have a negative income tax which makes up the difference. The nice thing is that it will apply to everyone -- working or not, sick or not, on mat leave or not, can't work because of covid or not. You top-up people's income and that's paid for through taxes.

You take the benefit of efficiency and productivity from the entire economy and return it to the people at the bottom.

You don't have a right to a job, or a particular income. You have a right for society to not leave you dangling when in need. Your ability to get a job or have more income should be determined by market forces.

Put a negative income tax in place and ensure a minimum level of funds for every citizen and see how quickly Amazon's treatment of its warehouse workers improve. Far more than any union could provide.

You can achieve the same or better result but simply mandating that the same company can't own the fiber AND provide service. The electricity grid in Europe is run the same way.

It caused inflation in assets, not in goods.

You are avoiding the actual question.

Furthermore what you keep repeating is not true. You're retconning history and economics based on your own knowledge and absolutely ignoring books and written history.

You're on the money.

Self-interest is an inherent human nature. Competition is the mechanism to keep self-interest in check. Everyone wants a monopoly. Our institutions and power structure have to be built to be anti-monopoly of all forms.

Rise of corporatism in America is highly correlated with concentration of power in the state. Corporations could not have achieved their scale and power w/o the state putting its foot on the scale to tilt it in favour of one particular outcome or the other. When you have a giant who can throw its weight around, all you need is a bit of smarts to use that your advantage.

You're confounding American corporatism and capitalism. In which part of capitalist philosophy do you find "rent extracting monopoly power"? Is it in the free market? Is it in the competition? Is in the decentrlization?

They're both real problems. Most of growth in the last decade has been from leveraging. A lot of people have BS jobs as a result of leveraging. Giving people money to avoid starvation (which is good), isn't going to change your leverage problem when it comes to businesses and banks.

Capitalism is built around competition and anti-monopoly, philosophically.

Unfortunately in reality people believe that the only good monopoly is the one they (think) they control. This leads them to pile more and more power into that institution -- Government. This makes the government a prize to win, ripe for abuse and takeover by special interest. In turn the government doesn't do the one thing it is supposed to do, which is ensure competition and prevent monopolies.

The basic premise of anti-trust is that you can't use your power in one area (say search) to gain marketshare in another area (say shopping, or videos). Google should have been broken up a long time ago. This doesn't go against any foundation of capitalism.

You'd also run out of that asset pretty fast.

EDIT: Not sure about the downvotes. It is a factual statement. Their increasing wealth is a reflection of other broken parts of the economy.

They're worth that. It doesn't mean anything until that is converted into cash. So their wealth increase or decrease isn't coming at the expense of everyone else. It is a reflection of the secondary effect of millions of other economic decisions made by others.

First you'd have to convert your 1BN gain of non-cash assets to cash every 2 weeks.

I've been on silicon side. Because chips are rushed out the door and always behind schedule, and they expect large customers to make 2-3 product lines with it during the chip's lifetime.

This also reveals a fundamental bug in naive democracy (i.e. we should do everything that the majority wants). It creates an implicit tyranny against the minority by the majority. Of course the same person can be in a majority group in one category but minority in the other.

U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and other similar fundamental laws were conceived as essentially a way to fix this problem; to keep the minority safe from the majority. You wouldn't be able to solve slavery with democracy. The majority would vote to maintain it.