Anarchism works perfectly well, as long as physical property is not involved. I have often cheered myself up by examining the Free Software movement, which is essentially communistic in nature. It is, however, significantly different from ‘real world’ communism, as there is no scarcity of resources. In fact, it is an evolved communism, based on an anarchy. At any point, the percieved community could randomly decide to follow another ‘leader’, without repercussion. Those who have become leaders of statue do so simply through their contribution and value to the community. I was curious recently as to the possibility of the heirachy being stratified, with Linus, ASM, and Bruce Perens being the leaders, when out of the SCO debacle, a new leader, PJ Wright, whose contributions stemmed from something other than programming, emerged. (She’s groklaw.net )
Can’t shoot people, all you can do is try to destroy their reputations. Luckily, there are ways to deal with that as well. Works pretty nicely.
…except the people who earn $100,000 tax-free a year will be spending a lot of it on paying road owners, particularly by greedy landowners who have jacked the price up by 1000% because they have a natural monopoly on that section of road. Or indeed maybe no goods will be able to be delivered because some pain-in-the-ass has decided they don’t want nobody driving on their land no more and have shut off their sectioon of the freeway, while other parts of it have fallen into disprepair due to owner apathy.
Of course even if the roads were open, he probably won’t be able to go anywhere anyway because the roads will subject to potshots from roving armed poor people that will inevitably turn into pitched battles against private security armies (and what’s to stop the private armies turning on their employers?), and Mr 100 Grand will of course have fork out a significant wad of income on 24-hour bodyguards too, which will have to protect him wherever he goes, since there will be no law enforcement in those areas that can’t afford or are unwilling to fund it, and no concensus on what constitutes legal or illegal behaviour.
Seems like Mr 100 Grand is going to lose the ability to earn that amount due to the collapse of society and infrastructure, and possibly theft of his savings by unregulated banking leading to high degrees of fraud.
I suspect his ability to make voluntary charitable donations is likely to shrink drastically.
This is a complex question. First of all let’s examine one place where today’s police forces have traditionally been afraid to set foot, South Central LA. There are nearly 400 murders per year in South Central (although this is slowly improving). The vast majority of these murders are due to internecine strife in South Central itself. In short, Gang warfare. The gang culture is perpetuated by the drug culture which, in turn, is perpetuated by the Government’s futile attempt to rid them from society. In an Anarcho-Capitalist society drugs would be legally supplied by private vendors at a far lower cost. I read an article in The Economist a few years ago (unfortunately I can’t find it on the net at the moment but I’ll keep looking) and the writer estimated that the cost of class A drugs would fall by about 2000% if the drugs were grown, refined and sold privately. No more drug fuelled gang violence. Imagine South Central LA without drug violence. I don’t live in South Central but I am certain that the area in which I do live would become a much safer place virtually overnight if all drugs were legalised.
So, for a start, under an Anarcho Capitalist system the catalyst for a lot of violence in the poorest communities would evaporate.
However, poor people would still risk being murdered. This risk would be partially offset in two ways. The first is in the traditional way in which it is offset today, by security forces. However, instead of a single, monolithic security force financed through coercion and the explicit threat of violence, it would be financed voluntarily and supplied by competing agencies on the free market.
I am well aware that, even taking into account the increased prosperity of even the poorest members of our society (due to the lack of goods tax and strength of private charity among other things), some people wouldn’t be able to afford to pay for private security. However, since private security, like anything else, would be provided far more cheaply on the free market due to the competition factor, the extra financial burden would be borne by businessmen and corporations. It is in the best interests of corporations to provide a portion of their profits towards the funding of private security agencies to protect their workers lives and property. This could happen in two ways. The first is that Corporations could pay their favoured security force directly. The second is that they could give employees allowances to provide for their security in much the same way as certain jobs provide health insurance benefits today. Since these corporations would be saving literally billions of dollars on taxes, and since they would be making more profit through sales since, due to the lack of taxation, the general public would have more disposable cash, it would be a burden they could afford to shoulder while still making a far healthier profit than they do now.
Also, in a society where near enough everybody would be armed and allowed to carry guns concealed on their person, there would be a great disincentive to ever try and murder anybody. It stands to reason that, the greater your ability to put your attackers dead to rights in a millisecond, the less attackers you have at all. To successfully conduct a violent crime you need military superiority over your victim. In an Anarcho-Capitalist society this would be impossible. How could anyone steal a car, or money from the vault of a bank or the cash register of a 7-11 if they know that everyone they face would probably be armed? In an Anarcho-Capitalist society we would truly be our brothers keepers and the Government wouldn’t have to point a gun to our heads in order to conduct the half-assed job they’re doing of it at the moment.
I’m at a loss to see how much support a revolutionary movement would have if the majority of their would-be supporters have more disposable income than they did before the evanescence of Government.
jjimm
What motive would any private army powerful enough to perform such an endeavour have for carrying it out? They couldn’t hope to install a Government in the face of an armed populace that didn’t want it backed up by the remaining security forces anxious to protect their profits. It would result in short term gains followed by annihilation and much bloodshed in the process. This is precisely why it wouldn’t happen. Your argument is akin to (to draw an admittedly dodgy analogy) saying “Don’t vote for John Kerry. He’ll instigate Martial Law”. He could, presumably, if he won the election, but he just wouldn’t because there’s no way it’d benefit him long term. A private security company of the size needed to carry out such an operation would be pulling in massive profits as it is. They’d have everything to lose and nothing to gain.
I don’t believe that every human being is a saint in the making but I do believe that they are all rational
John Mace
As far as I know Von Mises never identified himself as an Anarcho Capitalist. The only reason I included him with Hoppe and Rothbard is because his theories were great influences on them. It was a badly worded statement.
griffen2, how would society address the existence of nuclear weapons? They’re pretty scary in the hands of governments in the first place. How does the prospect of private ownership thereof look to you? Or do you presuppose the disposal of all of them? Or a Fallout-style world?
This is the mistake made by anarchist from time immemorial. Instability does not require that everyone act rationally. It only requires a few bad actors. It is certainly true that wealthy areas would be able to afford enough private security to maintain their enclaves. It is even possible that these enclaves could be quite large, perhaps the size of cities. But a couple terrorists, basing themselves in the poor and disconected areas could still wreak havic.
I’m afraid you’d need far more evidence that security can be provided without some economically less invested body, some body not entirely married to the financial fortunes of very small groups of people. Now, possibly, some large group of corporations would band together and form some sort of independant body charged with providing wide ranging security.
Perhaps in order to avoid conflicts of interest, they would fund such a body by agreeing to pay some small portion of their incomes regardless of how much an individual might have used the services of that body. But would this be fundamentally different than a government?
griffen2, out of curiosity, have you traveled to parts of the world in which governmental authority has broken down? Surely there are some nice places, like barely inhabited islands in the South Pacific, but I’m referring to the places in the world in which folks pretty much make up their own rules because whatever governments there are just don’t work.
For example, I spent a little bit of time in the border region between China and Myanmar. The area was far from stable. Guns, drugs, smuggling, murders, AIDS, STD-infected prostitutes, poverty, dirty water, no doctors. The problems go on and on and on. There’s also places that are much, much worse, like Somalia, Sierra Leone, and god knows, probably a few parts of Iraq.
So, how is it that these places have basically gone to pot without some body that organizes law, fair trade practices, justice, etc.? If anarcho-capitalism is appealing as you say, why haven’t people in these areas simply spontaneously taken it up? Or, could it be that they have, and the crime, poverty, and disease are the natural consequences?
Also, have you actually seen what it is like to live in these places, or are you just engaging in in armchair philosophizing based upon what you have read about human nature and South Central Los Angeles?
Ludwig von Mises — his name be blessed — was not an anarchist; he was a liberal. Not in the modern sense of a centrist ethic of wealth redistribution, but in the modern sense of a libertarian ethic of noncoercion, which itself derives from the notion of rights defined by property. His celebrated 1927 analysis can be read online in its entirety: Liberalism in the Classical Tradition. It is a short book, and explains well the roots of liberalism. A key exerpt:
“The program of liberalism, therefore, if condensed into a single word, would have to read: property, that is, private ownership of the means of production… All the other demands of liberalism result from this fundamental demand.”
I don’t mean this to be an unfair question, but since you are advocating a philosophy that directly relates to the implicit goodness of people, I feel it is fair game.
In 2001 through today, virtually every American has received a tax break, some more substantial than others, of course. Noting that with lesser taxes people will be more inclined to give to charity, as your argument goes, I ask you, griffen2, as an anarcho-capitalist how much did you give to charity in 2000? How much do you give today? In other words, are you practicing what you are preaching, or are you waiting for others to start doing it first?
In the same vein, do you expect that the recent tax cuts of roughly $2 trillion (spread over 10 years, of course) have generated a great deal of additional revenues for charities? Why or why not?
So what will you do when the Chinese land in California, the Mexicans cross the Rio Grande and the Brits re-take New York? Because they will, you know. They may call it “peacekeeking” or something but it’ll be just like any other colonial war of conquest. Nature abhors a vaccum, and every nation on the planet wiill see the U.S. as a vast expance full of natural resources up for the taking. They won’t be doing it out of malice - after all, if they don’t invade, somebody else will!
So tell me this, OP: how will 10,000 tiny security forces protect the U.S. from invasion by multiple well-organized armies?
Howdy. I’m an anarchist of the regular traditional noncapitalist variety.
I always assumed the absence of a money system to be intrinsic to anarchy.
• Who prints the money?
• I have a nice printer and I’m going to print some. Some of it will be deliberately indistinguishable from other money circulating out there, some will specifically say it is AHunter3 money appropriate as tender for all debs public and private. Any reason either or both of these scenarios would not occur? Why would the money I print, or the money printed by anyone else with a nice printer, be worth anything beyond the esthetic or utilitarian value of the bills as paper objects?
• You have a Thingamabubble for sale for 475 “anarchos” (or dollars or whatever we’re using in this setup). You have a repository of several million anarchos in some place, let’s call it a bank. Care to explain the process by which we, collectively, all of us anarchists, arrive at the shared understanding that you own these things? You aren’t using the Thingamabubble right now and I’d like to use it. Why can’t I just use it? Especially if you aren’t standing next to it to wave me off.
• If any of your answers involve big dudes with large sticks or guns who you pay to enforce ownership or prevent me from doing things, please explain in what ways this situation constitutes an anarchy rather than a, umm, Thug-archy or SecurityCop-archy or something. Also, why it is that the big dudes with the large sticks, if they exist and enforce things through coercion or the threat of coercion, don’t take your Thingamabubble and also acquire the contents of the bank. I mean, if we’re doing coercion as a means of defending the notion of ownership, which seems sort of intrinsic to the idea of money and selling and buying and capitalism and so on, why wouldn’t we rapidly end up with a BigStick-archy of one sort or another?
Mind you, I’m used to similar questions being posed to me based on things my questioners don’t understand or assumpions they make that I don’t share, so I’m OK with being told that I’ve missed a key concept or am making an assumption that is without merit somewhere here.
I believe an anarchy is entirely possible and practical but I can’t imagine it coexisting with the money system any more than it could coexist with a police force or a military.
What exactly is a “corporation” under your scheme? Isn’t a corporation a legal fiction? What the heck is a “legal fiction” when there are no laws.
Ignoring that and assuming the existence of something like corporations, these corporations would be protecting those lives and properties as they see fit. They would be using armed agents to enforce rules. This sounds to me like government. Apparently un-elected government. Apparently government that owns and controls the means of production…
I think there’s another word for that form of government.
But if they do that then no-one will ever drive down their roads. They’ll have spent all that money acquiring the territory and then price themselves out of the market. I’m not saying this is impossible but it doesn’t make very good business sense. People will simply take other routes until the greedy landowners lower their rates to the market price.
But what if the road is a very important one? What if a lot of people need to use it? Surely then he could charge what he likes, safe in the knowledge that people have no alternative but pay him through the nose? Well, not quite. If such a situation ever arose there would quickly be a massive demand for an alternative route and there would be no shortage of construction companies looking to build one. They would charge a rate in line with the market price or else another construction company would build yet another road and undercut the greedy landowner.
In a truly free market it’s nigh on impossible for a natural monopoly to exist for any length of time.
If they don’t want anybody driving down their stretch of the road it’s their right. They own it and can do whatever they want with it. I’m sure you wouldn’t like me picking flowers from your front garden and selling them on without cutting you in on th deal, even if there was an enormous demand for your flowers. If there is any serious demand for use of their land then construction companies would be able to build an alternative route and reap the profits.
Why would this happen? It seems you think the poor would be more disenfranchised than they are now. I can’t see why. Why would the poor be taking potshots? Sure, they have no welfare. But on the other hand, their money would go further due to the lack of tax on goods, their neighbourhoods would be more peaceful due to the lack of drug crime, the gradual growth of private businesses (and I stress the word gradual. No society could switch from Democracy to Anarcho-Capitalism in a short space of time and survive) to fill the gaps left by an ever diminishing Government would lead to increased employment and if they got in really dire straits they could turn to private charity which, instead of encouraging them to eke out their lives on subsistence levels by giving them paltry welfare checks and no real one-to-one help, would proactively encourage them to get back on their feet. Overall, the poor would have less incentive to revolt than they do now.
Sure, you probably think this is panglossian and loaded with assumptions but I am simply describing the inevitable results of the inevitable processes of the market.
You mean like an armed rebellion or a boardroom takeover? If you mean the latter then it’s reasonable to assume that before rebelling they have some kind of grievance. If the grievance is serious then surely the companies directors would negotiate better contracts for them. Better that than get shot.
Even areas of extreme poverty will be wealthier than they are now in terms of disposable income for the reasons I gave above. And private corporations would contribute towards their employees private security because it is in their own best interests to protect their employees and their property.
I think you’re wrong that there would be no consensus on what constitutes legal or illegal behaviour. I subscribe to the Lockean theory of natural rights. By virtue of our existence as human beings we have the right to life, liberty and property. Any infraction on any of these is cause for complaint. Essentially, this is the way things are now. How many crimes can you think of that aren’t an infraction against life, liberty, property, or any combination of the three?
Society and infrastructure could only collapse if the change from Democracy to Anarchy happened quickly. I envision it taking place gradually, over several generations. It may even take longer than that. It certainly wouldn’t happen in our lifetimes. As technology improves, the ability of private entrepreneurs to usurp government would grow with it. Government would be rendered irrelevant one service at a time. Is there any particular service which has to be performed by a Government to ensure the stability of society?
Presumably whatever the individuals who purchased the organization want to call it :). Since there is no good currently available that the free market cannot supply, the key distinguishing characteristic of Government is coercion. If the organization started demanding money from people that were not its customers it would essentially be a Government in all but name. Until that happened it would just be a private corporation like any other.
Sentient Meat
Erislover tackled your hypothetical superbly, and far more eloquently than I would have been able to do. I would have said pretty much the same things so I’ll let his answer stand for mine.
I think your definition of what constitutes a Government is very different from mine. To me, a Government is unique by virtue of its ability to coerce those who don’t want its services. Two warring militias would simply be two warring militias unless they coerced those who didn’t want to join them. If the militia’s used coercion to recruit members then yes, they would be acting like a very rudimentary Government. They can be dealt with, however, by the security forces employed by those they coerce.
Also, how, exactly, are the acts of your armed goons different from what the Government is doing now. The only difference I can make out is that we don’t actually get to see the goons unless we’re disobedient.
Your location states Paris so I’ll assume you’re talking about Universal health care like they have in France.
Universal health care is inferior to private health care for one basic and pivotal reason. The demand for health care is potentially infinite. There’s no such thing as being too healthy. Since the system is paid for through taxation and your rate of taxation is based on your income, you can use the health service as much as you like for little or no extra cost. What I mean by that is that if I were a French citizen and a recipient of a Universal health care system, I could go to the hospital whenever I was sick or every day to make sure that I never got sick and I’d still pay exactly the same amount towards the health service.
Universal health care is essentially a price cap at zero price. What do you think happens to consumer demand for health care when it is “free”? The demand shoots through the roof. People start visiting the doctors for trivial ailments that could be remedied by a couple of paracetamol and a few hours in bed. Hypochondriacs who get sick just thinking about their health bleed the system dry through unnecessary tests.
So what happens to the sparse medical resources when they’re being wasted on hypochondriacs, unnecessary treatments for the sniffles and lonely old people just who want a chat? Specifically, what happens to the Doctors and Nurses? Well, there’s never enough of them. They have only a few minutes to see the people who are genuinely ill, who have to wait very long times. In other words, quality of service suffers. When quality goes down and the service is health care, people die.
What then do you do? Hire more doctors. That shoots up the cost of the government program, the taxpayer burden. To cover that extra burden you have to raise people’s taxes thus making them poorer. Consequently they’re more dependent on the government provided services that they can no longer afford to pay for themselves. What do you do? Hire even more doctors. Do you see the problem?
OK, so instead, you just cap the prices that the hospitals and doctors can charge and that will surely keep the costs down, right? But what happens to the supply when you artificially cap the price? The suppliers can’t make a decent profit; it’s not worth their time, money and investment. They get out. The supply goes down. Doctors are leaving the field in droves. And the burden on the remaining ones is crushing. Do you know many young doctors have to go through over a decade of grueling school? Only to then have tens of thousands of pounds in student loans to pay off, while spending most of their salary on malpractice insurance because of out-of-control trial lawyers, while working 80-120 hour work weeks? Why would anyone want to be a doctor anymore? There used to be plenty of doctors. So many that they would come to your house! And they made great livings (which is why there were so many doctors). Can you figure out why that has all changed? Ask yourself why PC’s, VCRs and everything else is getting cheaper (in real, inflation adjusted pounds/dollars/francs) while the cost of heavily regulated health care skyrockets at many times the rate of inflation?
In an unregulated market, the costs of health care go down, not up, just like everything else. Treatments that were brand new and extremely expensive 25 years ago are now simple and routine. What keeps costs high, and people unable to afford them, is government. Government is not the solution. Getting government out is.
Under an Anarcho-Capitalist society the benefits reaped by the mass privatization of the health service in, say, America can only increase.
You can rule anyone who consents to your rule for as long as they consent to it. If you attempted to rule anyone who didn’t consent, naturally you would be prevented.
All governments are already anarchy, they just don’t admit it yet. Thankfully in most cases neither do their populace. Disagreement over the definition and extent of government between politician and populace rarely end well for both sides. Government works in part by the threat of violence, especially with regards to getting people to grudgingly go along with things. These do not include working for a living. If opportunities exist to profit by doing things that individuals enjoy, or at least tolerate, then individuals will go to these first. Those who find only crime enjoyable are unlikely to go unnoticed and untreated (massive lead injections are considered treatment in this case). I doubt these people will arise in any greater number than they do now.
There is an important difference between government collapsing and government shrinking away while stable life continues. In the case of government collapse poverty, destructive behavior, and similar problems are already present. They help drive the government collapse by subverting or crippling parts of the government. Eventually no recognized force exists. In such cases the populace is often too poor to defend itself and is forced to serve a regional power. Neighboring nations with greater stability and power may decide to take pieces of the pie at this point. In the case of government shrinking away these problems are not as prevalent. Elected individuals would be systematically removing the government’s ability to govern the life of individuals until elected officials became obsolete. In each case private institutions would exist to supply removed services. Structure and stability remain, government does not. Invaders seeking to take the territory inhabited by such individuals have to contend with private armies and armed citizens.
The biggest problem I think an anarchy would have is mobility of citizens. If only a single section of the world is operating in this manner the rest of the world is unlikely to want its citizens to go there and is definitely not going to want the weirdoes from the anarchy to enter their country.
I don’t think humanity will ever shed government. If governments begin to pull back, churches and similar cultural based structures will rise in their place. People will opt in (for the most part) but a structure that is government in all but name will remain. These will be based on the more insidious coercion. Not the crude “I got a stick do what I say” but the “Do what I say or I won’t like you” kind that humanity is deeply vulnerable to.
Even so in principal I think anarchy would be nice. I also think that if you do not believe humanity capable of self-governing on the individual level at any future time you do not believe humanity deserves to exist. What is the point of human existence if human existence can never reach the point at which each man can be responsible for himself without forcing his way onto others? Such an attitude shows a degree of despair and distrust in human nature that I cannot imagine living a happy life while believing it.
Prevented by who? The person I’m coercing? What if he’s weak, or overly passive? By the rest of society? I’m sure you know there are plenty of examples throughout history where stronger people have used force to oppress or enslave weaker people.
pervert is right. Human beings aren’t rational. This is just one of the many problems plaguing this beautiful, insane idea.
Say I hate gays (or Jews or Blacks or Whites or whatever.) I just hate ‘em. They ain’t natural and the Bible says they’re an abomi…ambomo…well pretty freakin’ bad. And I know Jethro and Tyler and a couple of the other guys from the Dew Drop Inn are with me, an’ revrin’ Fred says Gays should be sent to hell. (Course I coulda told you that, but its nice to have the revrin’ on yer side) So lets go hammer 'em cause there aint no cops no more so who’s gonna stop us?
Well, who? Oh, wait I know. The gay community can hire a private police force. So It’ll be the Gay militia vs. The Redneck militia vs. The New Black Panthers vs. Aryan Nations vs. the JDL vs. MS-13 vs. etc. etc. etc.
Oh and getting back to Sentient Meat’s sniper example, ** erislover** most emphatically did not answer it. Erislover’s response was that (1) we already have crime and (2) governments are violent too. Well yes, we do already have crime. The point Sentient meat was making was that it would be far worse in this situation because there would be no one with the resources to investigate the sniper SM described, or to investigate a thousand other difficult to catch criminals like serial killers, racist gangs, or simple neighborhood extortionists. Saying anarchy will be O.K because we already have crime is like saying It wont matter if my house catches fire because I’m already hot.
The point that Gov’ts are bad too is so silly it’s not even wrong. How does the fact that some governments have committed genocide begin to address the question of law enforcement in an anarchy? we’re talking about the gov’t of the U.S. being replaced by, well, by nothing it seems. What this has to do with the Crusades is beyond me.
And BTW, if you think that it takes a government to have a genocide I strongly recommend watching the doc Ghosts of Rwanda. All you need is a charismatic speaker, a mob, and someone to hate. A radio station is useful too. The atrocities in rwanda, Darfur, ex-Yugoslavia, and Somalia were (are) all carried out by militias.
And what about foreign policy? Say China invades Taiwan. Do we do anything about it? how can we since there really isn’t a “we” anymore? Is the whole world supposed to magically turn Anarchic all at once? If not are you suggesting radical isolationism, where even Pat Buchanan fears to tread? If you are, what about the borders and immigration? (Although I suspect it will be Canada and Mexico that will have to worry about their borders, as people flee the carnage and chaos by the millions) Who negotiates with OPEC?
And you are under a grave misconception regarding the drug trade. The drug trade is not violent simply because drugs are illeagal. It is violent because there is no recourse to enforceable contracts. Under your system no one would have recourse to enforceable contracts. So it wouldn’t be drug dealing becoming like every other business, it would be every other business becoming like drug dealing. In addition to people being killed because of drug deals gone bad, people would be killed because of air-conditioning deals gone bad, because of restaurant reservations gone bad, gas station deals gone bad, jar-of peanut-butter deals gone bad. etc. etc. etc.
I mean, even at her most loony, Ayn Rand realized you had to have a gov’t to protect against force and fraud and to enforce contracts. Ayn Rand for crying out loud!
I had a lot more to say about roads, health care, corporate transactions, and how the damn system gets implemented in the first place but I gotta go. Besides most of my other objections are either seperate issues or are more quarrels with regular old libertarianism, which seems eminently reasonable compared to this system.
And I’m sorry if I came on a little harsh. It’s a beautiful dream, a dream surprisingly similar to the one Karl Marx had sitting in the british library, saddened by the messed up nature of society he saw around him. I’m sorry reality always messes these beautiful dreams up with blood and carnage and (eventually) tyranny.
This strikes me as utter pie-in-the-skyism. Your scenario already exists in places like the DRC and Sierra Leone, and Haiti, and they’re hideously poverty-stricken. Darfur, anyone? No?
You have any idea how long it takes to build a road? How much land has to be purchased to do it? How much money it costs? The technical skills required? Road building is not part of the consumer market. Your counter here is entirely impractical
This is the nub of the matter. The only concensus in griffen2’s vision appears to be a non-checked-and-balanced situation where the direct threat of violence, or actual application of violence, is the only determinor. In the absence of any legal system, then the victor would be not the most legally proven argument, but the ones with the biggest arsenal.
This reminds me of Marx saying the Communist revolution would happen democractically in Britain.
So, you mean that if heart transplants are free, you’re going to ask for a dozen of those?
There’s a large difference between handing free cars and free surgery. The demand is defintely not infinite for the latter.
And can you tell me what is the difference with someone who is insured by a private company? I paid my taxes, you paid your insurance premiums. Then, both of us can get medical care and be reimbursed. The element which motivates me to go to the hospital more often than you is…what exactly?
Assuming you’re insured, why don’t you already spend all your days at the hospital, just in case?
Besides, how comes that all french people don’t go to the hospital every day? Since the facts don’t agree with your theory (french people should go to the hospital every day, according to you), I assume the facts should be discarded?
Besides, I would mention that one of the flaw of the US health system is the lack of preventive care for uninsured people (due to its cost) , resulting in them seeking health care only when they’re seriously ill, and, obvious result, the necessary expenses are much higher.
Indeed. All french people do that. That’s why the healthcare system in France cost so much more per head than in the US…err…wait…No, actually, it’s the other way around. And french people don’t that.
But that’s only mere facts. And facts shouldn’t be taken into account when a perfectly good theory of what should happen contradicts what actually happens.
Indeed. That’s why the life expectancy and infant deaths,etc…are higher in France than in the privately-run US healthcare system…err…no…That’s the other way around, once again.
But of course, that’s still only facts, and facts ought to be ignored.
Errr…No. I don’t see the problem. I look around, but I don’t see that. I understand your idea of what should happen…but…it isn’t what is actually happening.
These damned facts are so annoying.
I’m going to leave it at that. I would give essentially similar responses to the rest of your theories about public healthcare.
But I’m going to give you some of the reasons why a public healthcare system is much less wasteful :
-Uniformity : read the pit thread I’m refering to. There isn’t one bilion different forms to fill over here. I go to some public hospital. I hand them my SSN (actually my SS card). They give me an intemized bill. The same for everybody. From which the part reimbursed by the healthcare is already deduced (in the same way for everybody). The hospital send the infos to the same place for everybody. They’re dealt with in the way for everybody, and they get reimbursed in the same way, according to the same rule for everybody. Net result : a lot of administrative costs spared (the time hospital billings services, patients and insurers spend figuring out what is or isn’t covered, the delays, etc…)
-Efficiency. If there’s five public hospital, they don’t need to each buy some rarely used expensive equipment in order to avoid losing potential patients. Nor do they need to overprescribe just to amortize the cost of said equipment. They can be bought according to the actual needs of the local population.
-Already mentionned : essentially free healthcare means that people will tend to see their doctors before it’s too late. They won’t wait until they need invasive (and costly) surgery, to quit working for 6 months, etc… Free preventive care spares a lot of money.
-Economies of scale. I assume you can understand this part if you’ve some minimal familiarity with economics.
-No profit added. Believe it or not, private insurers, private hospitals, etc… intend to make a profit. As a result, you pay more for the same medical care. Surprising, isn’t it?
