I don’t see people being able to amass wealth as being much of an immediate problem compared to making sure no one is poor or otherwise lacks access to essential resources. Apparently the countries trying out basic universal income think so too, if that is indeed a trend. Obvious issues with it are the huge amount of public spending required, which has to be a substantial percentage of your GDP, but industrialized countries presumably have the money; it’s yet another social choice.
Well, you always start good, but then you forget what you said about not believing that the free market is perfect either.
https://www.dnalc.org/view/15367-Using-data-from-the-public-project-Craig-Venter.html
You are putting words in my mouth, which is especially annoying since I just finished saying that neither markets or government are perfect. And yes, Celera benefited from prior research done with government funding. I never said otherwise. The point is that they started from an even playing field, with both the public and private groups having the same data, and then they proceeded to outperform the public science.
I am not arguing against the capabilities of government funded scientists, and in fact in some cases I don’t think there is a market based alternative because of the huge money and government involvement required to build things like the Superconducting Supercollider. On the other hand, government science is wasteful, subject to close-minded ideas and political pressure, and giant projects can be shut down on the whim of legislators - projects like the Superconducting Supercollider for example.
But that doesn’t mean big government science can replace research done by private firms, because optimizing discovery means having diversity of ideas and many different pathways being explored simultaneously. There is no substitute for the inventive power of millions of brains, each of which has different experiences, local knowledge, and skills. And for those brains to be able to act on those ideas, they need access to capital.
If big government science were capable of innovating as well as the free market, the Soviets and Chinese wouldn’t have had to steal so much of their tech.
I actually did take a look before jumping into the discussion, so you should had learned a long time ago about how annoyed I do get when I see incomplete ideas from others. It was not really a level playing field once one knows the history.
What I found before getting into the discussion here is that if the government had not been there, Celera would not had been able to do much (And you should notice who was the one that I quoted in my last post). There are others that do not see that point of yours here. The performance they got was again thanks for them looking at what the groups with government funding did. And that 3 year leapfrog was actually made by both the private and the public effort.
The basic complain I have is precisely to your style of debating here. one has to notice that once again you fall in the last sentences for an absolute preference for private efforts. I would rather look at the point you also made before you try to dismiss it in the end.
That in reality this is very complex. And assuming that the free market as the ones capable of innovating is really a very incomplete idea, IMHO a lot of that innovation is possible when there is a strong government to rein on efforts that would actually become less beneficial to society if they had been left with no control whatsoever (IIRC the original plan for Celera was to patent most of the gene sequences they found, the problem was that indeed Celera was willfully ignoring that a lot of what they were using was based on previous discoveries, so pressure was put to prevent that outcome by funding the government effort more, for society a lot of new medicines or treatments based on the discoveries would had been stopped if that patent trolling would had been allowed to stand). I do think that the free market does have indeed a lot to offer, but we do have to push against the idea that we should drown the government in the bathtub as many conservatives are trying to push for nowadays.
So I have to agree with posters that early pointed out that the most successful countries do not have just socialism or non-socialism; there are many levels of solutions and mixes of those ideas that many are finding that it does the job for making a sustainable and more just society.
Given that the USA is the world’s largest debtor nation in absolute dollars and we spend far more per capita on health care than every other industrialized nation, I think you might be guessing incorrectly.
And we aren’t talking about wealth redistribution here. We are talking about people paying their fair share into a national system that everyone ultimately benefits from. Like the national highways, parks and military.
Basic health care shouldn’t be part of those social safety nets? Or at least part of our national infrastructure?
Or the Presidency of George W Bush.
When you weaken government with deregulation for its own sake, you enable corrupt businesses to flourish and amass wealth and power until they inevitably collapse under their own avarice. And as the 2008 financial crisis demonstrated, those failing business can take the rest of the economy with them.
So why is it “all or nothing”? No one is advocating massive wealth redistribution or “socialism”.
We spend more money on defense than the next nine countries combined and 8 of them are allies or major trading partners. You mean to say we can’t spend some portion of that on health care instead?
None of them (I.e the successful nations) have ‘socialism’…they all have at most mixed economies that use a capitalist engine for most of the heavy lifting and then they have SOCIALIST PROGRAMS. It’s a key distinction. Socialism, as it’s defined has never worked, afaik. Socialist programs such as universal healthcare, social security or other collective retirement programs, welfare and other social safety nets, etc often do soften the hard edges of capitalism. But socialism has a specific meaning and I’ve yet to see an example of an actual nation state that has been able to implement it across the board and be successful. Generally even trying to implement any of the economics hold back a nation from success, in fact, and generally are eventually relegated to very vertical industries that are publically owned and government controlled…utilities, postal services and the like.
Personally I don’t go for the definition you are using, but that is not the point here because I did not say that they were socialist nations, nor I think they are, and I also do think that that there has not been any nation where socialism has worked.
I do know that they have called many of the programs that they use as socialist solutions, and that was my point indeed. I agree more with the social democrats than with democratic socialists. (They are not the same thing BTW)