Actually, government roadbuilding and government health care are miles apart. Roadbuilding is a “mature” science with relatively few innovations. Most of the people who actually build the roads can do so with high-school diplomas, while under the direction of a few engineers. Medicine, however, is a complex and growing science and virtually everyone involved in its research and application requires advanced academic training. In the case of doctors and researchers, who have to undergo the longest training, full socialization means they may not be able to earn serious personal wealth. Wealth is a pretty strong incentive for people to become doctors or researchers, and I’m disinclined to remove it.
The Canadian system is already having problems with skilled doctors going south becuae they can earn more in the U.S. My mother, a registered nurse, has standing offers to work in any number of American facilities; green card and benefits included. Socialized medicine will stay, because most Canadians want it, but it’ll have to change or it’ll fall apart.
Regulation generally is a pendulum. Too much and it stifles innovation by making it hard for creative individuals to work. Too little inspires public outrage and potential revolution. A gradual back-and-forth motion works well enough. I’m naturally suspicious of anyone who claims to have found the perfect balance between govefnment controls and individual freedom, 'cause there ain’t no such thing.
perspective. When I go to my doctor or to my lawyer I pay them out of my pocket for their services and they have no problem identifying me as the person they rendered their services to. As I have explained already, charging people for their use of roads is practically impossible. And your answer is
When it happens you can ask me again. In the meanwhile and throughout history my explanation is valid. At least for me. YMMV.
I was never trying to prove that private roads are practical. That was only a small part of my answer. You may have difficulty imagining an efficient system of private roads, but that’s not my concern.
I was trying to show how practicality is dependent upon various conditions (such as the efficiency of a government, standards for “public good”) and can be open to interpretation.
The fact remains that you make gross exceptions to the interference with the free market with the explanation that they are the only practical alternative for the public good. But there doesn’t seem to be any consistent methodology for showing when indeed something is more practical or what exactly “public good” means. Your exceptions are so large and unpredictable to me as to make your general definition meaningless.
this “free market” concept goes back to adam smith and john locke at least but the idea of enlightened selfinterest goes along with it. what does it take to be enlightened in 2002? adam smith talked about mass producing straight pins in WEALTH OF NATIONS. technology has gotten more complicated since then.
computer companies talk about gigahertz but they don’t mention wait states. i worked for IBM for four years with no mention of benchmarks. in a free market the producer is free to hid the most important information from the consumer. it’s not 1776 anymore.
and why isn’t accounting mandatory in high school? it is nothing but 700 year old 5th grade arithmatic. wouldn’t that increase enlightenment. somebody will probably call it SOCIALIST. ROFL!
A market system for setting prices is generally a good thing. Even I, as an evil commie socialist, can acknowledge that :p.
However, there are times when having something available to everyone is more important than having it at the most profitable (often high) price.
The market is the means to an end, not an end in itself. It promotes efficiency (generally a good thing), but greater efficiency is not always desirable (well not according to my ideals anyway).
Also, private companies are not always more efficient than governement ones, and can actually provide worse services due to greed or short sightedness (example: public transport in the state of Victoria, Australia, which has in every important way, including, iirc, profits, gotten worse after privatization).
Good thing strict national regulation of the drug industry, in the form of the FDA, exists, or you and everyone else would be taking a huge gamble every time you tried a new treatment.
And don’t talk to me about private regulatory organisations, the shenanigans that sometimes go on with the US FDA are bad enough already, let alone with an eminently more bribable private organisation.
Well, you might, but I’d use my common sense and go to my doctor. You know, much like I do now.
In fact, I would make the case that the FDA is destructive in this regard. In the old days, drugs would get introduced into the marketplace gradually. If there was something wrong with them, we would find out before they were in widespread use. In addition, the people who had no alternative but to try new drugs could get them, while the people who had other choices could choose not to take on the additional risk.
But today, drugs stay off the market until they are FDA approved, at which point suddenly they go into widespread use throughout the population, because a government stamp certifying their safety causes everyone to just assume they can be used. So if the FDA makes a mistake, it can have catastrophic consequences. And the FDA isn’t infallible - look at Phen-Phen.
Another problem with FDA approval is that it can keep life-saving drugs off the market longer than they need to be. My favorite example is Beta Blockers, which help prevent secondary heart attacks and save thousands of lives per year. The FDA kept beta blockers off the market for several years after they were available in other parts of the world. How many thousands of people died who could have been saved had the FDA approved the drug? And why isn’t the FDA held responsible for those deaths?
Another problem with the FDA is that it treats everyone’s risk threshold as being the same. Cancer drugs stay off the market until they are proven to be safe enough for ALL cancer patients. But clearly, the risk threshold for a patient dying of terminal liver cancer is different than a patient who is being treated for a cancer that has a 90% survival rate. Even the left is twigging to this problem due to the AIDS crisis. The FDA has set up ‘fast track’ approval of some AIDS drugs, and allowed people to import AIDS drugs from other countries for personal use as an end-around to what they admit is a flawed regulatory system for drugs that can be used to save terminal patients. Too bad they don’t recognize that the same problem exists for other illnesses.
When you add up all the negatives with the FDA approval system, then add in the chilling effect on research and development that a decades-long approval process that costs on average something like 300 million dollars has, it’s not at all clear to me that the FDA is a net positive for the country. In fact, I’d argue that it isn’t, especially when you also add in the curtailment of personal freedom inherent in it (As an adult, I should be allowed to put whatever drug in my body I choose), and the cost of maintaining it.
David Simmons asks,
Many laws are passed after there is a real need for them, because the ‘problem’ is still in the public’s memory, yet the societal need is gone making it politically feasible. It’s a common pattern. And laws that are passed BEFORE society is ready for them just cause distortions and black markets. See: The War on Drugs.
The point is, no one really wants their children to work. But no one wants them to starve, either. The industrial revolution didn’t cause children to have to go to work - they were already doing that. In 1697 John Locke recommended that all children over the age of 3 start learning how to weave and knit, and use this work to pay for their own educations because the parents couldn’t afford it.
But more importantly, the alternative to child labor at the start of the industrial revolution was child mortality. For example, the percentage of children dying before five years of age was 74.5 percent at the start of the industrial revolution. By 1810 when the first ‘factory laws’ regulating working conditions for children were passed, the mortality rate had dropped to 31.8%.
Children flocked to the factories not because greedy capitalists tricked them, or because their parents were heartless bastards who sent their kids to work in order to buy them fancy clothes. They went to work in the factories because the alternative was starvation, disease, and death.
This is the point I’m getting at - societal pressure for ‘factory laws’ didn’t start until the wealth of children had risen to the point where the majority of them were no longer dying. But even then, the ‘factory laws’ just forced the rise of smaller operations that were not covered by those laws, and to ‘off the books’ hiring of children. Because there was still a big demand for jobs among children, because they were still dirt poor. So the point is that passing a law before it’s economically feasible has the effect of unintended consequences (i.e. moving children out of the large factories into smaller operations where the conditions could be even worse). And once society no longer requires its children to work, they’ll stop working whether there are laws or not.
For an example of that, look around you. It’s perfectly legal for children above the age of 14 to hold jobs, and some jobs can be held even earlier. But how many kids actually do it? If we had no child labor laws today, do you think our factories would be flooded with 9-year-olds?
But on the other hand, the worker’s paradise of Cuba has all sorts of child labor laws. But they are poor, so they get around it. For example, all children over the age of 11 have to go to ‘summer camp’, which consists of 30 to 45 days of hard work on state farms. Eight hours a day. Cite.
I go in the lines of [s]Sailor** and [s]Sam Stone**.
Somewhere, someone pointed out that the free market will produce what the people wants to buy.
For 3 decades I have wanted to buy a car that does not rust.
Aluminium or something like that.
I do not care to have the latest model, I just want a car that takes me from A to B.
I heard ones that Borgward, a old German car, if anyone remembers, was stopped “by not given loans from the bank”. Clearly speaking, they made too good cars that lasted too long.
For one decade I have wanted buy an video-recorder that, when recording, would recognise when the commercials begins and stop the shit, and begin to record again when the usual "ding-dong’ of the specific channel tells that the commersials are ended.
The advantage would be that I can look through news, films and what-ever without any tampoon-commercials in the middle of my favorite programs.
You can program and record voices in a mobile telephone, so why not in a video-recorder?
My examples are maybe not so good, but I do not believe that we always get what we want. But free market is the best system. No doubt.
All straw men. No one made the claims that you are combatting.
If societal pressure would end child labor, goods from China, Bangladesh etc. wouldn’t find such a ready market in the US. I doubt that you, or I or 1 person in 1000 considers the labor conditions in the country of origin when we buy things cheaply.
Sam, there might very well be social or other pressures against child labor in some places. My only claim is that I see no economic reason to end it and so I see no market force against child labor.
For the most part, cars don’t usually seem to reach the end of their useful life span because of rust. The parts start to wear out due to metal fatigue (the ole’ bend a paperclip until it breaks trick).
Now someone could probably build a car that lasts forever, but there is a tradoff. What is the price of aluminum vs a stainless steel car? Whats the extra cost of assembling (IIRC aluminum must be rivited. You can’t weld it). Clearly speaking, the longer you want something to last, the more it will cost.
Most people wouldn’t even want a car that lasts 40 years. While that vintage Mustang may look really cool, it really isn’t as comfortable nor does it handle as well as its modern equivalent. There isn’t much sense making the car last longer than most people want to keep it.
The market provides a balance between cost, usable life span and a dozen other factors.
A cheaper model of Volvo costs about 30.000 USD, an American car more.
We have 3 months summer in Finland, then comes the fall with rains like everyone has (I think), then comes snow, salt and sand on the icy roads, then everything freeze-melt-freeze melt and so on for two months in the spring.
Guess what it would matter if the Volvo would cost 1.000 USD more?
In my eyes, nothing, but naturally You have a point and You are right in what You write.
But as far as I "feel’, I am not an expert, they have begun to make good cars for some 10 years or so.
Inthe 70’ties and 80’ties the cars were just looking like cheese after 7 - 10 years.
It’d be a lot more than $1,000 to make a car that didn’t wear out. For instance, the only way you’re going to make an engine with cylinders that don’t wear out is to either build your cylinder walls out of titanium, or go to a ringless piston that doesn’t put friction on the wall. Something like a ceramic-coated carbon fiber piston maybe. Those exist for indy cars, and they cost about $20,000.
The DeLorean had a stainless steel body that wouldn’t rust, but it cost a lot extra, couldn’t be painted, and accidents were hideously expensive to repair.
Cars are built very efficiently, and are actually very optimal designs. There is no planned obsolescence built into them. Just the normal engineering tradeoffs between weight, size, performance, cost, and lifespan.