Topic: Capitalism. (Read 6902 times)

One major concern is that the subsidies never stop, so we go from reorganizing budgets to more and more taxation to support more and more subsidies. The same doctors you are subsidizing will end up making major donations to politicians to encourage them to keep the subsidies, with donation money coming from those same subsidies. Subsidies are a great idea, but only in a benevolent dictatorship.


My main concern is that more doctors will start pursuing the market with the same subsidized procedures, since that market has plenty of money to go around, instead of trying to figure out how to change the established market with something else. Eg, we heavily subsidize corn, so we end up investing into a lot of corn-based product development, putting corn in most of our foods, instead of figuring out if other plants would be a better alternative, or even looking into whether growing so much corn is having an extremely negative effect on our farms and environment.


That information can be found out by competition in the market. Short story - the same way we find out whether or not we should mine Bitcoin, or what to buy and sell our bitcoins for, despite not knowing how many other people out there are mining/buying or sitting on the sidelines.
Long story - A new team of surgeons wants to enter the market and compete against the other 10 teams. The only surgery costs they need to know are their own. They can find the price of the surgery the other doctors charge. Then, if the price on the market is < this new team's costs, they know they can't compete, and shouldn't enter the market. They also know that those existing surgeons are doing something new to make the procedure cheaper. If the price on the market is > their own costs, they know they can make a profit, and will enter the market. Based on how much higher the price is compared to their own costs, they can also see how much more advanced and cheaper their procedure is to their competitors, and/or that there is a huge demand for such procedures, and not enough surgeons to provide them.

What if instead of the government doing this to us, folks choose what they want to reduce their costs on by prepaying through pooled insurance?
Churches and Fraternal Organisations and other community groups used to do more of this but have been muscled out.

The only reason this makes any sense is that National Governments have co-opted the insurance industry.
Fear sells.

When is an ice cream cone not a cone?
When its a koan.

The white stuff, is also that the will to freedom ended these things many times.
When birthing, the kids don't always turn out as you might like, insights for child-rearing notwithstanding.

"Progress," left unqualified, is a handy word -- strong, positive, irrefutable & meaningless.  Just don't set a goal, and no matter where you meander, you're making progress.
Our beloved, untempered-with free market gave us everything that we know -- meddling states, kindly billionaires, commie despots of dubious decent, batshit-crazy mass murderers, slave traffickers, dope addicts, financiers, US presidents.

Each and every one feathering his nest in his own way, figuring out how to make things more comfortable, hoping to reap rewards -- you, the junkies & puppet dictators alike.

At the risk of sounding reconciliatory, i think you're pointing to a fundamental problem of the "hands-off" approach:  Both the tyrannical state & the benevolent billionaire were born by it.
"Hands-off" had to be the initial state for both, if we take God & aliens out of the equation.  
Libers choose to abandon their "hands-off" approach & yank the bit on their reasoning, before it prances them into inevitable though unpleasant conclusion:  the same freedomz that birthed the good stuff also mothered slavery, dictatorships, fascism, etc., etc.  

There's an old joke:
-Dad, what's the white stuff in bird shit?
-Son, that's bird shit too.
I doubt many here get the joke.

In other words, *any* price is the "right" price.  No matter what price Pinkie Pie pays for her lung transplant, that was the right price for her.  Nice save, tiger, though the rest of us simply call it "price," as in "that's the price you have pay, Pinkie Pie, or off to Poneville Glue Works with you!"


   How come *that* price isn't right, just like the rest?  Pinkie Pie is just as free to not pay the centrally dictated price.  She can vote with her hooves & prance that sweet ass right to the Glue Works.
Friendship is magic!

By the way, just want to inject this into this whole conversation:
It's the 'right price,' at the 'right time,' for the 'right people,' in the 'right place.' That's what constitutes the 'right price.' A centrally dictated price will ALWAYS miss the time and/or the people and/or the location, simply because different people value things differently depending on those variables, and the only way to pick the 'right price' is to let the people involved give it to you.


I think the answer is thus:

The only reason 12 teams is too high and 10 teams is the sweet spot is because 12 teams makes the lung transplant unprofitable, and 8 teams leaves room for more teams to take some of the profit. A government intervention could be to either reduce the prices, increase the number of teams, or force everyone, who doesn't need the procedure, to pay for it to.

In the first option, government forces the prices lower, meaning more patients can afford transplants, but now it's not profitable, so the number of surgeons will drop from 10 to, say, 8. Now even though more patients can afford the procedure, only 40 of them are done each year.

In the second option, the government could force more teams to do the procedure. But, as you said, if there were 12 teams, the prices got too low, so now even though 12 teams are forced to do the procedure, none of the 12 can really afford it. They will either have to force the prices to go up, reducing the number of patients that can afford it, or just quit entirely.

In the third option, you'll have 20 teams working, doing 100 procedures a year. All patients will be happy, and all doctors will be happy. Hopefully, the economy will continue to have enough profits for government to siphon them off to keep this setup going. But the two problems are, first, there's a real risk that the economy could get to a point where there isn't enough spare profit to support this, and second, everyone will be happy, and nothing will change. You'll have the same lung procedure done by the same people for decades, since there will be no incentive to either make the procedure cheaper, or to replace it with something different.

The only "faith" that a free market requires is that, if things are uncomfortable, someone will try to figure out how to make them more comfortable in hopes of reaping rewards for it. That's pretty much the gist of free market progress.

That statement is really not that much of a stretch from saying:
Currency is an invention of the state. Without bureaucracy and state sanctioning, currency is not possible.
The very idea of a free currency is oxymoronic, because it relies on assigning of value on currency notes.

If you look through my other comments in this thread, you'll see i am not arguing that the marching army example is the paragon of efficiency.  I've chosen it as a counter argument to another triviality -- an allusion to laws of physics where MoonShadow attempts to illustrate the folly of market "interference."  And yes, use of "MoonShadow" in preceding sentence is intentional.  Sheds appropriately silly light on this debate


Neither the complexity of a problem, nor the fact that an algorithm could be shown to generate sub-optimal solutions, implies that the algorithm is not the best one currently available, or that an alternative, untested algorithm is better.  
Solving the Traveling Salesman problem may be difficult, and the arrived at solution may be suboptimal, it's still unreasonable to conclude from above that "route planning is pointless" or that "each sales guy, by choosing his own route, will come up with a shorter distance than a planner."  I hope my point's clear.


See above ^^^

It's not extreme. It's empiric history instead of science fiction, plain and simple.

I'll take this analogy and drag it to reality -- as in why it displays the opposite of Capitalism and does not work.

In reality, the bureaucrat in between can optimize any given order for his own goals, while the original goal need only be fulfilled as far as his superior understands it and cares to react. This happens on all layers of the top-down structure including supreme command unless the population restrains it. And remember: any organizer changing goals affects all layers below it in addition to their own problems.

What is worse, a bureaucrat in any real-world system has diminishing incentive to optimize for risk-reward in large systems. Why innovate when the risk is on you but the reward is not? It is worth it only where a superior actively plans for it. Generally: whenever the optimization target of an individual diverges from the globally desired one -- which it pretty much always does -- the overall result is horribly inefficient.

Trivial analogies are useless exactly because they are trivial. In reality, the problematic decision is not to avoid a lava pit. It is the analysis of some gradient in some material in some device for use on an unknown time-frame over multiple usage scenarios -- and millions more of such decisions. We have no human who is able to organize such complexity from above, nor can we expect a subordinate to do it locally without proper compensation.

The market is a great tool to both determine and execute said compensation. Any attempt to mimic it will roughly simulate a market; why not use it in the first place?

Sorry, but you've missed the point.  In this example the generals, who are nowhere near the marching cannon fodder, are "the government."  The presence of generals is what makes an army different from a mob.  It's a new way of doing things -- you should check it out.  All the cool kids are doin' it.

If we take away "universal," then *any* price becomes the "right price."  We get a tautology.  If you're bothered by the word "universal," feel free to drop it, substitute "unique" for "universal" -- my example works just as well.  In hindsight, i can see my choice of words was atrocious.  Go with "singular" or "unique" -- distinct from other prices, which would be "wrong price[ s]."  That's a bit tighter.

And then show how the price discovery is (slightly) improved by the addition of more (weirdly fictional) bargainers.

Nothing to disagree with here, but not much to see either.