Hello everyone, i’ve entertained a debate concerning freemarkets vs socialism. Unfortunately i had no knowledge of the mechanics of the treatment given to the elderly The arguments and questions brought up by the opposition as well as my responses was such as follow :
1 - How do we prevent the old and frail to be abused on a freemarket?
I pretty much explained what a free market is down to the core of it, but that did not answer the question directly as he simply dismissed it as an impossibility to apply in the short term (i thought that was strange but whatever).
2 - The industry is regulated but not enforced; abuses occur because of it. The market is free because regulations do get enforced, therefore the market does not solve the problem as the solutions do not emerge, there are no subsidizies and the nursing homes are all private in the state we’re in, the bad companies should fail but they simply do not.
I have to say, this argument destabilized me because i simply have no knowledge of how this works legally, all i was left for argument is that there probably is a bunch of subtle laws we didn’t see preventing people from aiding those in need here but he maintains there aren’t. I simply have no idea how to verify that claim or find laws that prevent the solution to the abuse.
He claims to work for a company that is in the business of finding and exposing elder abuses and maintains that nor the government or the private sector is putting an end to the issue but this could be solved if the government hired regulators to enforce those laws. To this i pretty much pointed out this is a government problem as it is the government that mismanaged the issue; to this argument he held that the private sector did not attempt to enforce it either. I was left with the “addiction to government regulation” argument and costs increasing through the roof in the health sector, but he does not see a causal relationship with the elder abuse problem as the government could just print up money and make it happen anyway.
What would you guys say to this? It’s the first time i’m taken with no knowledge on a matter like this in which i just can’t find precise information about in a very long time and it’s quite troubling to me!
Yeah that’s a typical Leftist question, as it does nothing to offer an alternative. It implies that old and frail aren’t abused now or that things would be worse if there weren’t some central authority with a monopoly on legalized force. I would ask “why do you only care about the old and frail? Aren’t the young and helpless important too? How do we prevent them from being abused? How about the middle aged and stupid? What about the teenaged and ignorant? How do we prevent anyone from being abused?”
The first thing you should do is get him to provide an definiton of “freemarket”. That’s pretty important.
Stop right there. That is a completely false premise. Even if regulations didn’t get enforced (which by and large they do, but even if they didn’t) that doesn’t mean the market is “free”…as in “free from intervention and distortion.” So it is completely false to conclude that “therefore the market does not solve the problem”. He admits this in the very next part of the sentence:…
See? Why don’t bad companies fail? Is it because central governing authorities use force to take money out of everyone else’s pocket and then hand it over to the companies that have gone bankrupt and bail them out? Not exactly a “free market” is it?
And just as a side note, again, I don’t see him offering any solutions. He says we can’t go to a free market because things would be bad like they are now…but we have regulations out the wazoo…and he claims the problem is they aren’t enforced. So, we spend literally billions every year on this, and have tens of thousands of people whose entire job is to regulate and enforce these things, and he admits that doesn’t work…so what exactly is his alternative? We need to spend more money and create more bureaucracies to make sure the bureaucrats who are making sure the bureaucrats who are making sure the bureaucrats in the other bureaucracies are doing their job? We need some more oversight of the oversight of the oversight? Or how about “we just need to elect ‘the right’ people. We need some good, honest politicians like [insert guy I admire from my childhood].”
John Stossel articulates this really well…
Surprise surprise.
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Thank you very much for the reply, i do see one thing that you stated that didn’t really address the question.
I understand fully the idea that regulations did not solve the problems because of enforcement issues (government) however absent that fact it is pretty much a free market in that government doesn’t meddle in this area (granted that there aren’t some laws i just do not know about).
His argument was more, here we have an example of a market in which regulation doesn’t get enforced and since it doesn’t it is like a free market (I kind of agree here more than not). If private entities let the crimes happen because they don’t care then he has a point (however i just doubt this is factually correct but i cannot verify this). I’m just looking for empirical data that discredits the socialist argument here.
Thank you very much, haven’t watched the video, but i will very soon once i’m less occupied
You can’t take a snap shot of a more or less free market enterprise, find an undesireable aspect, then declare markets broken. No one claims that capitalism will end crime and suffering, but rather that it creates a better incentive structure to limit crime than a state-based institution.
It is entirely possible that a free market in nursing homes would have numerous cases of abuse. But would it be likely?
If people prefer to have their loved ones be treated well, there would be a profit incentive for any given nursing home to not abuse its customers, especially if the one down the street is rotten. In the case that every single nursing home is bad, why are people putting their parents in them? If this is really true, I would assume that these individuals prefer to risk their parents being treated poorly than have to take care of them themselves, which is a completely different issue that just can’t be solved by either socialism nor capitalism.
I did address that actually. Check the second section of the post where I mentioned:
“Even if regulations didn’t get enforced (which by and large they do, but even if they didn’t) that doesn’t mean the market is “free”…as in “free from intervention and distortion.” So it is completely false to conclude that “therefore the market does not solve the problem”. He admits this in the very next part of the sentence:…”
The truth is, it is completely false premise to claim that “regulations aren’t enforced therefore we have a free market.” For one thing, it isn’t true that regulations aren’t enforced. That is complete nonsense. There isn’t a single thing a bank can do that isn’t covered by some regulation. Not one. Try and find something. And to claim that not just a majority, but that every single one of those tens of thousands of pages of regulation is not at all enforced is so dishonest you might as well just call him a liar. Second, even if you can find a circumstance where a regulation wasn’t enforced, I guarantee you it was enforced on someone else. In other words, there is much more selective enforcement than a lack of enforcement. That is definitely not a free market, as it plays favorites…it is a system of manipulation that allows the picking of winners and losers, and whomever has the best connections in Washington gets the best treatment under the rules.
In fact, the rules are written to favor certain people and certain companies over others. So even when they are enforced, the market is not operating under the same rules. It’s like two teams playing a football game, each having a different rule book. What is a penalty for one team is perfectly okay for another. When one team scores a goal, it has to hand over some points to the other team…but the same isn’t true for the opponent.
This misses the point. Take the case of Bernie Madoff. That guy built a Ponzi scheme up to $65 Billion over at least a decade. There is no possible way that could have happened absent the SEC and the thousands of government regulations and agents all claiming to have everything under control.
When the power is given up to government, and protection and regulation is entrusted, responsibility is abdicated and assigned over. The market didn’t catch Madoff because that wasn’t the market’s responsibility any more…meaning it wasn’t anyone’s concern anymore, so no one took responsibility. No one in the market was really worried about something like that…everyone just says “the SEC is all over it. I mean that’s what they’re there for. They got all these rules. Everyone has to get licensed by them and report to them and file with them. They’ve got all the info.” But of course, Madoff was wining and dining SEC bureaucrats. There were multiple letters sent directly to the SEC literally detailing exactly what Madoff was doing, over a period of years…and they still did nothing. A free market would have ferreted that guy out in maybe less than a year. The PBS program Frontline did an excellent piece on the whole Madoff Affair. It’s a perfect illustration of how more government and more regulations do not make us more safe and better off, but instead less free, less safe, and worse off. It’s an excellent case showing how government regulations almost always have the exact opposite effect of what their intentions are stated to be. I highly recommend it.
Thank you very much, i appreciate all the time and effort spend on replying to this particular problem. I was very aware of all this, it just never comes into mind during an argument and if it does, not necessarily in an orderly fashion. Thanks again.
