Free Markets does not prevent elder abuse?

[John_James]

@Petey

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).

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.

@Petey

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…

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:…

, 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.

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].”

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.

John Stossel articulates this really well…

John Stossel, "Freedom and its Enemies"

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.

Surprise surprise.

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