I have to ask, do other libertarians see social darwinism as clearly as I do in the market system? I had this argument from a typical euro-centric american (…) about the U.S. health care system needing to be universal, one payer, blah blah. Here is one of the many typically unthoughout “arguments” presented and my response.
I’ll argue that the first question is arbitrary and that the second is inherently true for all situations involving scare resources, no matter the arbiter.
The price mechanism is the markets rationing system. It is a reflection of how productive people who contribute to society can get medical procedures due to the fact that they are worth something to the community. People who do not produce anything, as bad as it sounds, just aren’t worth as much to society in this way. But, the state uses the same reasoning for a different purpose.
The difference between “waiting in lines” (this is always due to scare resources) under a bureaucratically managed system and a market system is that in the market system the decision of a persons worth to society is made by that persons individual effort, labor, time, w/e, i.e. the decision is not arbitrary, as it is under a bureaucracy, it is within the person in question.
Let’s hypothesize:
A retired person 77 years of age needs a quadruple bypass surgery, but does not have an adequate insurance plan to cover such a surgery. A state bureaucracy will think things like, “What kind of tax revenue does this person generate?” and “If/How does this person vote?”
These are the rationing mechanisms of a state bureaucracy. ‘Does the surgery cost more than the taxes generated by saving the person?’ If the answer is “No” then we move to the realm of eugenics. It is state manipulated social darwinism; an appllication of eugenics. If the answer is “Yes” then we might adduce that the point of keeping the person alive is to generate taxes for the state. Both of which seem immoral to me. And on a fundamental level.
You might say, “Well, that is virtually identical to a private company and their motive for profit.” Yes, that is why some people are “un-insurable.” This also means that you cannot wait until you get sick and then apply for insurance, which is to misunderstand the definition of the word ‘insurance’. This behavior is likely exhibited out of an attempt at free coverage by not paying into the insurance plan before hand.
As I said in the first paragraph, the simple difference is ‘under a market system the ability to afford health care is based on your productive value to society in that they have (or had) a job in the voluntary labor force’. Under a state bureaucracy the ability to get medical treatments is based on your political value to the state.
In one you serve, voluntarily, your fellow man by producing wealth and earnings for yourself and in the other you serve a small group of faceless bureaucrats against your will or even knowledge for the benefit not of wealth in society, but for whatever the state says it’s using tax money for.
Also, (when you are at work you are producing wealth directly and when you buy things you produce wealth indirectly through someone else’s labor). That is how the word was used above.
You are only thinking of extremes and obviously jealous, first of all. Second, I agree that there are people, who harness state powers within the private market who make this look bad, but when tou think about it, yes rich people contribute greatly by facilitating vast amounts of capital into channels where things are produced.
“I don’t know what your background is but I’m in IT and I can tell you that Oracle (his product) is generally considered a virus.”
Someone is buying it. I think Electronic Art’s Origin program is basically a cloud based data mining virus as well, but that didn’t stop EA from selling 40 million dollars worth of them in two weeks. You sound like your personal judgments cloud your vision of how society actually works. You get mad about injustices and cannot objectively view how they operate.
This is a joke. No wonder you call market economics “dogma” you don’t understand it at a fundamental level. I find this a lot among people who have never studied it. “Profit” is how you measure the value added to raw materials during the production process. Each profit made by each actor during the different stages of production is a reflection of the value added during each stage. If a logger cuts down a tree and sell the logs to a carpenter, what the carpenter pays for the cut down tree is a reflection of what the carpenter views the loggers efforts were worth. It is a direct reflection of this. When the carpenter makes a table and chairs out of the wood and you buy it from him, what you pay for the table and chairs, and the profit the carpenter makes from it, is a reflection of what you think the labor to cut the trees down and make them into a table and chairs is worth.
I suggest you read this: http://library.mises.org/books/Ludwig%20von%20Mises/Profit%20and%20Loss.pdf
I never once used the word “efficiency.” Something else you have not read about is libertarianism. I don’t what libertarians claim to have efficiency as a virtue to strive for. It is about freedom of choice in the market. That doesn’t correlate to efficiency. Maybe, expediency, but not efficiency. So, this is a red herring.
How well they work. And we didn’t “come up with it,” it took a few centuries of “observations” for us to figure out how to systematize the abstraction of an amoeba-like system of interactions.