The monopoly on ideas
This is something that I’ve rarely if ever heard discussed but I believe that it is of immence importants.
The monopoly of ideas is exactly what it sounds like, everyone sees government as the major vehicle for societal cooperation and mutually advantageous relationships between men, rather than a force with which one group can dominate the other. Whilst the former role is occasionally true, and tends to be more true the smaller government one is talking about, it is never totally true, whilst the latter relationship is always true. The modern government is a chimera of two conflicting ideals, the first is what the state originally was, a means by which one group of people violently dominated another group, while on the other hand it is a combination of people who are legitimatly concerned with the well being of others and are anxious to improve society.
In today’s society most of this effort is then put into government, government opperates as a monopoly on ideas as the vast majority of effort goes into trying to make the government do things. The problem is that today this has resulted in a two party system which supports mutually exclusive ideas. Indeed the problem with the government is that it is a monopolistic institution, not only in its actual functions, but because of the simple fact that only one will can guide it at a time.
Let’s take the example of universal healthcare. Healthcare costs are obviously out of control in America, anyone who disputes this fact doesn’t understand the issue. Now let us forget about the reasons WHY healthcare costs are high and let’s simply look at what we can do to deal with the symptoms. Now over the past decade the way that people have attempted to deal with their felt uneasiness with healthcare costs is by supporting politicians, events, and so on that promise to offer either universal healthcare or a healthcare solution. This is because the government is percieved as the only organization for collective action, when the political solutions don’t work, people don’t necessarily go out and look for another solution, this is because of the fact that the government has a monopoly on ideas, solutions go through the government, if the government cannot solve the problem, then it is forgotten in terms of collective action.
But let’s think for a moment at some ways that it could be funded through other sorts of collective action. Let’s remove government from the equation, let’s say that tomorrow the United States becomes a libertarian nation and a strictly enforced constitution bans anyhting but defence provisions by the government. People can no longer work through the apparatus of government to the end of providing cheap healthcare, but this is not the end of the world, people do not become helpless, they decide to form voluntary organizations that attempt to solve this source of uneasiness. Let’s say that we get the “SAH”, “The Society for Affordable healthcare”, made up mostly of modern liberals. The SAH could do any of the following things:
A. Support and fund the founding of medical schools
B. Provide scholarships to medical students who agree to give SAH members special rates
C. Promote people becoming doctors and nurses, attempt to make it a great value and virtue to be a doctor so more people are willing to go into the field
D. Work with local churches and charities to make free hospitals
E. Make deals with doctors to have special rates given to SAH members in return for a certain amount of assured business
F. Fund the founding of hospitals or smaller clinics
G. Direclty fund the healthcare costs of those in need
H. Fund preventative treatment to reduce final heathcare costs
I. Promote online courses and other cheaper types of education, followed by an internship for lower level medical practioners
J. ECT.
The beauty of this system is that it directly attempts at either raising the supply or lowering the demand, real solutions to the problem. It also has a direct incentive for efficiency, whereas with government solutions there is no inherent feedback mechanism, but in such a situation people will simply support another such organization, or stop funding this one so that it simply fails entirely.
There are also a million social wills that could be solved using proper entrepreneurship. The problem is that people, when looking to solve a “social problem”, do not ask “how can we fix this” they ask “how can we get the government to fix this”. The government has a monoply on social cooperation, and because of its unaccountable nature, and the indifference that arrises naturally in a democracy, it crowds out all other forms of action.
Any thoughts?