I’m not quite sure your point. Any medical care program will be better at treating common diseases than rare diseases. There’s just more data to pull in research and development. We get more examples of what works and doesn’t.

But the point of socialized services is to make sure everyone gets served.

One of the major concerns regarding any good or service that is essential (not just medical care, but food, water and power) is that selling it as a commodity is a moral hazard. Since the customer is obligated to buy (or starve, freeze in the elements, die of dehydration) an unchecked capitalist can charge any price and, historically, has.

Before the age of states and movements away from monarchy towards (more) public-serving governments, we depended on the Church’s (meager) charity, and just accepted that a lot of people were going to die year after year, from famine, plague, freezing and so on. But I think we’re trying to do better than the middle ages.

Here in the US, the federal and state governments are completely captured by plutocratic interests, and it’s moving back towards autocracy. And our Republican officials have expressed that they’re okay with letting small children work long hours in hazardous environments, and letting poor children starve.

The point is that private healthcare is driven by the profit motive.

The state is the only institution under our current social organization both that carries capacities at the same scale as corporations, and that legitimately may be supporting the interests of the public.

Great question, why is it always Republican States as well?

Because it isn’t? It’s up by about 6%. The numbers are more accurate as well.

Frankly, even if your statement was correct, it would be the equivalent of asking why only people who go to the doctor have cancer.

Lastly, if we are throwing out random facts and trying to extrapolate the value of a system, why is Cuba’s literacy rate always close to 100%?

Probably some combination of our definition of literacy being adjusted, and the availability of more accurate data about populations and how educated they are.

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You do seem offended. Whatever are you talking about?

I don’t see your point other than an explicit joy in the suffering of others. Do I have that right? You think people should go hungry for your personal pleasure?

I recommend you read about Modern Monetary Theory. The US has Monetary Sovereignty in a fiat currency, and therefore is not limited by taxation when it comes to federal funding. Instead, the US is limited by the real economy, which is worth trillions of dollars more than the federal budget. If the federal government stopped with the federal budget and just spent on the real economy, it wouldn’t impact inflation in any way. We do this already with the military, like outspending the USSR on military tech for a decade, sending hundreds of billions of dollars worth of equipment to Ukraine, and spending billions to support Israel’s genocide.

All money is free. It is not taken from some limited store, but rather created by government, freely.

The value, stability, and legitimacy of money is sustained by the supremacy of state power. By such power, the government both determines the supply and shapes the distribution of money, and is assured never to be insolvent.

No distribution of money is natural or naturally superior.

Money is a social construct directed by political will.

Price inflation currently occurring is largely due to the political choice to distribute money to corporations.

That is, as a consequence of particular political choices, the already imbalanced distribution has become even more unfavorable toward workers.

If the political will were rather toward distributing money to workers, then prices may follow a pattern of gradual inflation, but as long as workers’ income keeps pace, workers would not be harmed by it even in the slightly.

My point is that the image would have you believe they don’t exist “because capitalism,” when in fact they do have them, and I know this because I volunteer and fucking hate potato day.

Something (intuition I suppose) also tells me that they also exist/have existed in socialist countries, and monarchies, etc, and I’d argue the soviet union’s breadlines were actually an example of a food bank by a different name, seeing as both serve the same function (passing out free food to the hungry), and that “free food locations” by whatever name under whatever communist utopia you envision would also be indistinguishable from food banks, and even if we get the replicators, those are food ATMs (pun, 'cause “bank” lol.)

I’m pepetuating a system that feeds billions

It’s the government’s responsibility to feed the people that elected them. This is not the responsibility of producers. Producers have a right to make money from their work.

Plenty of people who want to continue the social safety net are capitalists, too. Plenty of people on the right want social safety nets, too. It’s the idiot extremists on both sides that take black and white positions and ignore reality.

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Then let’s just kickstart human expansion into space so resources and land can be unlimited. That would be the only highly organized society you could convince me is legitimate.

We have more than enough land mass for every single human being to have at least one acre to themselves and then some right now, though. We just can’t distribute it evenly because humans are apes that form dominance hierarchies and control over the land goes to the dominant apes. Only when humans are genetically engineered to be egalitarian will it ever change, so I guess our debate is pretty moot.

I would suggest anyone concerned about food production under socialism look up Lysenkoism to find the real pitfall.

The fatal flaw in any collective system will always stem from authoritarian policies, but all you need to avoid the greatest errors is simply not, you know, rule by terror.

Yes it clearly has and if it hadn’t, they’d be the exceedingly rich countries with massive militaries, but they’re not. The U.S., the corporate oligarchy, is. So their social structure loses, and the one we both hate wins.

Life just favors evil in that way.

Just don’t.

Any path you follow will quickly lead to a truckload of babble about social Darwinism and other pseudoscientific dribble.

Give credit where it’s due.

Great imagination certainly was required to speculate the “plan is to establish a colonial empire”.

I guess capitalism would never dream of creating monopolies and artificial shortages to increase profit?

The only way to be a monopoly is to have a government-grant privilege, for gaining legal rights to be a preferred producer is the only way to maintain a monopoly in a market setting.

“Artificial shortages” are created by the mere existence of intellectual property. Even what you define “artificial shortage” is probably not artificial at all, as the price of a final consumer good is not determined by its cost of production.

And it wouldn’t dream of trying to trick customers to pay more for less?

“Prices are only incidental manifestations of [economic] activities, symptoms of an economic equilibrium between the economies of individuals.” This means that the emergence of a realized price […] coincides not only with the consummation of the exchange process but also with the attainment of a momentary state of rest by the parties involved in the exchange.

I think the point is that capitalism may be wonderfully humane, as long as it is confined within a mental box, and never touched by daylight.

I think you misnamed this community. It’s spelled “Communism”.

One example alone I can think of of how privatisation is bad is that redundancy is ignored because it is not profitable.
At worst, it leads to people suffering, at best, it needs constant regulation and enforcement by the government to stop them running in an unsafe manner.

There you go. The classical myth of “natural monopolies” and the intervention of the government, such as licenses, protectionism, “public utilities”, subsidies, etc. are the mere cause of this problem.

“The fact that the government must give permission for the use of its streets has been cited to justify stringent government regulations of ‘public utilities,’ many of which (like water or electric companies) must make use of the streets. The regulations are then treated as a voluntary quid pro quo. But to do so overlooks the fact that governmental ownership of the streets is itself a permanent act of intenention. Regulation of public utilities or of any other industry discourages investment in these industries, thereby depriving consumers of the best satisfaction of their wants. For it distorts the resource allocations of the free market.”

Companies will literally use child labour if you let them

“[…] the only reason our children don’t have to do this type of labor is that we are wealthier, not because of our child-labor laws nor because we are somehow culturally or racially superior.”

Any ban on child labor is utterly counterproductive and potentially life-threatening to the very people the government is “trying to protect”. Only economic development can improve the lives of these children, and nothing short of unrestricted free trade will do.

Rent seeking, manufacturing wants/needs, extortion, the list goes on and on, but…

Aside for your idea of “manufacturing wants/needs” (as they are unlimited), rent seeking and extortion (such as subsidies and taxation) are not legit means to profit in a market-setting.

“Those who particularly flourish on the free market, therefore, will be those most adept at production and at serving their fellow men; those who succeed in the political struggle for subsidies, on the other hand, will be those most adept at wielding coercion or at winning favors from wielders of coercion.”

You’ve defined capitalism so that all these inevitable features of a capitalist economy are “external factors”.

Corporatocracy is not the same as capitalism. The state is not intrinsically bounded to the formation of markets and voluntary exchange.

because any solution that would end scarcity for a good or service would thereby end profitability for the same.

There is no such thing as a permanent solution to the economic problem of scarcity. Any superabundance theory is destined to fail, such as keynesian economics.

Or in the case of the Great Depression, they’d sooner set fresh produce and livestock on fire than let other consume it without profit to themselves.

The Great Depression represented the most visible sign of a necessary correction in an economy artificially inflated by expansionary monetary policy. The interventionist measures made to boost the economy only drove it further into depression.

“Future recessions can be prevented by reforming the monetary system that creates the boom in the first place.”

Markets cost us nothing because they emerge spontaneously? Things that emerge spontaneously cost us nothing?

“We might object to this on the grounds that markets, like any other construct, are man made, and therefore entail a real cost. While it is true that markets are a human construct, we must bear in mind that they are, as Hayek put it, the result of human action, but not the result of human design.”

No. You can also profit by appropriating the fruits of somebody else’s labor
Capitalism violates the ethical basis of property rights of getting the positive and negative fruits of your labor.

An entrepreneur can’t “appropriate” somebody else’s labor if the employee who agreed to work for a wage did it voluntarily. Denying this would imply denying the natural right of the worker to free will. Social cooperation is not the same as slavery.

and taking advantage of market failures.

These so-called “market failures” are the product of an utilitarian and scientific economic theory to understand the causes and effects of economic relationships, as it ignores completely the difference between the study of Human Action and economic history.

In fact, the intervention of the government makes it more difficult to have a good allocation of resources.

Often times, actions that benefit consumers fail to receive adequate funding due to involving public goods.

“Every good is useful “to the public,” and almost every good […] may be considered “necessary.” Any designation of a few industries as “public utilities” is completely arbitrary and unjustified.”

Food is not scarce.

Food is not a superabundant resource. If it was, then the ends it satisfies would already have been attained, and there would be no need for action. Resources that are superabundant no longer function as means, because they are no longer objects of action.

An example of an actual superabundant resource is the air:

“Thus, air is indispensable to life and hence to the attainment of goals; however, air being superabundant is not an object of action and therefore cannot be considered a means, but rather what Mises called a “general condition of human welfare.” Where air is not superabundant, it may become an object of action, for example, where cool air is desired and warm air is transformed through air conditioning.”

Rising food prices are not because of food scarcity.

Of course. Rising the price of something could be caused by a lot of things. However, we should differentiate a change of the price caused by voluntary exchange of it caused by institutional coercion.

Milk hasn’t nearly doubled in price in the past two years because of a scarcity of dairy cows.

Descriptive economics is not the same as explanatory economics.

You are welcome to feed the world bro, I have enough with my family and pets

Is society entirely capitalist?