Education, healthcare and legal services

Spreading the means of production out as much as possible among small communities isn’t socialism, it’s a form of distributivism. It’s really worth your while to look and see what distributivism is and what it’s accomplished before you continue telling me that everything is some degree of capitalism or socialism.

Communism isn’t the ‘opposite’ of Capitalism, that would be like saying Catholicism is the opposite of Hindu; it makes no sense, they are just two ideas. People think of them as ‘opposites’ because they were the rival ideologies of the world’s superpowers for so long. The idea of capitalism being at one end of a continuum, communism on the other, and socialism somewhere in the middle sounds like something Zinnat made up, and that just doesn’t interest me very much. if he can show me where he got the idea from, I might find it more interesting.

I’m not fully against privatising healthcare, but I have significant reservations about the practicalities.

As far as I’m concerned, if people have to bankrupt themselves to pay to treat treat health conditions, I see that as being an immoral situation. A country that can afford to stop this happening should do so. That doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be privatised healthcare, but I think the system should be managed properly so that this doesn’t happen (possible with private or state owned healthcare systems). Being seriously ill is damaging enough, there’s no reason that people in first world countries should have to worry about how they can afford the treatment. That’s one problem that, if I were American, I would be trying to fix.

Also, how is meaningful consumer choice attained? Most people don’t know much about healthcare. Many will go to a doctor and try to get drugs, when they don’t get them, they just go to another doctor who will give them to them. However, what people want and what is good for people are often very different things. I know at least some people in America who are little more than legalised drug addicts. Over prescription is a real issue for the American healthcare model, too.

However, I don’t think that either of these problems needs a state owned healthcare system to fix them. Maybe a bit more regulation or some other form of incentives in the system. But America still has the most advanced healthcare system in the world, many people in England with rare or difficult to treat illnesses have to go to the states to have them fixed.

The NHS in England has problems - long waiting times, understaffing, strikes etc. However, most peoples personal experience with the system (including mine) are 100% positive, and I’ve had some complex operations on the NHS.

The NHS works for the UK, so I don’t see a need to change it. If private healthcare works ok for America, which overall it seems to, thats cool too. Neither system is without problems, but neither system is working so badly that it needs overhauling. Sometimes there is more than one possible solution to a problem, something which is easily forgotten when everybody is desperate to cling to an ideology. In this case, each solution has drawbacks, and each has advantages, but neither out of them come out on top.

In an alternate universe where the advocates didn’t try to present it as a fundamental human right that a society is terrible if they don’t provide, I could be in favor of it too. But treating something so expensive and unpredictable as a necessity is a recipe for disaster.

That sounds right, but my reservation on it is this: basically all the things that killed our great-great-grandparents can be cured with 10 bucks and a trip to Wal-Mart:  sterile water, aspirin, multivitamins and antibiotics are amazing things.  So now, the things that create situations like you describe above are horrible accidents and cancer.  The only way to treat these things are with methods with justified high costs; they involve cutting edge technology, experts that are few and far between, and teams of people who all had to give up their best years to higher education.  If there was an efficient way to provide such things to everybody, I would be for it- but I highly doubt there is. Combine that with a reminder of all the horrible health problems that simply don't exist anymore or are cured with over the counter treatments anybody can afford, and the situation doesn't seem as bad to me as it does to some.  I can see an argument that everybody should have cheap/free access to clean water, vitamins, antibiotics and such.  I can't see an argument that everybody should have cheap/free access to shooting microscopic lasers into their pancreas or whatever doctors are doing these days. 

It would be very nice if we could do this, and I hope that we can. I’d stop short of saying we must, at all costs, though.

I think in this case it comes from the consumer's general desire not to be afflicted. The customer doesn't have to know much about medicine to know they don't want to suffer from cat allergies or glaucoma or AIDS or whatever.  So a research company can spend a zillion dollars on developing a treatment knowing they will get a return on the investment because people will pay to be free of the affliction. 

Yeah, that’s my basic take on it too. The big benefit of having a bunch of countries is that there can be a bunch of different approaches to problems.

I'd like to know how much some systems are dependant on others. I've heard it said (but not researched it myself) that nationalized healthcare systems like that of the U.K. wouldn't work nearly so well if it wasn't for all the privatized research in the U.S., and costs in the U.S. are so high in part because the drug companies know they can't sell anything for a real profit elsewhere.  Could be bullshit, but sounds plausible to me.

Socialism is a form of distributivism. Especially the leftish socialism wants to publicly (via state, thus via taxpayers) distribute like a huge monster of Robin Hood. A small common has nothing to do with states or taxpayers. Commons have a long tradition - but unfortunatley also their tragedy. This tragedy is merely then a huge problem, if the commons are no real commons anymore but a cartel / trust or antitrust of so-called “global players”.

Would you mind telling me how you interpret the word “distributivism” then?

Is it like that?

Yeah, no. Are you just looking at the word for the first time, seeing that the root is ‘distrbute’, and assuming you can infer what it is?

Yeah, it’s like that. Note the parts about state-controlled means of production as a bad idea, and the rejection of socialism as a failed economic policy.

I also say that the state-controlled means of production is a bad idea, but nonetheless: socialism is also a form of distributivism. Socialists take money from the taxpayers and give it to the poor (“proletariat”, “precariat”). It is a fact which we can also call “distribution”,more precisely “distribution after theft”, or just “redistribution”. One should not deny this fact, although state-controlled means of production is a bad idea. But how can the means of production really be controlled by all people without any help of a powerful institution like state or church?

Could “SAM” be a solution?

In Sight of SAM.
SAM is pure distributivism. All authority is in the form of very small SAM cooperatives. SAM doesn’t require that property or production be in the hands of such coops or corps, but any and all decisions related to such concerns are made only by them. If many SAM coops decided it best that all of their property and production is to be united under one authority, such would be immediately done. But a SAM coop cannot so relegate its own decision making authority. So if at any time in the future the coops decided to not unite, such would immediately be the case. Politics in SAM coops is relatively instantaneous, no activist campaigns or rebellions required.

Where do you live?

All authority must be in the form of very small groups / cooperatives. That is important. Otherwise the authority would become corrupt, all economic and political relations and situations would again become the same old (although called “modern”) corrupted relations and situations.

Yeah, you're still doing that thing where because it has the word 'distribute' as a root, you're claiming any method of distributing something to somebody is distributivism.  That's not how our language works.   Facebook isn't a form of socialism because it helps people socialize, for example.

No. I meant the distribution of money. As I said: Socialists take money from the taxpayers and give it to the poor (“proletariat”, “precariat”). That has nothing to do with Facebook!

And you did not answer my questions:

But how can the means of production really be controlled by all people without any help of a powerful institution like state or church?

Could “SAM” be a solution?

Would you mind answering my questions?

Yeah that’s not distributivism. Again, you seem to think that because socialists distribute things they are distributivists. It’s an actual economic idea with an actual definition. It’s not merely ‘the act of distributing stuff’. That would be like saying socialsm is a form of capialism because in socialism the workers earn capital.

Not for very long. You’d need legal backing, like an expansion of anti-trust laws,

I dunno, maybe? I’m not really following it, like a lot of what James writes. I think the backbone of the economy should be capitalist, with a few distributivist reforms. I’m not advocating a wholesale shift to a distributivist nation, so I don’t know what you’re asking me for a ‘solution’ to. I’m just pointing out that this captalist/socialist dichotomy thing isn’t real.

The NHS buys its drug and equipment in the same way that private hospitals do, so I can’t see how this is an issue. Although the NHS does have research hospitals and sponsor some (world leading) research programs into patient care, the bulk of research is still done by private companies, who sell the products of the research to the NHS (drugs, equipment, training courses), for no small price tag.

The only big difference in this respect would be that Americans use a lot more drugs than the brits do, so in that way, the companies make more profit from them. Also, it’s a much larger market, which explains why the bulk of new medical research occurs in America.

That makes sense too. I mostly hear this brought up in connection with Canada- drugs legally cannot be sold there for over a certain amount, so manufacturer’s have to sell them for more in the U.S. to pay for the R&D. In effect, Canada hasn’t ‘made healthcare cheaper’, they’ve just pushed the costs off onto a wealthier nation. Or so it is said.

I’m pretty certain that Arminius understands that socialism is about the “redistribution of wealth” in terms of merely a “welfare program” and “government grants” involving money with strings attached. Socialism does nothing without “strings attached”. The whole point in socialism is to force all people to bow to the supreme leader(s) (polyarchy). Money (specifically) is the primary means (the strings), even though media and medical pressures are also a serious part of the game.

SAM is a game changer, independent of prior schemes but its inherent structure (not requiring the whole nation to convert) is one of “distributivism of authority” (more commonly known as “distributed intelligence”).

That’s ridiculous. Drug companies own patents and do not have to sell to Canada. Canada simply employs common business sense and uses its larger buying power to negotiate cheaper contracts, which is what the NHS should do more too (and has started to, finally).

In America, on the other handMedicare and Medicade are forbidden from negotiating drug prices, a classic example of over-regulation interfering with the natural markets. So the drug companies charge them more, because somehow they managed to write a law and then get it through which says they can charge whatever they like.You can’t blame Canada for that absolute shambles of a policy. Sure - maybe it produces a bit more research money, but it also undoubtably creates larger shareholder dividends, bigger advertising budgets, and fatter executive paycheques too. It’s an absolute fantasy to think that a private company would invest all additional revenue into R&D, just because you have agreed to pay them more than the market value for their goods.

Yep, that all sounds reasonable. I’m just airing hearsay here- economics is not my strong suit. If Medicade and Medicare could negotiate for lower drug prices, I wonder how much money it would save, since it’s these programs with SS that are bankrupting the country.

Probably Uccisore did not understand what I meant.

How can people of SAM defend themselves against corruption?

SAM is anentropic, the very essence of defense against entropy or corruption. People normally try to hope that their scheme for doing other things will not suffer corruption, but the “people of SAM” do nothing BUT defend themselves against corruption.

You eat so as to restore your health and spirit, diverting entropy/corruption. You work so as to gain the resources for eating. You sleep so as to rid your body of inadvertent corruption. You clean your body and house so as to dispense with corruption. In the long run, literally everything people do is actually merely the result of an attempt to maintain themselves, including sex, watching TV, eating too much, drugs, scheming, political activism,… everything. The problem is merely that that get confused and don’t maintain very well.

The notion recently promoted in the last 400 years or so that the goal and purpose of life is “power” (WtP), is false and merely a social/psychological trick. And that is the real reason that so very many people are not Nietzschian nor Faustian. Life has never actually been about gaining power. The truth is rather that gaining power is for ensuring maintenance. But it is too easy for Man to confuse anti-entropy (the effort to grow) with an-entropy (the effort to maintain).

The focus must be maintained upon the actual goal/purpose. A degree of power must be sought, just as a degree of sex is required for reproduction. But that doesn’t mean that anyone has to become manic about either. Power and sex (just as examples) serve only the purpose of ensuring the future maintenance.

Acquisition is not the goal. SAM maintains focus on Maintaining = Anentropy (anti-corruption). It does that through its decision making process which involves IJOT, an ongoing calculation of the eternal maintaining of joy throughout its populous.

Well, when you said ‘socialism is a form of distributivism’ did you mean that socialism is a form of distributivism? If so, I understood it perfectly well which is why I called you wrong.