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wateroverfire posted:What does a non-commodity economy look like for healthcare, anyway? i mean, healthcare isn't rationed beyond a simple 'if you need an outrageously expensive treatment to gain a couple of bad years you are out of luck' in most of europe; all it not being a commodity means is that it's not something you buy or which people profit directly from it consumes a ton of commodities regardless, of course (since it exists in a capitalist system) but is not itself a commodity in the same sense as a government platform for tax registration is not a commodity moving away from a market system entirely is obviously a colossal task, but i believe it to be necessary faced with the total environmental collapse we're seeing today
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Jun 4, 2019 14:55
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V. Illych L. posted:yeah but renouncing political violence per se, while convenient, means also renouncing resistance to the nazis. the minute you start adding exceptions you weaken the position dramatically and you have to start thinking about exactly which criteria legitimise political violence; in practice, i am categorically opposed to most political violence in most of the world, but i couldn't condemn e.g. insurgents in north korea or syria It's only a slippery slope if you grease yourself up and jump down it. It's fine to have a nuanced view that allows for resistance during a literal civil war (Syria) or against a truely despotic regime (N. Korea) but does not allow for shooting republican politicians or blowing up malls to protest capitalism or whatever.
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Jun 4, 2019 14:57
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V. Illych L. posted:i mean, healthcare isn't rationed beyond a simple 'if you need an outrageously expensive treatment to gain a couple of bad years you are out of luck' in most of europe; all it not being a commodity means is that it's not something you buy or which people profit directly from Ok. So what you have in mind is a non-commodity model for the provision to the patient of healthcare? Which like I said seems good to me. Moving away from markets in the supplying of the things needed to support that seems like a recipe for destroying the ability to do it, though, while not using any fewer resources. We are not going to make the same quantity of stuff with less environmental impact by removing markets from the equation. And we are not going to need less stuff to provide healthcare with (to the contrary, we're probably going to need more since more people are going to get more care, unless the quality of care is to go down) if we create a national service to provide it.
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Jun 4, 2019 15:03
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wateroverfire posted:It's only a slippery slope if you grease yourself up and jump down it. It's fine to have a nuanced view that allows for resistance during a literal civil war (Syria) or against a truely despotic regime (N. Korea) but does not allow for shooting republican politicians or blowing up malls to protest capitalism or whatever. i tend to agree, which is why i think abstract questions like 'would you kill x people if it got you y' are bad, because in reality things cannot be abstracted that way - if you're in a situation where political violence is likely to work you're either in charge or the situation is just hosed the problem arises, as always, in edge cases - at what point in weimar germany does it become acceptable to take to the streets and fight? apartheid south africa is another interesting example - was ANC violence justified? mostly, i'd say it was, but at that point we'd have to embark on a very long and difficult conversation about the dynamics of oppression and state power
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Jun 4, 2019 15:04
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also in a non-market socialism we would clearly need some scheme to allocate scarce resources - i'm simply not convinced that this would practically be much more inefficient than our current way of doing things; recall that major market actors today have a very strong incentive towards enormous inefficiency and practically run planned economies internally. without inefficiency, profits become impossible in a market system (at least under your naive econ101 null model of a free market: all revenue would have to be reinvested somehow) some structures would presumably be market-like, in that you'd go to the grocery store and buy groceries for money, but in general one would hope that we could regulate a collective reduction and shift in production along more sustainable lines, at the cost of somewhat reduced consumption and eating the rich
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Jun 4, 2019 15:14
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V. Illych L. posted:also in a non-market socialism we would clearly need some scheme to allocate scarce resources - i'm simply not convinced that this would practically be much more inefficient than our current way of doing things; recall that major market actors today have a very strong incentive towards enormous inefficiency and practically run planned economies internally. without inefficiency, profits become impossible in a market system (at least under your naive econ101 null model of a free market: all revenue would have to be reinvested somehow) Have you considered that society is a construct of human technology and cultural ritual? Markets are not inherently capitalist, just capitalists primary tool for hanging 500 kilo picture frames.
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Jun 4, 2019 16:14
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wateroverfire posted:What does a non-commodity economy look like for healthcare, anyway? With markets and commodification they are still just as, if not more complicated, it's just that they are also quite inefficient, have to make a bunch of surplus profit, and you deal with this by having lots of people employed to sort the logistics out? Unless you're suggesting that markets create some magical effect that actually simplifies the problem??
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Jun 4, 2019 16:23
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RuanGacho posted:Have you considered that society is a construct of human technology and cultural ritual? i agree, and think market socialism is a perfectly legitimate strand of socialism - i'd much rather have that than no socialism at all, for certain it's hard for me to see that the effectively evolutionary impulses that a market economy has towards maximising capital can be effectively squared with the pressing need to cut down on our culture consumption - basically, the M-C-M' cycle seems to persists even without the capitalist class, if you'll forgive the jargon so long as society is based on people buying things, people will try to get others to buy their things and our culture of overconsumption remains, propagated by the (now worker-driven) PR and ad firms just as before clearly fighting it would be much easier, and i'm entirely willing to countenance that i'm wrong here, but i don't see markets as structurally compatible with the sort of reforms that need to be made for the sake of ecological sustainability
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Jun 4, 2019 16:38
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Anyway, you could also look at it this way, a UBI in all likelihood is not going to be enough to provide a reasonable standard of living but instead would act more like a benefit check to just keep people just barely surviving. Is that reducing suffering or just prolonging it? wateroverfire posted:What does a non-commodity economy look like for healthcare, anyway? Uhhhh the Soviet Union was a thing that existed. The government produced those items through state factories and their costs were reduced from the hospital's budget, essentially one part of the government paying another part. It generally worked, although the Soviets often only had more limited access to the IP of certain medication and technology.
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Jun 4, 2019 16:42
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OwlFancier posted:With markets and commodification they are still just as, if not more complicated, it's just that they are also quite inefficient, have to make a bunch of surplus profit, and you deal with this by having lots of people employed to sort the logistics out? Markets do simplify the problem by recruiting millions of individual self-interested agents that each solve a little piece of it. That is more efficient, though not perfectly efficient, than creating bureaucracies to try to centrally coordinate, in most circumstances. There is a ton of research about this and your understanding of the economics is just not right.
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Jun 4, 2019 16:44
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Having decentralized entities maximize QALYs with grants is still optimization subject to budget constraints, in the endwateroverfire posted:Markets do simplify the problem by recruiting millions of individual self-interested agents that each solve a little piece of it. That is more efficient, though not perfectly efficient, than creating bureaucracies to try to centrally coordinate, in most circumstances. There is a ton of research about this and your understanding of the economics is just not right. coasean islands...
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Jun 4, 2019 16:45
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yeah, re what ardennes said soviet and Cuban models exist to prove that these systems are viable in concept, though whether they're optimal is of course another matter e. you know, ronya, i often feel that you get a bit of an unfair rep, but what the hell did that post mean
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Jun 4, 2019 16:47
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ronya posted:Having decentralized entities maximize QALYs with grants is still optimization subject to budget constraints, in the end You almost certainly know more about this than me, and if you want to write more I would love to read it.
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Jun 4, 2019 16:49
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V. Illych L. posted:yeah, re what ardennes said soviet and Cuban models exist to prove that these systems are viable in concept, though whether they're optimal is of course another matter Often the question is how can a nation respond to an issue with a limited number of resources and additional burdens like (for example) sanctions. Cuba isn't a wealthy country and it is still under quite severe sanctions, but neverthless it can produce often impressive outcomes because it maximizes the relative utility of what resources it has. It has its issues, Doctors need to be paid or at least rewarded further, but it is also hard to see how adding market mechanisms could further benefit outcomes. How are people in a country like Cuba going to afford to pay out of pocket for market rates for care? In modern-day Russia, the middle/upper class often pays for private care out of pocket or with insurance, but this is generally only because the public system has been purposefully strangled of funding. It is hard to see the efficiency of this beyond wanting to screw over people less wealthy can yourself.
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Jun 4, 2019 16:58
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wateroverfire posted:Markets do simplify the problem by recruiting millions of individual self-interested agents that each solve a little piece of it. That is more efficient, though not perfectly efficient, than creating bureaucracies to try to centrally coordinate, in most circumstances. There is a ton of research about this and your understanding of the economics is just not right. I'm not sure that exactly simplifies the problem as much as it decentralizes the bureaucracy? You literally just said it works by "recruiting millions of self interested agents" and then in the next breath complained about bureucracies? You literally started this thread to complain about the buraucracy surrounding the recruitment of the millions of self interested agents you muppet. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Jun 4, 2019 |
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Jun 4, 2019 17:03
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it's a mild poke in the ribs of the people who tend to emphasize millions of individual self-interested agents, because R. Coase, who wrote The Problem of Social Cost, also wrote The Nature of the Firm, which wonderfully describes firms as "Islands of conscious power in this ocean of unconscious co-operation like lumps of butter coagulating in a pail of buttermilk." (which is actually a quote itself, but Coase is the better-known name) the intuition is that millions of self-interested agents face substantial costs interacting with each other, and so form numerous little bureaucracies that centrally coordinate themselves, and these bureaucracies seem to do generally o.k. One should instead weigh exit vs voice re: efficiency (or, oh, fine, contestable markets), and perhaps any other number of aspects of industrial organization as well - adverse selection, etc. All considerations particularly relevant to firms of at least one person hiring at least one more person... we live in liberal capitalist democratic regulatory welfare states and the middle word there plays a large role in our regular lives; every industry, even relatively freewheeling unregulated ones, still has people who can characterize and describe its dynamics - to decide how to interact with it, if nothing else. Hayek's pencils are overrated, esp in the short term ronya fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Jun 4, 2019 |
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Jun 4, 2019 17:11
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I agree that a UBI needs to be high enough that it isn't just a life of misery. It's ridiculous to conclude we shouldn't make a policy because it could be sabotaged to not work. That's true of literally any policy Somebody fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Jun 4, 2019 |
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Jun 4, 2019 17:27
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there's no way to do violence which doesn't hurt innocents. even the most righteous causes (say, jewish anti-nazi resistance) involve damage to innocents. realistically, saying 'no innocents may be harmed under any circumstances' rules out anything but some cases of immediate self defence; it's not a view anyone actually has i obviously agree that such damage ought to be minimised, but life reality doesn't work in terms of 'aha, if we sacrifice x people here we can gain y political points with which we may achieve z' - it's vastly more complicated than that, and violence in particular is by nature incredibly hard to control, to the extent that the best-funded institution in the history of the world, the US state, cannot seem to manage it very well the areas where that sort of calculus does apply are typically the administration of public goods like roads and healthcare, and at that point you start veering very close to 'death panels' rhetoric when you bring forth a no-sacrifice-acceptable position V. Illych L. fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Jun 4, 2019 |
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Jun 4, 2019 17:38
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The problem, in this case, this policy really isn't realistic and would consume a massive amount of resources, five-year plan amounts of proportional resources. Also, it really wouldn't fix what is broken in American society in the first place, which makes the likelihood of success dim. It is actually quite it is risky.
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Jun 4, 2019 17:40
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MixMastaTJ posted:I agree that a UBI needs to be high enough that it isn't just a life of misery. It's ridiculous to conclude we shouldn't make a policy because it could be sabotaged to not work. That's true of literally any policy Given the massive political resistance and huge costs that would be associated with the kind of UBI you're advocating we would be much better off investing our limited political resources more wisely. The version of UBI that is easy to implement is the version that replaces other forms of government transfers with a means tested negative income tax. The hyper ambitious version of UBI that you want to see happen is literally impossible to implement under the current system, either politically or economically, for reasons that you're ignoring.
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Jun 4, 2019 17:52
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from a planning perspective, we are all moving toward healthcare as a commodity, even if that commodity is labelled "quality-adjusted life years" and it's a this neoliberalism is not content-free - it means, e.g., one is not going to see national mass callisthenics or other deeply-involving shared lifestyle/cultural touchstones oriented/rationalized in public health terms, that one is not drafting/conscripting doctors and other medical staff as national manpower mobilization, etc. Predominantly people still choose lifestyles and careers, hence the inbuilt liberalism, and for all of the challenges from the left and right today, this doesn't seem under much contest in the developed world for the vast majority of people. The part where the gosplan assigns you a career was never the most popular part of socialism for the intelligentsia (for minority demographics there will be plenty of interesting times of course but that's always the case) ronya fucked around with this message at 18:43 on Jun 4, 2019 |
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Jun 4, 2019 18:35
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Honestly, it is very difficult to get your actual argument from want you wrote, besides the world is becoming more liberalized. I am not being hostile, but that is just a word salad. Also, gosplan didn't assign careers even if the Soviets emphasized engineering in its educational system, people still picked what subjected they could go into. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Jun 4, 2019 |
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Jun 4, 2019 19:05
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Ardennes posted:Honestly, it is very difficult to get your actual argument from want you wrote, besides the world is becoming more liberalized. I am not being hostile, but that is just a word salad. Ah, I see you've met ronya.
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Jun 4, 2019 19:07
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Dabir posted:Ah, I see you've met ronya. I know Ronya, but it bears repeating.
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Jun 4, 2019 19:10
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V. Illych L. posted:if by 'buying into' you mean 'participating in', you presumably cannot. this is the answer you wanted, yes? i still don't understand why that's so important to you Why did I have to ask that direct, answerable question so many times before you would actually answer it?
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Jun 4, 2019 20:56
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Somfin posted:Why did I have to ask that direct, answerable question so many times before you would actually answer it? because i was trying to suss out your underlying point and address it rather than do the whole rhetorical question song-and-dance
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Jun 4, 2019 21:19
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V. Illych L. posted:because i was trying to suss out your underlying point and address it rather than do the whole rhetorical question song-and-dance Did you think I was asking the question in bad faith?
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Jun 4, 2019 22:10
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not necessarily, but i thought you were heading somewhere with it. i was evidently mistaken, however
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Jun 4, 2019 22:29
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V. Illych L. posted:not necessarily, but i thought you were heading somewhere with it. i was evidently mistaken, however I mean, I was, but now I'm far more fascinated in pursuing this. So, because you thought I was asking a rhetorical question, you decided to 1. assume that you knew where I was going and 2. talk past me to answer that instead of engaging with the actual question? Do you consider this to be taking my question in good faith?
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Jun 4, 2019 23:37
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Somfin posted:I mean, I was, but now I'm far more fascinated in pursuing this. So, because you thought I was asking a rhetorical question, you decided to 1. assume that you knew where I was going and 2. talk past me to answer that instead of engaging with the actual question? Do you consider this to be taking my question in good faith? Half your posts in this thread are in the "socratic questioning with minor brain damage" style, so maybe you should ask yourself why people think your posts are in bad faith?
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Jun 4, 2019 23:48
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Slanderer posted:with minor brain damage Odd note to throw in there, especially since I explained myself earlier.
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Jun 4, 2019 23:53
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Somfin posted:I mean, I was, but now I'm far more fascinated in pursuing this. So, because you thought I was asking a rhetorical question, you decided to 1. assume that you knew where I was going and 2. talk past me to answer that instead of engaging with the actual question? Do you consider this to be taking my question in good faith? you might be interested in pursuing this, but i am not. it's tedious and a little weird tbh
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Jun 5, 2019 00:06
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V. Illych L. posted:you might be interested in pursuing this, but i am not. it's tedious and a little weird tbh If I hadn't just asked you the same question eight times in a row in order to coax a straight answer out of you- which you still cached in the terms "this is the answer you wanted, yes?" because apparently you can't loving answer an earnest question directly to save your life- I'd be reading this with a bit more chagrin. You keep talking about the political untenability of solutions, but I'm interested in what your actual ideals are, here. You keep talking about unionisation, but unionisation is not the goal, it is a means to an end. Socialism, capitalism, communism, none of them are the goal, they are all means to ends. What is that actual end, in your eyes? What is your actual measure of a society?
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Jun 5, 2019 00:31
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somfin it's really loving obvious you're doing the philosophical debate thing where you try to get your opponent to agree to very specific premises so that you can then knock down that premise. like I'm guilty of that myself sometimes so I know it's tempting to think that you're doing it so that both parties can agree on the specific meaning of the things they are talking about, but people get really annoyed when you do it because you're trying to get the conversation to follow a specific script that you've conceived of beforehand. Not only is it really tedious, it undermines the foundation of a good-faith discussion, that being give and take.
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Jun 5, 2019 01:27
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A big flaming stink posted:somfin it's really loving obvious you're doing the philosophical debate thing where you try to get your opponent to agree to very specific premises so that you can then knock down that premise. I am genuinely not doing that. I'm sorry that you think that I am. Like, there seems to be a belief that I'm asking these questions because I've got some hidden trap card combo that I'm gonna play on the result like WAHA I HAVE YOU NOW but the truth is I just want to comprehend what people actually want and what they mean when they say phrases that seem carefully constructed to me. Somfin fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Jun 5, 2019 |
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Jun 5, 2019 02:10
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Y'all are probably gonna not believe me though so y'know, do whatever, I'm out, have fun with the thread wherever it ends up If someone starts talking about how we need to incentivise workers to revolt by cutting their benefits or whatnot remember that we have  now
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Jun 5, 2019 03:02
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A big flaming stink posted:somfin it's really loving obvious you're doing the philosophical debate thing where you try to get your opponent to agree to very specific premises so that you can then knock down that premise.
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Jun 5, 2019 03:11
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Helsing posted:Given the massive political resistance and huge costs that would be associated with the kind of UBI you're advocating we would be much better off investing our limited political resources more wisely. The version of UBI that is easy to implement is the version that replaces other forms of government transfers with a means tested negative income tax. The hyper ambitious version of UBI that you want to see happen is literally impossible to implement under the current system, either politically or economically, for reasons that you're ignoring. This sticks out to me as a bit of a non sequitur argument. What does a policy being expensive really mean in this context? And why is it something those of a leftist agenda should oppose? Say we send out an annual income of 20 grand. That ends up being a 6 trillion endeavor. But we're going to pay it off one of two ways- either increase income taxes or eat the inflation. Either way, an expensive policy just means we're displacing large amounts of wealth. And isn't that a good a thing? Isn't that a fundamental feature of ALL socialist policy? Aren't housing goals going to involve dismantling a 30 trillion dollar industry? How the hell is that not a massive cost? I also want to know- say I agree, we dump UBI as a goal. What are these better policies we should be looking at? What policies is a UBI going to detract from that we could aquire in a similar time frame?
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Jun 5, 2019 05:17
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Ardennes posted:Honestly, it is very difficult to get your actual argument from want you wrote, besides the world is becoming more liberalized. I am not being hostile, but that is just a word salad. sorry yes that was peak "ronya idly sketches verbal diarrhoea into a post" er OK so relative to the grand scheme of radical approaches to healthcare in the 20th century, the span of national healthcare policies in the first world is pretty narrow - all developed countries perform some kind of technocratic quantitative assessments of aggregate outcomes, tweak similar levers of spending, approved coverage, and incentives in order to nudge decisionmaking by devolved bodies subject to some mix of competitive pressure (exit) and public consultation (voice) across some measure which is reckoned to be 1) quantified reasonably objectively, 2) partitionable into coherent chunks, and 3) substitutable between different kinds of healthcare or non-healthcare objectives along that one quantitative metric (that is to say, three characteristics of being a commodity). We do not have, e.g., conscript medical service, mandatory physical exercise (outside of conscription in a handful of countries) or otherwise mass movement campaigns, deprofessionalized healthcare (barefoot doctors a la Mao &c). We do not assign people to medical school, or not to medical school, and then to some distant rural village for their lifetime of patriotic service, on theoretical pain of imprisonment for defaulting (which the Soviets and the Chinese both did, although the penalties or enforcement certainly varied much over time). We do not have mass deliberation to identify a public health concern and then engage in mass action to root it out. &c &c so when we talk about commoditization and the neoliberal/technocratic outlook, we are focusing on what is, even relative to actually-existing historical alternatives, quite a narrow span of being slightly more commoditized or slightly less commoditized as a side effect of political winds that are not especially about commoditization, and the key aspects of what it means to be a commodity all remain salient. What is actually under debate is not the experience of healthcare for "most people", which remains largely the same in the span of alternatives, but the panoply of edge cases. Hence both the radical knowledge problem and radical decommoditification are not salient.
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Jun 5, 2019 05:59
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The criteria here is a commodity is part of a market, so yeah, it still isn't working for me.
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Jun 5, 2019 06:44
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