Harbal wrote: ↑Wed Aug 02, 2023 5:22 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Aug 02, 2023 3:50 pm
Harbal wrote: ↑Wed Aug 02, 2023 3:06 pm
In Britain we have the National Health Service, which is a socialist enterprise,...
Yes, and it depends entirely for its survival on capitalist-produced taxation, and is continually putting the economy in crisis, and is a continual source of complaints by the public.
Well of course it depends on taxation; where else would its funding come from?
Not from the market, apparently: it never makes money.
But where taxation comes is YOU. That's what people forget. And that means that an inefficient system, one that fails to deliver a service paralell with the amount of money it takes to run it, is not only depriving you of health care to the standard you need, but also is outright stealing your money.
The NHS is quite sacred to most of us, and I would not begrudge paying more tax to properly fund it.
I know. And giving it appropriate funding would make some sense. The problem is that things like the NHS can keep asking for money, even while not delivering good service. And there's no limit to how much it can ask...it's totally devoid of market discipline. Nobody's really calling it to account.
So it can deliver to you substandard service, while continually taking more of your money. And there's no mechanism to stop it doing that.
No, one can have Socialist-style elements of an economy that survive by leeching from capitalism, but even the Chinese have discovered the obvious fact that Socialism itself makes no money and actually only drains it.
Why should capitalism be allowed to flourish unless it is to the benefit of everyone?
But it is. It benefits everybody who is willing to work, invent, create, deliver, labour, or otherwise contribute to society.
I have no problem with people making money, but it is criminal that some should have far more than they need while others struggle to pay for food, housing and health care.
You have a particular problem in England, of course. All your land and resources have been enclosed and designated off since the 17th Century. You have limited land, and no longer own colonies. There are not enough opportunities even for the hard-working in England...which is exactly why, in the 17th Century, people started flooding out to live in the colonies.
Perhaps that's still the solution: migration to more promising areas, areas where the land is not all owned and where resources are more freely accessible. Maybe England can only support a particular population on the resources to which it has access. Nobody calls the UK "the land of infinite opportunity."
Socialism is always an economic liability rather than an asset: it never makes money or generates new technologies
It should be a partnership.
Well, the terms of such a "partnership" have to be worked out in an economically viable way.
It's not bad to have something like the NHS, if that's what you want to have; but it has to be sustainable. If it can't make money, then still, something has to pay for it, and taxation is equally necessary for roads, public schools, defense, welfare programs... somebody has to be making sure that enough money is coming in that the amount going out doesn't exceed it, or first debt then bankruptcy ensues.
Not only that, but there needs to be enough opportunity for profit in the market to keep people willing to do things like innovating, inventing, creating, starting businesses, providing services, doing deliveries, investing in new ventures, and so on. All that also has to be taken into account; the NHS can't be the sole concern, or we'll kill the economic engine that keeps the NHS going.
And I think we can agree that bankruptcy is not going to fund the NHS, can't we? So if you love the NHS, your first concern should be, where is the money coming from, how can we get the best value out of it for the money, and the best services for the amount of money we can afford to give it?
It's not infinite, unless you are personally infinitely wealthy and are making an offer...
