Hacker News Reader

Comment by fastbeef | Hacker News Reader

While snarky in tone, he has a point - The Market doesn't have a spectacular track record of having foresight longer than the next quarterly report.

View on HN

He is absolutely right, scientific glass blowing does take about 10 years to be exceptional. And then the work is painstaking (low output) and the pay isn't that good. You can earn more money making bongs. A lot of old neon tube benders are ex-lab glass blowers, but that field is dying off too.

yup, last neon plant within 3 hours of me recently closed. they will be outsourcing it all to a vendor in seattle, with an additional wait time of at least two weeks per project.

I remember having this argument with an invisible-hand fanatic, who thought that the economics of supply and demand simply solved everything.

"So... a neurologist takes 13 years to train from scratch. How does the market manage that?"

Well, to be fair the market does manage quite well! Since it's so hard to become a neurologist, there's a shortage unless the pay is so good that people are willing to forgo 13 years of their life to get there.

And the bodies of the people that did not get their treatment (or got the wrong one, because their neurologist was overworked, tired of burning the midnight oil) pile up.

Free market is good only when you have both elastic supply and demand.

13 years is a very slow lag time. For comparison, the general public has only been aware of the internet for about 20 years.

If you ignore the massive subsidization by the federal government, then the market manages just dandy. Taxpayers spend north of $15B on graduate medical education annually.

Were there no neurosurgeons before those gov't subsidies were in place?

Government subsidy of the arts and sciences is a practice that dates back to the ancient world in the form of patronage [1]. If you wanted to be ridiculously pedantic, as some people on the internet are known to be, you could argue that the neurosurgical procedure known as trepanation [2] dates back to at least 7000 years ago. However, the modern science of neurosurgery is far more recent so I do not think it is at all unfair to claim that gov't subsidy predates neurosurgery by a wide margin.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trepanning

Neurosurgery (as we know it today) first came about in the early 1900's.[1] CMS, the gov't institution that funds residencies, was created in the 1930's (well, it predecessor was).

And if we look outside of neurosurgery to general medical practice, we'll find that it was humming along quite nicely without any gov't support.

[1]http://neurosurgery.ucsf.edu/index.php/about_us_history.html

You just provided a link to UCSF, a government-funded public university [1], to prove your point that the government didn't fund the development of neurosurgery?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_California#Histo...

Just because a government-funded institution creates a webpage describing the history of a subject, doesn't mean that government funded institution created that subject.

If I link to a NHTSA website on the history of cars, are you going to argue the government invented cars?

So your argument is that government didn't come up with the original idea for neurology and therefore, what, exactly?

What is your argument?

I think that, because at some point there was a doctor, therefore the free market will make doctors just fine. Ignoring that medicine is one of the least free markets in the US (and even less outside the US) as irrelevant. From education (college subsidies, loans), public financing of med schools, public financing of post med school education, etc. Not to mention who actually pays for all that medical treatment. Or just random free market magic argle bargle.

I don't disagree that the US healthcare system is the exact opposite of a free market. But I do disagree that it would be impossible for a functioning healthcare system to exist without the gov't.

I disagree. The free market is predicated on free individuals making free choices. If you contract a fatal, but curable disease there is no practical limit to the amount of money you'll pay for the cure. The fact that your very life depends on this treatment makes you a non-free person, rendering the free market dysfunctional.

Sure, if your definition of market includes government-funded universities. Of course, such a definition has a tendency to swallow everything in the world like some kind of intellectual black hole. This is why the idea of the invisible hand is commonly derided as a religion.

Trivially. For starters, student loans, wherein lenders profit from interest on the loan.

Better example is how does the free market build the Sydney Opera House? Or a decent healthcare system?

Dunno about the Opera House but the free market built Disneyland.

Disney receives some of the biggest tax breaks of any company on earth. They pay no tax at Disneyland Anaheim and get massive subsides for movies (Pirates of Caribbean and Starwars being recent examples). They get tax breaks internationally and are rivals to oil and arms in scale. Free market does not apply.

Disney also has special flight restrictions, which Congress, not the FAA, mandated. Nominally described as an anti-terrorist measure, I agree with the many who say it was to prevent aerial advertising and sightseeing helicopters.

In Florida they have their own special tax district, the Reedy Creek Improvement District. It is "exempt from all county and most state regulations, such as development-impact fees or costly and time-consuming regional-impact studies. The district is regulated by building codes drafted with the developer`s help. Waterways, utilities and sewer systems are built to suit the developer`s needs. The district is governed by a ruling body that is handpicked by the developer." http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1987-02-23/business/8701120...

Low or no taxes would seem to be an important part of the definition of free market

Low or no taxes for everyone would be a free market. If only certain corps get it then it's like a subsidy from the rest of society.

You're forgetting the 12+ years of schooling.

Yours is an example of an interesting comment. Had he made an actual argument I wouldn't have called it out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com