And India still can't afford to pay those prices.
The problem is obviously not that THIS guy is not working efficiently. It's that the distribution of wealth under our planetary economic system is deeply unfair.
Wealth isn't distributed, it's created. I mean you can distribute after that but it would be theft.
Nonetheless I hate that some people are just born into economic situations where they are severely less able to actuakize their potential, so I share your sentiment. I just don't like the word unfair as it seems to disregard accomplishment and to me it demonizes people who have succeeded.
You can make far more money just by being rich and owning capital than you ever can by your own labor. You can own physical property that makes money like farmland, apartment buildings, natural resources, factories, etc. or you can be a shareholder in companies which make money.
Either way, it's not really your labor that's making you richer, and that's the part that feels unfair about the whole system.
A piece of anecdata to support my point: the richest families in Florence today are the same familes that were rich 700 years ago, too: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/18/11691818/barone-mocetti-floren...
Your claim about making more wealth from wealth than labor kinda skips over the parts about needing so much wealth and having to accumulate it.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people that this is true.
Under capitalism, wealth is created by labor and taken by those already wealthy.
This quote explains just half the story. The half of the story being: "success".
Pray tell me how is wealth created by labor without someone investing the necessary capital required to begin with? It is not like the labor worked for free.
The "wealthy" laboured at one point to earn that capital. They just "chose" to invest their hard-earned capital wisely which helped them beget more capital. Upto that point, your assertion holds true.
There are many who were "wealthy" who made blunders when they did not invest their capital wisely and lost it all. Would the fundamental assertion of capitalism "capital should beget capital" hold true in this case? And for all the Zuckerbergs, Jobs and Gates out there, there are a million more who failed. Those million are proof that the fundamental assertion of "capital should beget capital" is false.
The only assertion that fits Capitalism is "Survival of the fittest". I can live with that!
many would argue that in reality wealth is largely the result of capital
"Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power."
-- Adam Smith
There's a whole history of colonialism to contend with. What was once nearly a quarter of world GDP in 1700 dropped to less than 5% in 250 years. The whole country was deindustrialized.
It's a lot easier to actualize our potential in some places. I don't think it's demonizing me to admit that if I was born a woman in Sub-Saharan Africa, or in a war zone, I wouldn't have been able to build wealth like I have.
Does that assertion come from a study, or is it just a guess?
My guess would be that wealth comes primarily from war and genocide, but I admit I haven't looked at the economic theories.
We can be quite confident that European wealth during the age of colonialism didn’t have much to do with colonialism as such because that wealth preceded the colonies and neighbours that differed in having colonies were much the same economically. Britain was rich before it took over India. Germany had no colonies of any economic importance and Austria-Hungary none. They do not suffer by comparison with France with its extensive colonial empire.
I'm fine with a system that has wealth inequality, I don't see any way around that and it's great for causing innovative pressure, but I find it hard to justify the fact that some people are deprived the basic necessities of life.
> Wealth isn't distributed, it's created. I mean you can distribute after that but it would be theft.
So are you one of those people that believe taxation is theft? Are you a self-made man? Are you Caesar without Rome? It strikes me as incredibly foolish when people ignore the fact that their success is entirely dependent upon their society.
Did you create your own school, did you create your own language ... are you really that unaware of the great debt you have to others? Without society, you'd be a degenerate caveman, you owe everything you have to it.
Actually, it doesn't strike me as foolish, it strikes me as incredibly useful for rationalizing ones station in life. It must make it easy to walk past the homeless and suffering, feeling like you are innocent and not complicit at all in the silent tragedies the system sustains.
Wow I thought we were having a civil discussion until the second half of your post. You have some very presumptuous nerve. Rather than responding to all the ad hominem I'll just explain:
My parents fed and clothed me for 18 years. The public services are there for a reason and many of them (ie schools) need to be there. I inherited knowledge from thousands of years of thinking. I believe all humans deserve those types of gifts, and as such I'm willing to pay my fair share back.
What I absolutely refuse is to allow people to come in and take more and more until they are satisfied. To tell me that they know better than me (as you are attempting to do) of my privilege and what I owe for it. You want to sacrifice your life's work to others? Go for it. Put your money where your mouth is. But you just keep your opinions about what I owe and what I deserve to yourself because you don't know me and I guarantee you're going to look like an idiot if you continue to try to talk down to me.
Yes, of course. Are you suggesting all people are wise and have this foresight? Are you suggesting that people aren't raised in stressful and violent environments, greatly worsened by economic pressure, whom turn to vice instead of education and productivity? I don't think it paints a different picture, I think it reaffirms my position: that some people aren't fit to thrive in society, but that doesn't mean (by my values) they do not have the RIGHT to the necessities of life.
> To tell me that they know better than me (as you are attempting to do) of my privilege and what I owe for it.
This is not a matter of logic, but of principles. I do not believe I know better than you, I believe I understand the plight of common people more than you, and that my view of the world has been formed by that. You aren't wrong, I'm not wrong. I know this, but at the same time rhetoric which casts the proponents of opposite principles as being in the wrong is the main tool one has in convincing others that his principles are the "right" ones.
> I guarantee you're going to look like an idiot if you continue to try to talk down to me.
I'm sorry I rustled your jimmies so much. It's not personal, I was just addressing the position you seemed to be defending. I only know you as a paragraph of text, take it easy.
$1 is almost 70 indian rupees, and the distribution of rupees might be slightly more equitable among the population of India.
Here health care is destroying us too, but _most_ (not all) people who need heart surgery still get it. Sometimes it destroys them financially (not saying health care works here either), but they get the surgery. And our economy does not crash. So far. India literally can't afford to give them the surgery.
This is what's hard to conceptually grasp about nationalized healthcare. The concept of "a nation can't afford" does not make sense because a nation-state with control of its own currency can simply create and allocate the currency to serve this purpose.
I'm not sure why this is not on the table.
Economic growth does, but not overnight. And figuring out how to do equivalent things with less input (whether it's model-Ts, or surgery) is an important part of that.
To take an extreme example, every space-X launch costs $50 million. If I say that America could not afford to give everyone an orbital holiday, this is not a statement about fiat dollars. It's a statement about the enormous resources, and chiefly the labor of an enormous team of people (including all the suppliers, and their suppliers) required for each such trip.
Of course it makes sense. In any healthcare system (yeah, even pricate insurance) there are tradeoffs to be made, because the reality is that resources (hospitals, doctors, time, not necessarily just money) will always be finite. For example, having a breast scan every year might save more people than having it every 5 years, but at some point the marginal returns will be so small that it makes more sense to focus resources on other things.
So thanks for posting it.
Yes, the nation can just print money, but will anyone accept it?
When the supply of money increases, but economic output and resources are held constant, prices increase.
Imagine if the resources available in the economy are worth M currency. If the government just creates 10M currency, that doesn't mean more things are available to buy, just that each unit of currency is now only worth 1/10 of what it was before, so prices rise. But because people expect that, they try to get rid of the currency even faster, so prices rise even more than the increase in the money supply.
This results in "hyperinflation" - prices rising more than 50% per _month_ - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation for accounts of governments who have tried the "create and allocate currency" approach.
There's a great "Planet Money" episode on the hyperinflation of Brazil, which started when the country decided they could just print money to build a beautiful new capital city, and how it persisted for decades because it destroyed people's faith in the currency as a store of value, until Brazil created a new stable currency and convinced people they would no longer just print money to spend. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2010/10/01/130267274/the-...
If that heart bypass machine is coming from Germany or Japan printing more rupees isn’t going to make it anymore affordable either.
However with abundant natural resources and a large population you could maybe be a self-sufficient economy in close to absolute terms.
I’m not sure what the Indian balance of trade currently is but they seem to be rapidly developing in a lot of ways.
What I said was:
>a nation-state... can create and allocate the currency to serve this purpose.
I totally agree with you in a general sense. Creating and allocating currency and distributing it to the general population equally will cause the scenario you describe. "More dollars chasing fewer goods," as Greenspan described[1].
However, if we take the hypothetical scenario that the government agrees to pay exactly the current cost of the procedure at Narayana for medical procedures, none of what you described will come to pass. Wait times at Narayana might increase because more people might come in to have the services performed, but it will not cause runaway across-the-board inflation.
Smaller amounts of "print and spend" inflate less than large amounts, but they do cause inflation, and the wish list is never just healthcare.
Controlling a fiat currency lets you hide some taxation as inflation, but it is no free lunch.
It’s never just healthcare, sure: move the goalposts and set up your slippery slope.
But consider this: what if the tax produced value over the cost of its implementation? What if it prevented harder, more expensive downline complications or made the population more productive—more likely to gain, retain and apply their education?
What if we looked to it as an investment in our people?
Why is it then not justifiable?
It looks like you understand why even a nation that controls it's own currency may not be able to afford nationalized healthcare:
1) because creating and allocating currency inflates prices, it just hides the cost rather than eliminating it
2) because we cannot eliminate the cost by creating currency, cost and benefit of healthcare spending must still be evaluated in comparison to other spending priorities
Good discussion.
That’s why most nations grow their money supply over time, after all :)
It’s how almost all other sustained rises in living standards have happened too. China’s first growth miracle in the 20th century happened because going from civil war to the Communist Party was an improvement but in India, China, Indonesia, Russia, moving to capitalism lead to a rise in living standards.
Fairness would be nice but let’s try getting everyone out of poverty first.
It's even worse now with these "HMO/PPO hybrid" systems, where instead of getting nothing, you get "something", then a massive hospital bill afterwards.