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Comment by pastacacioepepe | Hacker News Reader

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This is sweeping a lot of problems under the rug. Many US governments are so disfunctional that it's unclear that they could succeed at European-style public housing.

An analogy: just because Japan has a very good high-speed rail network doesn't imply that a new one will succeed in the US. In California it's an open question whether it's going to succeed in the end. You can't assume the US way of doing things like that will do as good a job as other countries on some things, because the culture and politics are very different, and sometimes that means we screw it up.

California has a vast and robust sprawling network of socialized transportation, the budget for which has doubled in the past 2 years to consume 7% of the annual state budget. Think I am talking about high speed rail? No, just the freeway department, which spends 40x more every year and the economic sustainability of which is never even obliquely questioned.

In short, California has plenty of appetite for socialism, as long as it is the kind they want.

> 40x more every year

Am I reading this right? Are you saying that each decade, the California freeway department multiplies their budget by a quadrillion? If their budget was $1 in 2013, they would now be spending more money than there exists in the world? I'm going to request a source for that.

I think GP is saying that CA spends 40x on freeways as compared to public transit.

I am saying that every single year Caltrans spends 40x the budget of the high speed rail.

This does not count the budgets of the DMV and CHP which are 3x and 4x the HSR budget respectively.

Okay, but generic arguments of this sort won't tell us whether any particular project will succeed. It's going to depend on local conditions.

> when are they going to understand that the same solution can be applied to housing and other problems?

Housing problem is not an economic problem, it is an effect of vetocracy of city councils and activist groups.

Similar to the housing market, the government created this problem in the first place.

This tone is not useful, I say this as someone who supports this move.

The best time to do the right thing is yesterday, the second best is today.

This isn't Socialism, it's the Welfare State, which was created to deflate Socialism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck

> A master of complex politics at home, Bismarck created the first welfare state in the modern world, with the goal of gaining working class support that might otherwise go to his socialist opponents.

Oh, how the Socialists have been laid low. Once, they promised utopia. Now... they're pretty sure they can make cheap insulin.

I wish them luck, but I won't hold my breath.

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In the US (a nation of 320,000,000 people), around 5 people per year die from this[0]. On the list of causes of death that need attention, this one is considerably lower than lightning strikes (which kill ~20 per year)[1].

Is it a problem? Sure. Is it an argument for reorganizing our economy? Hardly.

[0] https://rightcarealliance.org/activities/insulin/ [1] https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-lightnin....

No country in Europe is Socialist. They're examples of the Welfare State, which was created to deflate Socialism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck

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It looks like your account has been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. Could you please stop? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, so we end up having to ban accounts that do this—regardless of which ideology they're for or against.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

the constraints of cited issues (affordable insulin, housing) are due to cartel-like behaviour from stakeholders in the market.

It is not a characteristic of (freemarket) capitalism in itself (like, the rest of the world make it work), but a concentration/tyrrany of powers (patents, regulation, lobbying) and a disregard of human life/health in society.

These are not factors that disappear in a socialist/comunist framework unless one is "government from the people" naive.

A "simple solution" would be to make patents on critical things to be "opensourced", licenseable in automatic to anyone interested in exchange of a % fee on sales to patent-holders, making still competitive for Original-inventors to produce things at a competive advantage while keeping prices for End-Users "honest" due to production competition

This isn't Socialism, it's regulated Capitalism, akin to the Nordic Model.

"The Nordic Model isn't socialism!"

"OK, so let's implement their policies."

"No, that's socialism!"

(cribbed from a meme; https://twitter.com/pty/status/1109687920938541057)

Confusing. The people saying "The Nordic Model isn't socialism!" are the people who are responding to "No, that's socialism!" Saying that the nordic model isn't socialism is a response to those who oppose it by saying it is, an attempt to persuade anti-socialists to chill out.

> Saying that the nordic model isn't socialism is a response to those who oppose it by saying it is, an attempt to persuade anti-socialists to chill out.

No, that's not true. For example, the Heritage Foundation: https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/commentary/the-myth-s...

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