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Comment by nickpp | Hacker News Reader

> put their trust in a profit-driven company's hands

Every single company making products and services we all use is profit-driven.

> Healthcare isn't something that should be sold as people are forced to buy it to survive

Healthcare is far from being the only essential good that I have to buy to survive. It's a merchandise like any other - the market rules still apply. Maybe emergency care is different (since I could be unconscious when buying it) but that's what insurance is for. That's what I use in countless other domains as well: car emergency assistance, travel emergency, etc.

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>Maybe emergency care is different (since I could be unconscious when buying it) but that's what insurance is for.

Hope the hospital your unconscious self is taken to happens to be in your insurance network, and that your insurance provider doesn't decide that what you went in for wasn't really an emergency.

Also hope I will not lose my consciousness in the middle of the desert where there is no hospital. Yes, there are risks in life and you cannot protect yourself from every possible danger. Life is harsh.

As intelligent beings we have the capacity to reduce that harshness. Not being able to eliminate all danger and risk is not an argument against limiting and controlling the dangers and risks we we have the ability to affect.

Cost. Cost is what you are forgetting. Yes - we try to reduce risk as much as we can but the more we protect ourselves the more expensive that is until the last little part it's costs everything.

How many resources are you willing to allocate to limit and control dangers and risks instead of using them for your kids, education or maybe simple enjoyment of life? What percent of your income are you willing to give those who promise that risk-reduction and how can you measure that they lived up to their promise?

> Every single company making products and services we all use is profit-driven.

And it's all getting shittier and shittier every year. The profit motive does not select for high quality products, it selects for the products that are as cheap as possible to manufacture, which includes lying about the contents and capabilities of the product in the absence of sufficient legal incentive to be honest. And for markets to work, consumers need accurate information. Thus, regulatory agencies are necessary in practice for efficient markets.

> The profit motive does not select for high quality products

Simply not true. Under communism, where the profit motive was outlawed, we had the absolut crappiest and worst products. While in the west, capitalism and free markets were spoiling people for choice.

This is a fallacy. Pointing out the flaws of unregulated markets is unrelated to either capitalism or communism, let alone an endorsement of communism. Market economies are better than command economies, but the utility of a market is its efficiency, and completely unregulated markets are demonstrably subject to effects that make them massively inefficient, and therefore useless. (Which, to clarify, is not to suggest that all regulations are useful.)

And as far as "spoiling people for choice", this is irrelevant as a refutation. A choice between a hundred shitty products is a shitty choice nonetheless.

Have you driven a Lada car? Drunk a Soviet pop soda? Worn some commie clothes? I did and I can tell you that until you do, you have no idea what “shitty” is.

You are writing your nonsense on a free-market created computer, publish on a free-market created website over a free-market created network.

Please point out the “better” not profit-driven computer, website and network you find less “shitty”.

The problem with full communism is the same as full libertarianism; it fails miserably to account for human behavior. In both cases, advocates will tell you "well that doesn't count, they didn't do it right!"

> You are writing your nonsense on a free-market created computer, publish on a free-market created website over a free-market created network.

Yeah, no. The government and publicly-funded universities invented the internet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#History) and publicly funded CERN invented HTML and the Web.

> fails miserably to account for human behavior.

Agreed - the only system I know of that takes human behavior into consideration is capitalism and free markets.

> ARPANET [...] CERN

You do realize that the Internet is not just a set of protocols, right? It's people, services and companies all coming together in this amazing web. How do you think that happened? Who brought them here?

There is a long distance from Arpanet and Cern to Johnny getting his Tiktok fix on his smartphone. And it took a lot of private money and initiative for this to happen. Nobody's denying DoD's role in funding the basic protocols Internet relies on, but compared to what was added on top of that since then - it's a tiny contribution, to be honest.

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