nickpp

> the vast majority of European countries who have socialized medicine and seem to be doing fine

You do realize that the "vast majority" of European countries doesn't mean highly developed Western Europe, right?

Here in Central and Eastern Europe (where I live) socialized medicine is not "fine". You should visit some hospitals in Bulgaria or Romanian to get a more complete picture. We pay the state outrageous insurance costs every month then go and pay out-of-pocket in private hospitals when we actually need them.

> All empirical evidence shows that single payer systems work better, producing far better outcomes at lower cost, than the US system.

Agreed. Also, all empirical evidence shows that free-markets work better, producing far better outcomes at lower cost than either. Just look around at any less-regulated and thus free-er markets. Or just "reject the evidence" - your choice.

> die

I am middle-aged so I used plenty of health services in my life. I always had choices when in came to price and level of care and treatment. None of them were for the "dying" case. But I do have an insurance specifically for that case. I am a rational being so I plan in advance. No need for a government bureaucrat to decide my health care for me just in case some day I may be incapacitated.

> the Phoebus cartel

> 1000hr incandescent light bulbs remain the standard offering till present day

This proves in fact that all the cartel did was establish a standard, an optimal average between various tradeoffs when building an incandescent lightbulb: brightness, cost, efficiency and life span. Yes, the cartel behaved anti-competitively. The effect on the market? Nil.

> perfect information and infinite time

There is absolutely no requirement for this for markets to work. Markets work just fine with partial information and just-in time. When new information and new market participants appear, markets will self-correct. The only way to prevent markets from working is through government intervention.

In facts, free markets are the only system we have that works with incomplete info and reacts in real-time. Central planning will happily decide on incomplete info then never adapt. We saw that during communism when the Party decided allocate X resources for production of Y and it always resulted in a glut or shortages. Central planning doesn't work.

> Is there a legitimately good reason for all those treatments to be so expensive

We can't really know, since only free markets can determine the price of a good or service (it's driven by supply and demand) and health care market is tightly regulated.

> Why is American insulin

Because of the regulatory barriers not allowing other providers to enter and sell insulin on the US market.

> misanthropic fantasy

It's the obvious reality around me here in Eastern Europe. We were starving under communism before 1990 but are now enjoying the amazing wealth capitalism brought.

No need for blind belief, you can always visit Venezuela, North Korea or Cuba to see how a country without free markets fares.

Or come here in Eastern Europe where we had the "pleasure" of trying both systems and see how free markets pulled us out of utter poverty.

> greedy corporations who literally exist to extract the most money

Every single product and service I am using in my life is made by a corporation. The clothes I wear, the food I eat, the car I drive, the PC I am making my living on.

Government?! Decaying infrastructure, lines at the DMV, crappy schools and killer hospitals.

You may trust the government if you want, but I will never. However, you are the only one pushing your choice onto me and reducing my options. I am fine with you using private or governmental services but you won't allow me this freedom of choice.

> So then you would expect life expectancy in the US to be higher than in Germany, France, UK?

Pretty soon, actually. EU countries are falling further and further behind economically. Health care costs are increasing, taking up an ever increasing slice of the government budget. Labor force participation rate is decreasing due to generous welfare and high taxes. Natality is plummeting. Attempts to increase retirement age are met with riots.

We're a technological backwater. AI research is done in USA and China - the benefits will mainly go there too. We can't even cool our cities: we're losing more people every year to heatwaves than the USA to gun violence. We're closing down nuclear power plants after years of shamelessly funding the Russian war machine for cheap energy.

Years of redirecting defense spending into social programs are coming back to bite us. Russia is hungry and aggressive, while the US is not protecting us anymore. What do you think will be the life expectancy under drone and rocket attacks?

> Time and time again large competing forces in the market are found to have colluded instead of directly competing with each other to drive price/cost down.

Collusion and cartels never work on the long run. It's an unstable equilibrium, the incentive to reduce prices to capture more market is too great.

> What is it that still makes you believe

Competition. It's the only force keeping humans honest. That's why we must treat any barriers of entry in a market with extreme care. The only "failed" or "captured" market is a strongly regulated one.

The great majority of health care is not emergency health care. Actually, the fact that emergency health is so expensive is quite the incentive for preventive medicine. And for the rest, insurance is necessary. Like for house fires or floods: I get the insurance but I also check my wires and pipes regularly.

> you also need to tax it, to deliver benefits to your population

The benefits were already delivered by that strong and prosperous economy in form of products and services.

Taxation is of course necessary to fund government spending but we need to keep in mind its drawbacks: from discouraging productive activity and slowing economic growth to giving politicians funds to buy votes with populist social policies.

I lived under the very system this principle enabled and I can tell you that without the profit motive we were cold and starving since there was no motivation for people to work and sew clothes or grow food.

I live in Eastern Europe and my "news sources" are friends in hospitals asking us to donate for desperate causes.

Governments-paid treatments are god-sent but many times the funds are limited so they only cover older, cheaper treatments. Approval and funds for newer ones come so late, sometimes too late.

Germany has one of the most developed economies on the planet so naturally has more spend on healthcare. But that can change and when the money is tight, tough choices have to be made. I'd make those choices for myself rather than trust the State to do it for me.

Expensive health treatments can easily bankrupt any western government. None of those developed countries can afford to spend their money indiscriminately on them. So instead they turn to waiting lists, death panels and very often saying no but not in your face (since that is politically frowned upon) but thought delays and countless committees and bureaucracy until the patient expires...

Any system needs a resource allocation algorithm.

In capitalism it is easy and transparent: price, with the side effect of aligning society interests with those of the selfish individual.

Of course the strange and heavily regulated US health-care system is obviously far far away from a free market.

In socialism it's much more random: black markets, lists, lotteries, friends and network of connections. The side effect is that the most productive individuals are discouraged and punished, with the whole society lagging in effect.

Case in point: the EU that started lagging the USA so much in growth that ended up having to beg for basic defense when a blood-thirsty neighbor came hungry for land.

Capitalism is the reason those treatments exist in the first place. I don't see many cutting-edge cancer treatments coming out of Cuba, North Korea or Venezuela.

I am curious: how else would you fund them? I sometimes donate & follow such cases and cancer treatments are expensive, especially experimental, custom ones. Worse, the rarer and more aggressive the disease - the more expensive the treatment and the slimmer the actual chances.

Oh, nothing like a little radiation fear mongering to convince the public they need government approval for every single drop of drink and byte of food we put into our bodies. It's for our own good, after all!

Meanwhile, years after the actual Radithor radium water [1] scandal, the very same government was merrily blowing up atomic bombs in open air, in the desert [2].

And even today there are crazy people around the world happily consuming radioactive gas in specially designed spas [3]. They should be locked up for their own good, the government always knows better!

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

[2] https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/artbound/downwind-upshot-knot...

[3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9073685/

> assuming equivalent efficiency of conversion

Is there any case where this is remotely even true?! The way advertising budget is spent always has an enormous impact on the outcome.

One competitor spends in print, another on TV. One competitor targets young professionals, another families with kids. One competitor goes to best and most famous agency but buys the cheapest package and fights any decision, another gets a genius kid at the beginning of his career to create a most brilliant TikTok ad. Etc...

> I suggest you look at how advertising works

A valuable advice, try following it sometimes.

Stats that people like to be chauffeured around and be helped with housework?!

Do you also need stats to back up the fact that people prefer using washing machines vs washing by hand?

They’re in a tiny tiny tiny minority then.

Do they want self driving cars or domestic help robots though?

> this should be regulated at least a little bit

Don’t you think hotels aren’t already regulated? Just try opening a new one in a popular place and let us know how open the market is.

Repeat after me: regulations (no matter how good or well intended) favor the incumbents and hinder startups. Fewer startups means less competition. Less competition means fewer, crappier and more expensive products and services.

Trying to use more regulation to fix a market f’ed up by regulation will only deepen this spiral of doom.

You just have bureaucrats and politicians doing that instead, securing their comfy jobs and reelection.

The equation is simple: tax one productive member of society 1000 euros - lose 1 vote. Redistribute 100 euro each - win 5 votes. The rest goes towards various government programs implemented by companies owned by friends that can redirect pay the profit in offshore accounts of relatives of said politician.

> It's unclear exactly what you're arguing

Actually, it's perfectly clear to me.

> we shouldn't have any regulation

Nope, he's not saying that at all. He's just saying that any regulation (no matter how necessary, well intended or even perfect it is) has a cost. And that cost is accumulating across all regulations.

Furthermore, that cost is easily supported by large incumbents (big fans of regulation, btw) but it hurts startups the most. Thus the more regulations a market has, the fewer startups will have. Fewer startups means less competition. Less competition means less innovation, fewer products and higher prices. We can easily see this effect unfolding in the housing, education or health markets.

Bottom line is: we must take those second order effects of regulation into consideration when talking about it.

> And then? I'll compensate the loss of thousands of dollars I don't earn anymore every month with the profits of a $100 investment in some ETF?

Probably most of it at least, because under your supposition that the AGI will replace labor we'll get incredibly cheap products and services as a result.

> Property has inherent value.

You weren't talking about inherent value when you wrote "Super-intelligence will make labor worthless (or very cheap) it won't make property worthless." which is what I replied to.

> None of this has any connection to anything I've written. I'm talking about the concept of a resource curse.

And my point was that the wealth of a nation does not come from its resources but its entrepreneurs. Resources are a course usually when monopolized and administrated (looted) by corrupt governments, not when exploited by private entities. AIs controlled by governments would scare me indeed.

> Other rich people can buy their products and services.

> He could still sell his cars to Altman

Are you joking?! How many cars do you think Altman can buy?! Do you really think the rich people can be an actual market?! How many rich people do you think there are out there?! Are you talking about middle class by any chance?

> Why do you think rich people would like to buy your labor if using AI/robots is cheaper?

Because labor evolves too, just like it evolved when automation, IT and outsourcing came around. Yes, I can't sell my dirt digging services in the age of digging machines but I can learn to drive one and sell my services as a driver. Maybe I can't sell coding in the age of AI but I can sell my ability to understand, verify and control complex systems with code written by AIs.

And so on, you get the idea. Adaptation, creativity and innovation is the name of the game.

> You're proving my point

> The point is: Because rich and powerful people still have to pay for labor their incentives are at least somewhat aligned with the incentives of the average person

Not at all. My point was that Elon and rich people are interested in you as a customer, not for your labor. That is the old mindset and the one we need to evolve from. See yourself as selling and buying products and services, not your labor, and the world will be full of opportunities. "The rich" won't seem like a separate class from you, but regular people you can interact and profit from (while mutually benefiting).

> The complete opposite. Freedom of association is the entire foundation of it.

There is a saying: you can be communist under capitalism but you can't be capitalist under communism. And it's true: there are plenty of communes, coops and non-profits being run in the US right now.

Can you describe how that would work the other way around under "libertarian socialism"?

> sustainable environment designed for human beings, and not profit

Profit is also for humans, not space aliens. Without profit, how do you convince people do the necessary jobs nobody wants to do, like sanitation or war?

> people on the moon? Almost definitely not.

Then the country and the system resulting in people on the moon will come and take over your own "designed for human beings" because they will innovate and advance technologically while you will be playing hippy in the park.

I've seen mainstream "socialists" (Obama, Sanders, countless Europeans) embracing and sustaining authoritarian communist thugs like Chavez, so...

We've seen here in EU socialist policies cripple our economy to the point we're lagging the USA and we can't even defend ourselves from the blood-hungry psychopath in the east.

> libertarian socialism

Is this a real thing? Any examples of being implemented anywhere? Cause it sounds like a oxymoron to me. Socialism means regulations and confiscation from the productive members of society (taxation). Those must be enforced with the threat of force so less liberty there...

> no one deserves to be able to force you to do things

So I shouldn't be forced to pay my taxes? How would then a socialist government implement its expensive social policies?!

> It’s not an utopian idea to try as a society to hedge and distribute returns to all members.

It's not utopian, is downright dystopian. Redistribution means forceful confiscation (through taxation) from the most productive members of society. This in practice means punishing work, innovation and creation and rewarding laziness and low productivity. This will logically lead to a less productive societies that will fall behind and be either bought out or conquered by more successful, more aggressive societies. We've seen this scenario unfolding in the EU.

> I enjoy every part of life where complexity is being dealt with for me

Me too. But I want private companies dealing with that complexity, because market competition controls them and keeps them honest, unlike governments which are monopolies happy to give people free benefits and entitlements to buy themselves their next elections.

I also want participation in such schemes to be voluntary not compulsory since this keeps people responsible, aware and educated. Compulsory schemes are widely hated and rejected, even when being a net positive otherwise.

> public utilities

My water utility is a state-granted monopoly charging outrageous prices. Same for my electricity provider. I would love to quit them, but any competition was outlawed, of course.

> you can demand each member of society to learn about ETFs. Personally

If you have time, go to an online calculator and compute how much the compounded amount taken for pension from your salary every month would be worth today if invested in an S&P500 index ETF - then compare to your projected state pension. It was eye opening to me.

Because every time I encounter such capitalism haters they turn out to be marxists in disguise. Usually pushed and promoted by people that never lived outside of their comfortable capitalist wealth bubble, written on capitalist devices, here, on this very venture capitalist's forum! The hypocrisy boggles the mind, really.

It's like the lack the most basic understanding of economics and they never read any history. I mean, communism has failed everywhere it was tried and there were so many A/B test that plainly show each system's results: North vs South Korea, Eastern Europe before vs after 1990, USA vs USSR, Argentina during the last hundred years, Venezuela before and after Chavez, etc.

Or they push socialism under new names ("democratic") as if it's a new thing, not just a watered down form of communism, with authoritarian communism being the logical end game of socialism - because "at some point you run out of other people's money" and you need force to keep fleecing them. Just like it happened in Venezuela...