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Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

nytimes.com

161–170 of 210 posts

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>American medical system is not capitalist but mercantilist. This distinction is made on the fallacious idea that "capitalism" is equal to a totally free market. This is a common confusion but false nevertheless. There is no reason I see why a capitalist system cannot include intervention by the government, and indeed it must deal with this to uphold property rights as even libertarian authors tell us. Capitalism is…

>There is no reason I see why a capitalist system cannot include intervention by the government You're attempting to redefine the meaning of words to create a strawman where 'capitalism' can have any property you want, which then allows you to misrepresent an attack on a $random_negative_thing as an attack on 'capitalism'. A system with state intervening in the market is called a mixed economy. >It has also resulted…

>You're attempting to redefine the meaning of words to create a strawman

Isn't this exactly what post-Marxian authors did? By the time Marx was writing, it was clear what capitalism was - the predominant employment of wage labour, private ownership of social means of production, and accumulation of capital. The idea that a state which owns all or most of the productive capacity of society cannot be "capitalist" for some reason is outstandingly silly.

>The more protected against 'exploitation' people in a particular country are, the more likely they are to risk their lives trying to escape their socialist utopias.

This is a very ignorant statement; there exist heavy protections against high exploitation in the EU, but the EU is not a Socialist organisation nor are many people trying to escape it for its labour laws. There has not existed a Socialist society as of yet aside from the Paris Commune and Catalonia (which I must note, very few people tried to escape); before you reply that this is an NTS fallacy, I must say that the Socialist mode of production rests upon the abolition of the law of value (i.e commodities are not produced) and the working class as a whole hold ownership of the social means of production, and the functions of private property have been done away with. This was not observed in the regimes of the USSR, Soviet satellite states, Cuba or Venezuela.

>If you weren't a hypocrite you would renounce your citizenship and relocate to a 'better' place, like Cuba or Venezuela.

No. Cuba and Venezuela both operate the capitalist mode of production, and in fact Cuba is in very direct violation of the principles of non-alienated labour. How can a Socialist country be opposed to fair working conditions? This suggests to me that it is not Socialist at all. You must also note that I have not shown any appreciation for the economic models of either Cuba or Venezuela. The idea that I must support any country which calls itself "Socialist" is as absurd as saying that as a democrat I must support any country which calls itself "democratic", including the DPRK.

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#162

Right now Nazism is rightfully consigned to the trash heap of history and mostly people don't talk about it in polite company. Communism should also undergo the same fate. It probably has the highest body count of any ideology (see Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro ) and is the only ideology where a country built a wall, not keep people from coming in, but to keep people from leaving. It has made millions of people misera…

Generic ideological tangents are off topic for HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. They don't count as interesting in HN's sense, i.e. they don't gratify intellectual curiosity. The more grandiose a topic, the fewer new meaningful things there are to say about it.

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#163
post #160
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not what socialism used to mean. European countries are capitalist with a welfare state. This was first set up in Germany by Bismarck, and the socialists were opposed to it. Socialism used to mean that the means of production were in the hands of the government, and by that standard Europe is certainly not socialist. The capital is privately owned and the decisions about how to use that capital are made by th…

What is the percentage of non-defense GDP spending? I'd guess that the delta is larger.

The US spends 3.3% of GDP on military whereas France spends 2.3%, so while excluding this makes the delta larger, it won't make a significant dent.

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Succeed at what? What success do they gain from being a doctor in a country which prevents them from being rewarded for it? I would say the success of being a doctor at all but it seems that to you success is purely a function of wealth. In that case these people could have left Cuba before using it's free education. It's highly hypocritical to use all the benefits of the Cuban system and then be upset when you also…

> Every working person in Cuba, peasants, mechanics, and seamstresses alike, chips in to train you as a doctor. Everyone, including the doctor, continues to chip in to train the next generation of doctors. They're not chipping in , they don't have a choice in the matter. I think Cubans would rather have a better basic quality of life, than spend so much of their income training doctors who probably won't even operate…

Come on man, I wrote a big rebuttal, actually line by line. I at least expect an attempt at addressing the meat of it.

But to blame Cuba's poverty on communism is wrong, it's a result of being excluded from trade. And I really wish you could pull back from the slavery hyperbole. They're not indentured servants. I work at a corporation, I make a bunch of money for the corporation that they pocket and then I get a tiny piece back, am I an indentured servant? What about my debt? Am I an indentured servant? Come on, just pull back on the rhetoric a bit and let's hash this out. And no one likes the hoarded wealth of secretive and bad people but that exists in America just like it does Cuba.

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#165
All: Generic discussions about communism and other grand ideological themes are off topic here. Because we're communists? No, because there's nothing new to say about them, at least not on an internet forum—if you've really found some, you should write a book. As a topic gets bigger and bigger, what one can say gets less meaningful. We end up in the space of 'what's new is not good and what's good is not new', and that is one of the lame squares on the intellectual curiosity board.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#166
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that confused me a bit as well... I work for a US-based engineering company and they bill clients 3 - 4x what I earn for my work. Am I misunderstanding something about the article?

If you feel like you're not being paid what you should, you always have the option of starting your own engineering practice instead of letting someone else decide how you get billed out and what cut you get paid. Presumably these doctors don't have that choice; they get what the government says they get and that's that. Of course med school in the US is far from free. Totally different system over there, if you comp…

I definitely don't disagree with you regarding the doctors not having any other option. I was just surprised that the article was describing a 4x billing rate to salary ratio as outrageous when in my experience that is typical for the technology industry in the US.

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think everyone working an honest job should be payed pretty well (not sure what you mean about 'relative to the supply'), at least enough to have a good life, for sure. Is it too much to ask that everyone have enough to live a good life? Who doesn't deserve a good life because of their occupation? Nobody. I don't know there's any reason doctors should get exceptionally high incomes (except that in the U.S. they hav…

By "relative to supply", I mean that if there are far more than enough doctors in a given region or scenario or specialty, the price could go down and it would be fair. If you don't think that doctoring should earn especially high incomes, then you have not seen a doctor work, and perhaps you've never been gravely injured.

If you don't think that trashmen should earn especially high incomes then you have not seen a trashman work or perhaps you've never produced trash.

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#168
post #3

> But in one of his final attempts to normalize relations with Cuba, President Barack Obama in January ended the program, which had allowed Cuban doctors stationed in other countries to get permanent residency visas for the United States. When I visited Cuba this spring, there was a palpable level of resentment towards Obama for this change, as well as the end of the 'wet feet dry feet' policy [1]. Tourism dollars ar…

It's funny how the first priority of the Cuban government in those negotiations was to prevent the people from being able to leave.

The second priority was to pimp out the people for more pocket money.

Now that's Progressive.™

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#169
post #53

The SV atitude on communism threads is always interesting. Communism is great, quit whining you greedy doctors. Helping people is its own reward! But for me? No no, I'm a developer! I deserve my salary!

You may have fallen prey to the 'HN commenters are in SV' fallacy. HN long ago became an international community, and even in the US its readers are mostly outside SV. The majority of HN commenters aren't that well-disposed toward SV.

Users here have a broad range of politics, just like any sufficiently random large population sample. The ones who feel strongly about X are more likely motivated to post to X threads. So what you're seeing is not a high communism rate in general, just in (lord help us) communism threads. In other words the sample-bias fairy is afoot.

To round out the bias list: a good test when you think you see a pattern on HN is to ask if the same is true of humans in general. We're seeing a return of classic ideological battles (e.g. communism vs. capitalism), but that's also true in society at large. It's the macro trend, and HN can't be immune from that. We get wet in the same rainstorm as everyone else. I guess history didn't end after all!

Re: Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’

#170
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying communism cannot exist separately from (evil) dictator? Lots of the ideas do (there are plenty of functioning highly socialist countries). Theoretically at least communism could exist peacefully (although it seems you would need everyone in the country to agree and remain agreed to the principals for that to work). Also - dictatorships can work. There have been several 'benevolent' dictators who made c…

> Are you saying communism cannot exist separately from (evil) dictator? History does seem to bear that out.

Around 100 years of history isn't a big sample size when it comes to political/economic ideologies. Also, I would argue their are examples of it existing with non-evil dictators. I won't bother naming anyone specifically as it's easy to say 'but x did y' however I feel like that applies to a majority of world leaders under any system. There are certainly leaders of communist countries who did no-more evil than some of our recent democratically elected leaders in the west.
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