Tech Workers Backing Candidates Looking to Break Up Their Employers

Not all capital was destroyed. So far Kurdistan was not the part of Syria where the war hurt most.

If you want an example where war isn't involved at all, you can have a look at Catalonia right after the fascist coup in 1936: anarchists and Communists workers just took the control of the whole industrial system and it was locally administered by workers (at least in the beginning, before the Communists allied with Republicans and massacred the anarchists).

Those are not socialist nations, not even close. This is a common response that has no basis in reality.

For example: Have any of those nations taken over and nationalized large businesses? Have any of those nations grown government so large that a massive percentage of the population depends on it to survive?

Those countries are as capitalist as you can get in practice. They just happen to have one or more well developed social programs that compare favorably to the US. This is commendable, BTW, and there is no reason for which the US should not actually do better than all of these nations put together on these fronts. The reason we do not is because our politicians, well, suck.

When people point at just a handful of European nations and claim them to be examples of socialism doing well, the usually point at Nordic countries and even places like Germany and the Netherlands, as you did.

This false assertion is always based on a single data point: Healthcare. Or, by extension, high taxes and healthcare and maybe education. Nothing else.

Well folks, universal healthcare does not make a country socialist. Show me where Karl Marx explained this was the goal of socialism and you might have a point.

It's even worse when you truly look a the economies in these countries and understand how it is they are able to do as they do. For example, having an oil-based economy that supports great social programs --which is like winning the lottery at a national level and using the money intelligently.

The reason the US does not have an equivalent healthcare system is because politicians, on both sides of the ideological divide, have been focusing on the wrong variable in this complex multivariate equation: Insurance.

The US does not have a health insurance problem, it has a health costs problem. Until that side of the equation is balanced the situation will not improve, whether you go to Medicare for all or do something else. This is a business, and you have to balance costs if you want to improve outcomes.

What are the cost drivers?

The first layer might be a heavy regulatory framework that makes everything more expensive. Regulation is important and necessary. Over-regulation, to the point where the cost of doing business is negatively affected, is bad for everyone. Just try to develop a medical device or drug in the US and see what happens.

I have been wanting to develop a specialized hearing aid for what is known as "Single Side Deafness" for quite some time. It's impossible without a massive amount of money and likely not a large enough market to make it worth investor's funding such an effort. The impediment isn't in technology, it's in the onerous and extremely expensive (in time and money) regulatory framework. We end-up with investors and intelligent folks devoting their money and smarts to figuring out how to get more people to click on links than devoting their time and money to solving important problems.

Why is it that Europe and others pay so much less for the same drugs and devices that are so expensive in the US. Because we develop them here and the US bares 100% of the cost of the US regulatory burden. In other words, we, in the US, pay for what it cost to do business here. The rest of the world pays for the basic COGS on these products plus some profit. The difference is massive. If the various European nations had to pay for the actual cost of developing anything sourced from US companies their medical systems would crack and crumble. The UK's NHS is and has been in trouble for some times precisely due to the cost side of the equation, something that is unsustainable [0]. In 2017 the NHS's budget represented over 30% of public spending. Something like that is not sustainable. The net result is that care goes to hell, people have to wait months for care and others who are able to end-up paying for private care (negating the entire concept of these systems being the solution to healthcare).

That's just ONE of the cost drivers in the US. Next you have to look at tort reform. For those not familiar with the term, it means lawsuits, doctors, clinics, hospitals, medical device and drug manufacturers exposure to being sued.

This is a problem in the US that permeates almost every aspect of life to varying degrees. For example, if you run a website today you can be sued any time if you don't implement ADA accessibility guidelines. I am NOT saying the ADA guidelines are a bad thing, what I am saying is that in the US we use a sledge-hammer in the form of lawsuits or the threat of lawsuits rather than a more rational and less socially costly process.

In the medical field, the cost of lawsuits is massive. Which also means insurance costs are large. Doctors, depending on specialization, have to pay for very expensive protection (insurance) against predatory attorneys looking to make a buck from any mistake they might make when treating a patient. The cost for hospitals and medical device and drug manufacturers is equally massive.

There are repercussions to this structure. A simple example is that doctors will order and perform a battery of sometimes unnecessary tests on patients simply because of the threat. Nobody wants to go to court and have to face severe career-ending penalties, so they order tons of tests to cover their behinds. Medicine ceases to be about the patient when doctors are worried about lawyers.

Yet another cost driver is the high cost of university education in the US, and, in particular, medical education. When a doctor graduates with US $300K in debt they cannot earn below a certain threshold. Their lives will soon include added costs for a house, car and eventually a growing family with their own cost structures. They will also need insurance for their home, cars, healthcare and practice. Without charging enough for their services they become enslaved to the cost of their education. As it is, most will require decades to pay off these loans.

The cost of our education is out of control precisely due to government intervention. When a government guarantees loans as they do universities charge massive amounts of money for their degrees. The result is a chain reaction of costs at every level that affect the competitiveness of our medical industry in more ways than one.

It's easy to point at a few countries in Europe and, just because they have "socialized" medicine and high taxes conclude that's utopia and the US's problems are due to evil capitalism. A more intellectually honest dive into the realities behind these issues reveals a completely different scenario, a truth where most of the failings in the US are easily attributable to failures in policy and politics and government becoming far more involved than they should.

And then there's the "life is great" assertion and yet we don't see hundreds of millions of people wanting to move into any of these nations. In fact, if they don't control immigration tightly they would crumble in short order. Interestingly enough, if the US made immigration free and open we would probably easily double our population in a very short period of time. Everyone wants to come here, including people from the countries you mentioned. I also presume from your comment you no longer live in any of those countries. If life was so great, why not? The most common answer to that question is, lack of opportunity. Everything comes at a cost.

[0] "10 charts that show why the NHS is in trouble" https://www.bbc.com/news/health-42572110

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> The good news for the US is that they don't have an imperialist neighbour who's going to crush their economy and support a coup to shut down any socialist threat to their imperialism. Because that's what happened all the times in Latin America.

While U.S. intervention in Latin America is regrettable, this is a lame cop-out. One, many countries that embraced capitalism flourished economically despite U.S. intervention. E.g. Chile, South Korea, etc. Two, many countries that embraced socialism destroyed themselves economically despite the lack of foreign intervention. E.g. Venezuela under Chavez, India under Nehru.

> That's a really strange thing for a “classical liberal” to say. This is straight from the hardcore neoconservative narrative.

Not really. If China were playing with equal rules there would be no problems. They are not. From currency manipulation to intellectual property theft, not a care about the environment and the imprisonment of massive amounts of people and more, they are not equal participants in the economic realm.

Classical Liberalism does not require me to ignore reality. China is playing to win, by whatever means necessary. Which means if we (the western world) create the opening they will go right through it. A world dominated economically and militarily by China is likely to result in a severe reduction in the standard of living of many nations doing well today. For a crystal-view into that today just look at nations with seriously degraded industrial ecosystems.

For those who might not be clear on what classical liberalism is about, here's a good explanation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iU-8Uz_nMaQ

Please note there's nothing in these principles that would have one be comfortable with what's going on with China, both within and in the context of the world stage. In fact, classical liberalism would cause one to raise a serious alarm against a good deal of China's behavior, internally and externally.