The Impending Death of Modern Capitalism

No, why do you say that?

What leads you to believe education or housing are things the govt is specially equipped to provide? Private schools are cheaper per kid and have far better results than govt run schools. What part of housing do you think the govt does better than the private sector?

The capability to allow people to access these homes.

It is true that the private sector is more efficient at building homes at lower cost, but that advantage can diminish pretty quick when the same dynamics that drive construction efficiency also result in a failure to meet socially acceptable levels of affordability and access. We would agree that it does accomplish those goals pretty well but it doesn't mean it's suitable to accomplish the latter. You still need those additional mechanisms to reach the sweet spot.

I wasn't quoting or suggesting that you were implying that. It is a common good faith idea.

Chez and I took turns on this subject and it's important. The govt and private sector specialize in different capabilities rather than some universal belief that one is better than the other.

The private sector is generally more effective in competitive, consumer driven industries like leisure, smart phones and tech, entertainment and hospitality and such. The govt is better suited at public infrastructure, the utilities, HC, public transportation -areas where regulation helps to make things run smoothly.

Neither of those in theory or in practice run well a sa one size fits all solution. And every developed country, whether its the US, UK, China or Russia have a blend of both because of it.

Yeah, housing has always been a multi-faceted issue. Most places eventually do a half-hearted attempt by throwing a small bit of money at it. When that inevitably fails, critics try to use it as an example of why any type of housing won't work.

You can't simply give people free houses and expect it to work. Symptom-based solutions are flashy for election season, but are always going to fail long term.

I want to return to the public/private issue when I have more time, but for now I'm bumping the thread to touch back on a simpler point -

bahbah, you said that free houses will prevent people from working - why work if you already have the things you want from it, right?

but millionaires have everything they need (food, shelter, etc) already, so why would they the keep working?

in other words, why do you assume the poor aren't equally interested as the rich in perpetual betterment?

I don't recall saying everyone given a free house will stop working. Some would, sure, but not all of them.

Millionaires keep working to be able to buy nicer things (food, shelter, clothes, etc) and to be able to help their kids, neighbors, employees, strangers, the poor and a lot of other people.

Millionaires don't face the same level of incentive not to work that the poor do. Both sets of people have the option to not work and make $x from tax payers handouts, but the rich would have to take a massive pay cut while the poor would take a slight pay cut. Millionaires are on avg more ambitious and harder working than poor people as well.

Do you believe it is a coincidence that the three things (housing, healthcare and education) the govt has put more money and effort into make more affordable have experienced the highest price increases of any major industry?

Right when we thought capitalism was dying the WSJ posts an article about how Sweden is going more capitalistic. More private schools, healthcare, and innovation and less taxes, government control and welfare.

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/the-wor...

How on earth would you quantify this. You're just making **** up, dude.

Am I correct to assume since you modified my post to one sentence that you agree with the rest of it?

If you want to quantify how ambitious or hard working one group is to another you can look at hours worked/week, dedication to learning a skill, how many raises/promotions they have received in their lives, how dedicated they are at setting and following through on goals, how often they talk about their plan/growth/other opportunities, how willing they are to take risks to grow, how motivated they are to be better, how often they take initiative, etc. As I am sure you can imagine millionaires smash poor people on all of these gauges.

Your brain is kinda broken, eh?

Housing is a very complex issue. If one were to summarize it in very few words, I'd say the private sector is good at figuring out what housing people want, while the government is good at figuring out what housing people need.

Understand that this is extremely rough, and you can find counterexamples aplenty that I would not disagree with. You can write books on this subject (and people do) and still miss out on important facets of the debate.

I will say that only doing one of these things is not a good solution, the former has a tendency to disfavor those with less means, the latter is rarely a good recipe for solid neighbourhoods. There is more to community than walls and ceilings.

I'd personally say the best solutions come from well-regulated urban or rural planning that employs the private sector. However, even decent regulations can fall victim to developments in economy, disasters and political events outside their control. Decent neighbourhoods can crumble because economic tides shift and businesses close, and on the other side of the coin bad neighbourhoods can turn around due to such things improving (though that is generally a much longer and bumpier road). It is difficult to plan decades into the future. Affordable neighborhoods can also improve simply on the account that that is where people move, but the flipside of that is gentrification.

Developed countries with decent economies often find themselves in a weird paradox. As economic times turn better, more and more people find stable housing or home ownership. Eventually they represent that majority of the voting population, and also represent a stronger socio-economic group which also means more impact in politics. So those who fall on the outside of this have less and less of a political voice or impact in elections. Thus the politics increasingly favor the former and disfavor the latter. The last 10% becomes a much tougher hurdle than what you expect.

You claim I am making stuff up and ask me to quantify my claim that the rich work harder than the poor so I provide 9 different metrics at which you can quantity hard working and your only response is to say my brain is broken? That seems like a lazy and not hard working response from you... I am going to guess you are also poor.

i aM gOiNg tO gUeSs yOu aRe aLsO pOoR

Mother****er, we all are. In a world with a billionaire class, everyone else is poor. You can pretend you're on their team all you like, but you'll be discarded the same as Joe the janitor. Your ignorance wallows in the muck of avarice.

How does this response go along with my claim that millionaires on avg work harder and are more ambitious than poor people that you claimed wasn't true?

LOL. Just because I am not the richest person in the world doesn't make me poor. Do you have a poster of Ricky Bobby in your room with his famous quote "if you're not first, you're last"?

In fact, I would consider myself rich, just like I would consider everyone in the middle, upper middle and upper class in the US rich. I don't think this is a difference in mind set either. The fact that the middle class in the US is so much richer than the middle and lower classes in many other countries can not be denied.

You want to be a victim to the rich so bad, but you have to realize that there are a hell of a lot of people who are capable of thinking for themselves. A lot of people know we wouldn't have half the luxuries we have today if it weren't for rich people throughout history.

You act like the rich will discard people, but look at the Forbes richest list and think about where that money came from. Almost every single dollar was earned because some person came up with a product or service to make millions of peoples' lives better. These are the types of people I want to have even more money if we could ever convince the poor and lower middle class to stary paying their #fairshare

The duality of man.

Is this sarcasm? I hope so for your sake.

"private is more efficient than public"

why, though?

the answer is scope, and in this is revealed that the above claim is a total illusion

private scope is limited to specific concerns, whereas public scope must be more holistically sensitive.

by way of a very simple example, a private enterprise can dump its waste into another's space, thereby "saving" the cost of dealing with that waste. a public enterprise cannot do this because there is no local "other".

accountability is another important difference in scope. private actors are accountable only to shareholders, whereas public ones are accountable to the wider body politic.

basically any appearance of superiority in terms of efficiency claimed by "private" enterprise over public stems from the ability of a private enterprise to ignore the harms it creates, thereby enabling the creation of more harms in direct proportion to the amount of privatization.

otoh, the public's greater capacity to achieve economy of scale, combined with its constitutive ability to pierce the obfuscation of information on which private actors thrive, give it the potential to achieve great efficiency while simultaneously reducing the propensity to cause external harm

anyone claiming "private" efficacious superiority in juxtaposition totally omits the compensatory differences, which are purely the product of policy, between private and public work

at if the arguments for golden parachutes for CEOs somehow don't also apply to police officers and school teachers

the argument that public effort may be subject to capture further proves the point by assuming the negativity of privatization of concern!

then again, "poor people are lazy", which is why they often have to work multiple jobs

private schools provide fewer services than public schools, lowering their spend and focusing their provision (see above re scope narrowing)

private schools also generally cater to a more advantaged student body, skewing their "results"