Comment by Bloating
3 years ago
Sounds more like how crony politics for personal gain works. Alternatively, you could finance the hospital, fire depart, or whatever without an middle man siphoning off "their fair share"
3 years ago
Sounds more like how crony politics for personal gain works. Alternatively, you could finance the hospital, fire depart, or whatever without an middle man siphoning off "their fair share"
So if you want to see this theory in action go to developing countries with an elite ruling class where they don't disperse funds to social works and see how nice it is, behold their lame GDP, etc.
The country I live in SE Asia is a good example. It's quite libertarian out here and yeah being able to pay for private hospitals is nice, but generally speaking your quality of life is lower, quality of goods is lower, average person is less educated, traffic is a crippling problem due to poor planning, it goes on and on. And despite labor being super cheap, roads are a mess, sidewalks are few and far between and if you do get one it's crowded with junk.. Only 10% of the country pays taxes, the inequality with the rich is massive, and if you're not in the top 1% you're basically a poor.
I recommend everyone in a rich english speaking country spending at least a year or two living in a developing country to get some perspective
Coordination games and public goods games (which arguably model insurance) work best when people don’t adversely self-select, but coordinate around the social optimum (for insurance, when the risk pool is as large as possible). Whatever can orchestrate such coordination adds value. If people do it on their own, great, but some problems have characteristics like time horizons such that the coordination doesn’t happen without an authority. Yes, this brings in other public choice problems, but the trade-off is not necessarily bad.
Alternatively, you could finance the hospital, fire depart, or whatever without an middle man siphoning off "their fair share"
This has already been tried. People used to subscribe to fire service, or ambulance service. It doesn't work, and is also bad for society.
If you want people to only use the things they directly pay for, and not pay for shared things through taxes, then only drive on your own driveway. Don't drive on any roads outside of your cul-de-sac. Don't get your Amazon order delivered on state and federally-funded highways. Don't fly out of any big airport in America. Don't fly on any commercial airline, since they have all received taxpayer bailouts in the past. Don't use a bank. Don't use money. Hire a security guard to protect your property, and another one to follow you around every day. Get your water from a well on your own property.
For an 88-day-old account to be this stunningly obtuse, I'm going with "troll," rather than "genuinely completely oblivious to how the world works."
> People used to subscribe to fire service, or ambulance service. It doesn't work, and is also bad for society.
That's interesting - FEMA says that 70% of the fire departments in the US are all-volunteer, and >90% have a volunteer component.
https://apps.usfa.fema.gov/registry/summary#g
I've lived in areas with volunteer fire departments that paid for their operations primarily with "fire dues" for most of my life. As far as I know, most volunteer departments operate like that.
I had no idea they didn't work. I wonder if anyone has told them?
Subscription fire departments and volunteer fire departments aren't the same thing. I know all about volunteer fire departments, and have worked with them in the past.
Subscription fire departments were commercial entities, sometimes run by insurance companies, to which you paid a regular subscription fee. If you house was on fire, they'd extinguish the flames. If your neighbor's house was on fire, and they didn't subscribe, then they let it burn.
Citing a completely different thing does not refute what I wrote. It just illustrates that you don't fully understand the issue.
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What does account age have to do with any of this?
In this case the "middle man" is literally doing the work. Money doesn't build things. It goes to entities so that they can build things. I suspect you know this, but it _seems_ like you don't.