Comment by BerislavLopac
1 year ago
> Profitable and valuable are synonymous.
So your police, firefighters, the military, health services (not in the US though) and various charities are not valuable? That is an interesting take.
1 year ago
> Profitable and valuable are synonymous.
So your police, firefighters, the military, health services (not in the US though) and various charities are not valuable? That is an interesting take.
They are valuable and they are also quite profitable (I am excluding "various charities" as that is too broad and fuzzy).
The fact that the state may provide the majority of these does not mean that they are not profitable as private ventures. Why are they profitable? Because they are deemed very valuable!
In some countries they are not profitable, because they are publicly owned organisations not for-profit private ones, and they are run purely for the benefit they provide to society.
Please re-read the comment you replied to with this context in mind (as their excluding the US was for this reason; though of course the US is not the only country foolish enough to allow profit motives to harm their healthcare, firefighting, etc. services) - the fact that some countries choose to allow profit extraction through these services does not mean that the non-profit versions have no value.
Healthcare is a profitable industry in the EU. Security services are a profitable industry in the EU. There are private firefighting services in the EU. You can easily understand that in general terms all of these services are valuable and profitable to provide (because they are valuable!). The same goes for "military services"... Mercenaries and other "private providers" are a thing.
You are completely missing the point. Whether a type of service has a state monopoly and thus no viable private market is also quite irrelevant to the general point.
The general point is that people (i.e. "the market") are willing to pay for things they find valuable but not for things that they do not. That includes paying through taxes though because the payment is indirect it is more likely to not perfectly align with "value".
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