It's socialism, after all, for the Government to own an interest in a company.
Covered yesterday on YC.[1]
replies(4):
Covered yesterday on YC.[1]
> Covered yesterday on YC.[1]
> [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44989773
The post from yesterday was news; this is commentary, as in, not a dupe.
To your point, it's arguably closer to state capitalism, which may be a distinction without a difference if you paint it with the same brush as socialism, but it's one worth mentioning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism
The name of the (sub)site we're posting on is HN; YC is the host. :P
Eventually those were privatized. Now, the railroads are being socialized again.
China is trying to beat US at its own game. US (or at least its current political leader) is trying to beat Russia at its own game. Russia is trying to remain relevant. Russia is the muscle, China is the finance.
China needs Russia just like Google (Chrome) needs Firefox. Without Russia around, China would get all of the attention instead. Without Firefox existing, Google would have no counter to antitrust allegations in the web browser space.
Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything better than you.
No, not like that!
It's like that Spider-Man meme where everyone is Spider-Man pointing their fingers at each other. All the power structures are mirroring each other. It's all kayfabe, all the time. Everything is wrestling.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/magazine/is-everything-wr... | https://archive.is/muwUp
If you say 'I like Capitalism', a significant minority will hear 'I love US imperialism and hate nature', despite that almost certainly not being what you meant. Similarly, if you say 'I like Communism', many hear 'I love dictators, gulags, 5 year plans and famine'.
A word of advice: if you actually want to have valuable political conversations with people, don't start by identifying yourself with ideology that's arguably responsible for various atrocities and millions of deaths.
So neither capitalism nor communism? What's left, anarchism? I guess they haven't killed that many people.
The chip fab industry builds billion dollar bespoke superfund sites, and they're paid for the privilege.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv65swcp.5 | https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv65swcp.5
The US government doesn't need leverage. It just needs an act of Congress. Corporations are convenient fictions that exist at the pleasure of our legal system, which can be changed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-owned_enterprises_of_the...
US federal government is the biggest player in healthcare, by far. 32% of all healthcare spending is Federal government dollars. They have plenty of leverage. Bad if they use it, but they have it.
$900+ billion in Medicare yearly $600+ billion in Medicaid yearly
Now only companies are left to pick up the bill, because a republican administration won't ever consider doing it.
I still wonder when CEOs will realize that lack of education and lack of healthcare will eventually land at their doorsteps because they won't have immigrant workforces anymore that can compensate for it.
What would the value add for either party be?
Have you considered that they don't care? They can make a better profit now, so why worry about what is happening 5 to 10 years down the line?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine,_Affluence,_and_Moralit...
As a high-income earner I used to be in favor of privatizing healthcare here in Italy/Europe.
I've always seen the public healthcare system wasteful and inefficient. Our healthcare system really is in a terrible spot.
Then few years ago, a very close friend of mine, had to give birth to her child. She had chosen one of the most expensive hospitals in the region, where there would be a huge staff all for her, not that crappy public service she would get.
Then tragedy struck: in all the luxury and care she was receiving, her newborn had huge problems staying alive, and died of respiratory issues few minutes after birth.
A very preventable death the autopsy stated moreover if she was in an appropriate public hospital.
Why? Because larger public hospitals have all a newborn reanimation unit with trained staff exactly for these kind of emergencies. Private ones? They are virtually non existent, doesn't matter the country or budget, no private hospital can afford such an expensive unit that requires extremely specific training and equipment but gets to act rarely if ever. So they don't exist in those contextes.
Since then I realized how naive I was: private healthcare just cannot justify investing in a huge amount of treatments that are a financial disaster for the private clinic/hospital. They just can't.
Thus, at the end of the day, you don't really want private healthcare that has to choose what to provide on a $ basis, you just don't. You want a as comprehensive and available public service that needs the right amount of money and incentives to work properly.
I don't know how can it be achieved, but you really don't want to be that father/mother, sister, friend or patient that cannot access an important procedure because it makes no financial sense to offer it.
This is not likely.
Oh and if you like reforms, then you are anti-revolutionary, which means you are reactionary, which means you are a fascist. Yep, that's the standard communist logic.
That’s a fair point. I agree that my phrasing glosses over a bit of nuance. The political capital needed to reform the insurance companies would be hard to wrangle for anyone else but Trump, was my point. The government in many states regulates the insurance industry as far as rate increases and so on, so I’m sure they can apply pressure in many ways. I just don’t think that the government would do so, but they could in theory. I’m not sure they would in practice, but you were right to call me out.
The state could represent interests like "keeping high-paid jobs on-shore" or "avoid legal/labour/environmental standard arbitrage" that regular investors won't vote for.