I, too, was naively hyper-libertarian once, about 15 years ago. I recommend looking at a wide variety of aggregate data, and it will soon be clear that blaming the government for literally every problem was always going to be too simplistic of a worldview.
There has never been a successful libertarian society. All successful societies have combined a lot of capitalism with significant socialism, including the US.
Public schooling, so that children born into poor families can get an education? That's socialism.
A fire department paid for with tax dollars? That's socialism.
A police department? That's socialism, too.
The police are very flawed, but having no police is empirically worse for everyone except for those who are highly skilled at organized crime, since they become the de facto government and rulers in that country, just like we see in Mexico today.
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There are frankly many important oversimplifications in the above post I'm replying to, but I'll try to be brief:
1. The relevant comparison between "socialized" medicine and what the US has is not a (usually good and very rarely botched) surgery versus a perfect surgery, but bad surgery versus no surgery at all. Americans without healthcare don't wait in line, and thus certainly don't wait in line for longer than people who _do_ have healthcare!
2. If competition is part of what makes capitalism so great (and I do think it is), then let's bring on the competition and have a public option.
3. Canada's healthcare model is very different from the UK's, but you grouped them together. I think the US should adopt a model, not like the UK where the government owns the hospitals (and thus indeed has no incentive to control costs), but instead do something similar to what Canada and Germany do, where the hospitals are privately owned. The part that is socialistic is that citizens join forces to group-buy healthcare instead of each buying their own. This group buying has always been done via the government, where the gov't becomes the "single payer" (buyer) of healthcare for everyone as a group, so that we can negotiate lower prices.
Thanks to the internet, it is possible to use something like Kickstarter to literally group-buy healthcare _without_ the government needing to be involved; it would be very interesting to see some country try!
Hello. As tempted as I am to go through your reply point by point and give my take, that would take forever and end up longer than my original post. The short posts I favor can't be comprehensive and are unlikely to be persuasive except on the margin - which is fine for my purposes.
I'll just add that your last point about "kickstarter" group health schemes is already quite prevalent in the US. There are several regional and/or religious groups doing this and one largish one called CrowdHealth (https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/). Of course, this only impacts the demand side and doesn't address all the distorting (by my view) impacts of government on the supply of health care, but still, it's a step in the right direction.
That's not an endorsement, of the CrowdHealth, btw. Just an observation.
If you want more of my "naive" libertarian takes, check out the rest of my Substack. Oh, and I have a podcast and YouTube show that will probably entertain and annoy you too! https://www.youtube.com/@HamanNature
I, too, was naively hyper-libertarian once, about 15 years ago. I recommend looking at a wide variety of aggregate data, and it will soon be clear that blaming the government for literally every problem was always going to be too simplistic of a worldview.
There has never been a successful libertarian society. All successful societies have combined a lot of capitalism with significant socialism, including the US.
Public schooling, so that children born into poor families can get an education? That's socialism.
A fire department paid for with tax dollars? That's socialism.
A police department? That's socialism, too.
The police are very flawed, but having no police is empirically worse for everyone except for those who are highly skilled at organized crime, since they become the de facto government and rulers in that country, just like we see in Mexico today.
---
There are frankly many important oversimplifications in the above post I'm replying to, but I'll try to be brief:
1. The relevant comparison between "socialized" medicine and what the US has is not a (usually good and very rarely botched) surgery versus a perfect surgery, but bad surgery versus no surgery at all. Americans without healthcare don't wait in line, and thus certainly don't wait in line for longer than people who _do_ have healthcare!
2. If competition is part of what makes capitalism so great (and I do think it is), then let's bring on the competition and have a public option.
3. Canada's healthcare model is very different from the UK's, but you grouped them together. I think the US should adopt a model, not like the UK where the government owns the hospitals (and thus indeed has no incentive to control costs), but instead do something similar to what Canada and Germany do, where the hospitals are privately owned. The part that is socialistic is that citizens join forces to group-buy healthcare instead of each buying their own. This group buying has always been done via the government, where the gov't becomes the "single payer" (buyer) of healthcare for everyone as a group, so that we can negotiate lower prices.
Thanks to the internet, it is possible to use something like Kickstarter to literally group-buy healthcare _without_ the government needing to be involved; it would be very interesting to see some country try!
Hello. As tempted as I am to go through your reply point by point and give my take, that would take forever and end up longer than my original post. The short posts I favor can't be comprehensive and are unlikely to be persuasive except on the margin - which is fine for my purposes.
I'll just add that your last point about "kickstarter" group health schemes is already quite prevalent in the US. There are several regional and/or religious groups doing this and one largish one called CrowdHealth (https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/). Of course, this only impacts the demand side and doesn't address all the distorting (by my view) impacts of government on the supply of health care, but still, it's a step in the right direction.
That's not an endorsement, of the CrowdHealth, btw. Just an observation.
If you want more of my "naive" libertarian takes, check out the rest of my Substack. Oh, and I have a podcast and YouTube show that will probably entertain and annoy you too! https://www.youtube.com/@HamanNature
Thanks for reading!
> I'll just add that your last point about "kickstarter" group health schemes is already quite prevalent in the US.
When I said it'd be interesting to see a country try such a thing I meant at the scale of a country, not just a niche attempt.
But I hadn't seen CrowdHealth and it still has more participants than I would have guessed, thanks.
I tried to use neutral phrasing to ask ChatGPT about wait times and so on, and its answer matches the research I've done over the years: https://chatgpt.com/share/6765e64a-7a28-8012-8af9-1004cac2a3c5