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Sorry for the incoming monster post. It started out tiny, I swear
Originally Posted by CoccoBill
Sure, but nothing changes regarding their skills and outcomes if the resources are there.
That's precisely what changes. No level of increased skill or resources produces better results if incentives are wrong. We see the evidence of this constantly. Throwing more money or more talent at fundamentally flawed systems has pretty much never worked. Governments are always in need of more resources because the additional resources they constantly get never solve the problems yet do increase costs.
And in the public sector, the potential resources are larger, and they can also be used for basic research with great long-term but no clear short-term profits, which would be much more challenging to get into in a free market.
Using government for basic research is one of the better arguments for it. However, I don't think it works. Private enterprise does way more applied research and we can't make a quantitative case for why basic research is better than applied research. Additionally, private non-profits also do basic research, of which I'm not sure isn't already higher than government funding. At the very least, the government has high monopolistic characteristics on basic research that greatly discourage others from providing for it. For example, due to government policies, universities compete for government grants. This makes government involvement in basic research look much higher than it otherwise would be if universities had a more market efficient approach that involved competing for private funds for everything they need. I suspect the amount of basic research that would be performed is much higher in a totally free market than in one of government involvement
How and in what time would the free market have dealt with the railroad, MS and IBM issues without government intervention?
They already have been and they already are. How Microsoft went from being incorrectly perceived as a monopoly in the 90s to being a major underdog today is an incredible story. Long story short: Microsoft OS was considered a monopoly because of super high market share. For the time being, let's disregard the fact that even 100% market share by one company isn't a monopoly because consumers can choose to not participate in that market (and are incentived to do so by a misbehaving company), which is behavior that churns competitive interests and ultimately reduces that market share. The government stepped in to keep MS from "being a monopoly", but it didn't do shit. Nothing changed for years, yet the consumer didn't actually experience any real monopolistic problems (because MS wasn't ever a monopoly in the first place). Then what appeared to be overnight, MS lost tons of power to the Google Uprising. It couldn't compete with Google because it didn't know how and because it had incumbent business model interests that discouraged adaption. MS did everything it could to preserve Windows-for-sale, yet was crushed by Android-for-free, and now Windows is dead. MS scrambled to win with Bing, but Google kept pace and Bing lost. MS is now scrambling to adapt Office to new platforms and become a market leader in the cloud
The market solved the Microsoft monopoly (which was never really a monopoly) in the exact way economists predict. The same stuff has happened with Amazon beating up Walmart and many others, like Uber and Tesla. Uber and Tesla are probably the two highest profile examples of companies that are having trouble defeating government enforced monopolies/oligopolies
http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com...rust-lawsuits/
So all of these are made possible by government regulations and would have been sorted in no time by the market, or not been possible in the first place? Somehow I find that hard to believe. In my opinion, if certain practices that would be beneficial for individual businesses but harmful to others were not regulated, they would be much more common. The argument is the same for regulations against individuals behaving badly, why would companies be any different?
Companies aren't different. Markets are different. They're different because consumers have free choice and companies compete for their purchases. This is the problem solving system. It breaks down when government has a legal monopoly and creates uncompetitive markets. It isn't so much that the market solves all problems, but that when problems are solvable, they're done best through markets and worst through government, to the degree that you can't find that many problems markets haven't solved when allowed to and you can't find that many problems government has solved. When we do find examples of problems government has solved (like slavery), we also find that those were problems mainly perpetuated by government and that the "solving" process was worse than the problem and that they would have been solved way easier by markets anyways
As for the topic of slavery, the worst thing that has happened in US history is the Civil War, and it's not really even close. We call Lincoln a hero for "freeing the slaves", and we don't call him a monster for sending a nation of men to their gruesome deaths. We don't talk about how slavery was already losing ground for market reasons, or how letting the markets handle the problem would very likely have solved it with far less suffering than what was caused by the Civil War. We don't talk about how the only thing the government ever does that's "good" is keeping its constituencies from living in warzones, which is ultimately the one thing a society needs in order for market forces to arise and start solving problems.
That's most likely the case if you look at the US education system. Try Finland or South Korea and it might look different,
I don't know about Korea, but I do know that Scandinavia has a far more market-oriented education system than the US. Even then, the results aren't that great. They only look great in comparison because the US is so awful. No country has an education system great relative to the amount of money thrown at it. Pick any vibrant market and you'll see the amount of money thrown at it is itty bitty and results are incredible in comparison to any education system. Today, even the best education system on the planet is wasting a shitload of time and money on things that do not matter to the students and their lives. Universities themselves are incredibly outdated and I think if we had let the markets decide for the last two hundred years, they would hardly still exist.
though education and video games are such different areas that a direct comparison between them is probably not very useful. Again, the US government is in many ways broken, I'm not advocating in any way the current US implementation of a government. What I've been talking about is "a" government, which doesn't but could, until proven otherwise, exist.
Fundamental governmental structure is the problem. Even the best and the brightest cannot succeed when incentives are not aligned for success. We live in a world where a bunch of numbskulls in a market produce far greater success than the smartest, most well intentioned people in government who never solve a single problem. The only real freedom you and I have is from what the constitutions of our governments say about what is illegal for the governments to do. We should work to expand this dynamic, not reduce it. Back when governments had legal power to do whatever they wanted, life sucked for everybody not an aristocrat. Today, the aristocracy doesn't even exist, and life is amazing for so many. I think if you compile all the things that "good" governments do, you'll find they have very little to do with what makes you life good. Food isn't cheap, abundant, and delicious because of government policies. Transportation isn't incredible because of government policy. Government creates no gadgets. The only good government does us is not allowing itself to steal from us or allowing others to steal from us. The sad part is that government is still allowed to do all sorts of crappy things.
This probably sounds ideological and pompous, but I don't know what else to say. We live in a world where chicken sandwiches cost a dollar, iphones exist, and people can get heart transplants. Where is government in creating these things? Find where government is in anything, and you'll find there is very little innovation in that thing and costs are enormous. Find where there is little government, and you'll find amazing things that we take for granted
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