Tag: Not So Crazy Libertarian Ideals

A Slight Victory in the Donor Market

It’s not a secret that there is a severe shortage of organ and tissue donors in the world. Much of this can be attributed to law that prohibit those donating organs or other bodily substance from gaining financially. Thankfully it has been ruled that those donating bone marrow are no longer guilty of a crime when receiving compensation:

The Institute for Justice today announced a major legal victory for cancer patients and their families from across the nation when U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder declined to seek Supreme Court review of a March 2012 decision of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that compensating most bone- marrow donors is not a crime. This decision will give doctors and their patients a powerful tool in the fight against deadly blood diseases.

“This decision will not only save lives, but also reinforce the principle that doctors and patients should have the freedom to make their own choices when confronted with deadly diseases,” said Jeff Rowes, a senior attorney with the Institute for Justice and lead counsel on the case.

Many hold the erroneous idea that organs sold for money are somehow so inferior to those donated that they should not even be accepted. This has created a major shortage because people, being self-interested creatures, desire compensation for giving up their property. Laws barring organ donors from receiving compensation is a direct violation of voluntary association as it prevents those wanting to sell their organs from doing so. These laws have also created a black market for organs, which have lead to stories of individuals waking up in a bathtub full of ice missing their kidneys. Hopefully this ruling will set a precedence and we’ll see the act of receiving compensation for donations become legal.

Why Opponents of Capitalism Should Oppose Publicly Funded Healthcare

One of my friends who I would describe as Marxist made a post on Facebook exclaiming that yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling was a good step but the endgame is a publicly funded single-payer healthcare system. I found it strange that an opponent of capitalism would advocate for a publicly funded healthcare system.

Let’s consider for a moment one of the most often brought up criticisms of capitalism by Marxists. According to Marxism the laborer/capitalist relationship is exploitative. The capitalist is said to exploit the laborer by taking a portion of the laborer’s productive capacity, which is kept by the capitalist as profit. Under this criteria a publicly funded healthcare option must also be seen as exploitative. Instead of the capitalist taking a portion of the laborer’s productive capacity the state is. The only effective difference, under Marxism, between the capitalist/laborer relationship and the state/laborer relationship would be who is performing the exploitation.

This is one of those inconsistencies in Marxism that is usually overlooked by its advocates. Somehow a capitalist that takes a potion of a person’s productive capability is an exploiter while a state that takes a portion of a person’s productive capability is benevolent. I never understood this belief and no Marxist has ever been able to adequately explain it to me. Of course not all communists follow such absurdities, on the topic of healthcare I turn to an anarcho-communist (the only kind of communist I respect, even though I disagree with them) named Peter Kropotkin. Kropotkin wrote Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution where he correctly observed the generally cooperative nature of animal life, specifically humans. He concluded that humans beings are cooperative and that cooperation among a species is necessary for survival.

History demonstrates Kropotkin’s point as the voluntary solution reached by humans to help those in need was mutual aid. There was never a need for the state to enter the healthcare market and in fact their entering the market is what caused it to be the mess it is today. Before the state there were mutual aid societies that individuals voluntarily joined to pool their resources for the good of the membership. New members who were down on their luck were accepted into these societies without demands for payment as it was understood the members would begin paying once they got back on their feet.

Any state controlled healthcare system is exploitative because the relationship between the state and laborer, unlike the relationship between a capitalist and laborers, isn’t voluntary. If an individual fails to pay into a state controlled system they find themselves the victim of kidnapping or even violence if they should choose to resist. I’m not sure how a person who believes capitalism to be an exploitative system can support a publicly funded system of any sort.

More on the Supreme Court Ruling

I’ve been skimming through the 193 page Supreme Court decision [PDF] regarding the Affordable Healthcare Act and I must say, they’re right. The individual mandate is ruled constitutional through Congress’s power to tax, specifically the penalty fee that must be paid by those without a minimum level of health insurance is seen as a punishment for non-compliance with taxation. I haven’t had time to do a detailed read but I must also face the fact that the Constitution does grant Congress the power to tax, in fact it’s one of the most egregious powers granted to the federal government in the Constitution.

When you think about it this is really an affirmation of what has been done for ages. Every person in the United States is made to buy many things including aircraft carriers, nuclear missiles, Predator drones, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, monuments in Washington D.C., salaries for politicians, roads, armaments for federal agencies, etc. We’re forced to purchase these goods through federal taxes. If we’re forced to purchase aircraft carriers why can’t we be forced to purchase health insurance?

One of the problems with taxation, beyond the fact it’s a form of theft, is the fact it’s a mechanism to force individuals to do business with those they generally wouldn’t do business with. I have no use for a aircraft carriers or nuclear submarines so would have little reason to do business with Northrop Gruman, but through taxation I am forced to do business with them. How many people wanted to do business with Solyndra? Obviously not enough to keep the company afloat, yet we were all forced to do business with them through taxation. Taxation is another form of subsidy as it gives wealth to companies that would likely not obtain it through free markets.

In all honesty little has changed with this Supreme Court ruling. Let’s look at the Solyndra case for a moment. Solyndra obtained most of their funding through various government grants and a bailout. Congress could have funded Solyndra using a different mechanism, namely by forcing everybody to buy solar panels from Solyndra. It wouldn’t be terribly difficult to justify, Congress would merely have to write legislation that purported to advance self-sufficiency and renewable energy or as a mechanism to fight terrorism by decentralizing the power grid. The reason they didn’t do that is because people get upset when they are forced to buy something from a company but are generally complacent when it comes to paying taxes. In other words throwing a layer of obscurity between tax victims and receivers of tax money keeps the public happier. This Supreme Court ruling merely removed that layer of obscurity, which allows people to see where their tax money is going directly.

What has really changed with this ruling? Nothing. Congress and the Supreme Court have merely decided to flaunt their powers openly instead of from the shadows. Given time we’re all going to learn precisely how “free” we are in this country.

Intellectual Property is Expensive

Intellectual property is an interesting concept to me. The state can grant a monopoly to somebody on an idea even though ideas aren’t scarce, if I tell you my idea I don’t lose it. Yet the state manages to use its violence to protect the monopolies it grants which has given rise to a whole new industry, the industry of patent trolls. Patent trolls are nothing more than companies that buy up patents for the express purpose of suing anybody violating said patents. This industry is certainly enriching lawyers:

In the past, “non-practicing entities” (NPEs), popularly known as “patent trolls,” have helped small inventors profit from their inventions. Is this true today or, given the unprecedented levels of NPE litigation, do NPEs reduce innovation incentives? Using a survey of defendants and a database of litigation, this paper estimates the direct costs to defendants arising from NPE patent assertions. We estimate that firms accrued $29 billion of direct costs in 2011. Moreover, although large firms accrued over half of direct costs, most of the defendants were small or medium-sized firms, indicating that NPEs are not just a problem for large firms.

$29 billion was completely wasted in 2011 by businesses defending themselves against patent trolls. That $29 billion could have been spent on productive endeavors, which would have given way to cheaper and better products for consumers. Instead a bunch of lawyers were enriched because the state has granted a monopoly on certain ideas to entities that exist solely to sue other entities that managed to have the same idea. When you boil it down patent violations are a form of thoughtcrime.

The Paradoxical Philosophy of Obedience

As a general rule if your philosophy involves paradoxes then it’s not a good philosophy. Supporters of authoritarian philosophies have this problem, they preach that we must followed a strong leader in order to be free. What these people don’t see is that one cannot be free if they are following mindlessly, which is why this New York Times column is nothing but dribble:

These days many Americans seem incapable of thinking about these paradoxes. Those “Question Authority” bumper stickers no longer symbolize an attempt to distinguish just and unjust authority. They symbolize an attitude of opposing authority.

The old adversary culture of the intellectuals has turned into a mass adversarial cynicism. The common assumption is that elites are always hiding something. Public servants are in it for themselves. Those people at the top are nowhere near as smart or as wonderful as pure and all-knowing Me.

There is a reason the common assumption is that elites are always hiding something, because they are. Public “servants” are in it for themselves. All actions are based on self-interest and politics is the art of force. Politicians are people who have decided to use the means of force to achieve their end of self-interest. Since people generally respond poorly to being forced into action the politicians must hide their intentions, they must wrap their political interests in a layer of “greater good” and “public service.”

You end up with movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Parties that try to dispense with authority altogether. They reject hierarchies and leaders because they don’t believe in the concepts. The whole world should be like the Internet — a disbursed semianarchy in which authority is suspect and each individual is king.

What? Both groups believe in authority. Occupy Wall Street generally believes in authority of the masses, commonly referred to as democracy. The Tea Party generally believes in the authority of the republic and representatives (otherwise they wouldn’t move to get desired representatives elected). Of course, according to the author’s beliefs, I can see why he would think both movements oppose authority altogether:

Maybe before we can build great monuments to leaders we have to relearn the art of following. Democratic followership is also built on a series of paradoxes: that we are all created equal but that we also elevate those who are extraordinary; that we choose our leaders but also have to defer to them and trust their discretion; that we’re proud individuals but only really thrive as a group, organized and led by just authority.

I don’t know if America has a leadership problem; it certainly has a followership problem.

In other words we should all learn to be good little slaves and shut the hell up. I’m curious what this man would have been writing before the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War. It’s obvious that he would have supported the “just authority” of the British king but I’m curious how he would justify it. Now that I think about it, I’m curious how he justifies supporting “just authority” now. For all the talk the author makes about “just authority” he never actually says what kind of authority is just. Is devine authority just? Is a person elected by popular vote granted just authority? Is the most heavily armed individual a holder of just authority? The author never says, he only says that we must obey just authority.

Just authority can only be voluntarily granted on an individual basis. You can choose to delegate authority over aspects of your life to another. I cannot choose somebody to rule over your life though, just as you cannot choose somebody to rule over my life. This automatically means democracies are not just, just because the majority of people agree on something doesn’t mean it’s right (a majority of people once believed the Earth was flat after all). Likewise, just because a larger group voted to grant a man authority over a geographic region doesn’t make it right. The people of Iceland had the right idea during their 300 years of statelessness. Individuals could voluntarily agree to recognize the authority of a godi and if that godi was no longer to an individual’s liking they could seek another (and his choices weren’t restricted by geographic regions). That form of authority could be considered just as it was voluntarily granted and could be reclaimed at the granter’s choosing.

I will give the author credit on one thing, he’s one of the few authoritarians who actually admits that paradoxes exist in his philosophy. He doesn’t properly identify them or realizes that the existence of paradoxes should indicate one reexamine their beliefs, but he at least acknowledges they are there.

Where do School Boards Come Up with this Stuff

The biggest issue with central planning is the fact no person can know what another truly wants. When central planners do get their way unintended consequences are always soon to follow. Take the recent story where a school board in Buffalo, New York decided it would be a jolly good idea to ban sunscreen:

School leaders in Washington State and other parts of the country have said the regulations are needed, because kids could have an allergic reaction or other medical condition as a result of the sunscreen use.

In a little twist of irony the school board banned sunscreen over concerns of students having allergic reactions without stopping to think that some people have allergic reactions to sunlight. As one of these unfortunate soles you’ll never find me with a tan and when I am going to be exposed to sunlight for any notable length of time I always make sure I put on plenty of sunscreen. Even people who aren’t allergic to sunlight don’t tend to react well to overexposure:

There’s outrage nationwide over a school’s policy in Washington State that caused two young girls to get severely sunburned, and that could have an impact here locally.

Sisters Violet and Zoe Michener of Tacoma, Washington arrived home from school last week with severe burns, after the school denied them access to sunscreen. They were out in the blistering sun for several hours during the annual field day event.

Did this possibility never cross the minds of the school board members who banned sunscreen? You would think there would be one member with enough brains to say, “Hey guys, humans invented sunscreen because we don’t react well to sunlight. If we ban sunscreen kids are going to get severely burned and it’ll probably result in a lawsuit against the school.”

If a student is allergic to sunblock then it is up to their parents to ensure the kid doesn’t wear it. Punishing every student because there might be one that has an adverse reaction to something is idiotic.

Under the Radar Gun Control

Perhaps there was more to Obama’s comment about working on gun control under the radar than I first thought. Fast and Furious has blown wide open and evidence shows that the operation was, at least in part, about advancing gun control. Now we have a slightly stranger story about the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) moving in to attack a gun range. What’s interesting is how desperate the charges appear to be:

Among the “violations” noted in the citation: An instructor on the range wore Howard Leight Impact Sport Electronic Earmuffs, which allegedly provided insufficient noise protection. (p. 11). I’ve never used the Howard Leight brand, but I have used electronic muffs from Peltor and from Dillon. Electronic muffs are the perfect choice for hearing protection and range safety, especially for an instructor. When the muffs detect a sound spike, they instantly shut down, reducing the noise to a comfortable level. Unlike passive muffs, electronic muffs do not block sound at other times, so it is much easier for the instructor to communicate with students, and to hear everything going on in the area. Indeed, normal sounds (but not gunshots) can be amplified by the muff’s electronics, if the user so chooses.

I have these exact same ear muffs, as do several people I know. They are sufficient for me and I have rather sensitive hearing so I see no grounds for claiming they offer insufficient protection. The charges get even more silly from there:

Here’s another violation: “A gun range instructor conducting shooter instruction was observed reaching down on the range floor to collect a loaded handgun cartridge. The employee was not wearing any hand protection such as gloves. The gun range floor was contaminated with lead. The gun had misfired and it required manual cycling of the barrel slide to remove the defective round which then fell on the gun range floor.” (p. 22).

Umm… I can’t tell you how many times I’ve picked up loaded cartridges from the ground without any hand protection. Unless you’re dealing with unjacketed rounds and pick up the cartridge by the bullet there is no chance of lead exposure. If the round does go off (let’s say due to a hang fire) gloves aren’t going to protect your hand from the shrapnell. The idiocy of this violation can’t even begin to be explained.

What’s more worrisome is the fact OSHA has the ability to find a workplace because of employee actions. OSHA should have no way in what an individual does. If an individual is stupid enough not to wear hearing protection (or is deaf and not in need of hearing protection) that’s their business. Even though most employers have restrictions against such actions there isn’t always a boss to watch the employees so they can violate posted safety rules, it shouldn’t fall on the shoulders of employers when that happens.

With “violations” like those mentioned above it would be a trivial matter for OSHA to shutdown any firing range. Many ranges aren’t able to eat a $111,000 fine and a return by the OSHA thug would certainly net the exact same “violations” as they are unavoidable (especially the “violation” of picking up an unfired cartridge). Of course having such actions be finable offenses is great if your goal is to shut a range down, which I’m betting is part of the motivation behind the current set of charges.

The Value of Fiat Currency

Fiat is Latin for “it shall be.” Fiat currency is money that has value because the state says it shall have value. This is the opposite of a commodity backed money. Commodity backed money is money that is backed by a good, which is said to have intrinsic value. Intrinsic means belonging naturally. Intrinsic value means the value of a good is held within the good itself.

Thus people, including myself, often claim that fiat currency has no actual, or intrinsic, value. After a great deal of consideration I believe that statement is wrong, fiat currency does have intrinsic value under the state. Under United States code:

United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues. Foreign gold or silver coins are not legal tender for debts.

In other words one must pay off their public changes and taxes in government issued money (technically you a debt holder must accept fiat currency in payment on the debt but you could use other forms of payment if both parties agree to it so that’s a separate case).

We must now consider what happens if one fails to pay their taxes or other charges brought about by the government (fines, etc.). If you fail to pay your taxes, fines, etc. you will generally be kidnapped by a state agent and brought to a court. At the court it will be decided what is to be done with you, usually it involves a jail sentence, garnishing of wages, or other form of punishment. If you refuse to comply with your kidnapper you will have force brought against you, and deadly force may be used if you resist sufficiently. Ultimately the result of not paying taxes, fines, etc. is force bring brought against your person.

Under United States law the only form of payment that the state will accept for taxes, fines, etc. is government issued money, which is all fiat currency issued by the Federal Reserve. In order to avoid violence being brought against you by the state you must hold their issued fiat currency, ergo people desire fiat currency as a means of avoiding violence. In effect fiat currency is similar to firearms, many people buy firearms to protect themselves from violent individuals.

Avoiding violence, like anything else, has a subjective value. Some people will go to greater lengths to avoid violence than others. Most people facing the option of starvation or violence will take violence as it is still preferable than death. Thus a person may spend their last dollars to buy bread while knowing it means they will be unable to pay their taxes tomorrow. Other people value the principle of not submitting to tyranny so highly that they won’t pay taxes, instead they will subject themselves to kidnapping and imprisonment. To such a person fiat currency may have no value at all.

Thus I believe saying fiat currency is without value isn’t entirely accurate. Under a state fiat currency contains within it the ability to avoid state violence and thus it can be said that fiat currency does have an intrinsic value under specific conditions. It would seem technically accurate to me to say fiat currency is the value of avoiding violence.

Some Economists are Simply Insane

They say a sign of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. By that definition many of today’s so-called economists are insane:

Inflation occurs when there is too much money chasing too few goods. Deflation occurs when there is not enough money. For years, inflation alarmists have been forecasting runaway prices as a result of the Fed’s efforts to expand the money supply. But prices have remained stable, with the Consumer Price Index down last month and up just 1.7 percent in the past year.

There is so much wrong with this paragraph that I’m not entirely sure where to begin. First of all the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which is used to “measure” inflation, is crap:

The first thing to keep in mind is that the CPI is not an economic variable. It is a statistic that at best gives an inaccurate picture of an economic phenomenon: inflation. To calculate the monthly CPI, the USDepartment of Labor takes a weighted average of prices of various things that consumers purchase, and then its statisticians try to figure out the various proportions of different items in a “mythical” household budget. For example, the statisticians may hold that housing costs are 30 percent of household expenditures, food costs 20 percent, gasoline another 15 percent, and so on.

Armed with the proportional spending of the “average” household, the statisticians then assign that percentage to price changes of each item. Obviously, the higher the percentage of a household budget for a certain item, the more “influential” that item may be. For example, if gasoline prices rise sharply, then those particular price increases are seen as “fueling inflation” (no pun intended).

CPI isn’t some kind of fixed economic variable, it’s a statistic. Statistics is the best mechanism available to lie through numbers. A practically infinite number of variable can be manipulated to get the result you want. Do you want to make it appear as though the rate of inflation is minor? Simply give less weight to items that are increasing in price such as gasoline and food. Do you want to make it appear as though the rate of inflation is actually negative? Give more weight to items that exist in a mostly free market, such as electronics, since their prices generally trend down overtime. Do you want to show a massive increase in the rate of inflation? Give the more weight to food and gasoline.

Let’s talk about inflation. According to the article author, inflation means there is too much money in circulation. That’s not an accurate definition:

As economists and others of the Austrian School understand, inflation occurs when the value of money declines relative to the goods and services it can purchase. In other words, inflation is a monetary phenomenon, not a price phenomenon. Prices go up because inflation is happening, not the other way around.

Putting more money into circulation causes the value of that money to decline because it is less scarce. That value can also be affected by other things. What would happen if the oil producing nations in the Middle East decided they no longer valued American dollars and demanded all payments for oil be made in gold? We would see the value of the dollar plumet while the value of gold would jump.

The third point I want to address is the claim by the author that, according to CPI, inflation was up by just 1.7 percent. If, as the author claims, inflation is caused by too much money entering the market then any inflation rate above 0 would indicate the money supply must be retracted.

His remark about the low rate of inflation combined with his remark about inflation being caused by too much money in circulation also means he has admitted, indirectly, that he wants to rob holders of dollars. He admitted that inflation is the result of too much money in circulation, he admits that there is inflation meaning that there must be too much money in circulation now, and he wants the Federal Reserve to inject more money into the system. Since there is already too much money in the system a further increase in the money supply can only result in more inflation, meaning that current holders of dollars will be able to purchase less. By the author’s own statement he is advocating the state steal purchasing power from people who current hold dollars.

The author then moves on to use another set of numbers of prove his claim:

Don’t believe the official numbers? The Billion Prices Project at MIT says that lately inflation is actually lower than the government estimates.

That’s interesting, because last year the Billion Prices Project showed that inflation was higher than CPI:

The price of everything seems to have skyrocketed. Only housing, the dollar, and inflation-adjusted income are negative. World food and commodity prices are up 28 percent over the last 6 months. The MIT “Billion Prices Project” confirms that prices have been surging higher than indicated by the consumer price index. Entrepreneurs tell me that big price increases are already planned for everything from vegetables to blue jeans.

In fact, if you look at the data, the correlation between MIT’s Billion Prices Project and CPI is nonexistent. Often the rate of inflation according to the Billion Prices Project is higher than CPI and often the rate of inflation according to CPI is higher than Billion Prices Project.

Regardless of that fact the author still admits that according to the Billion Prices Project there is still inflation, which indicates that there is too much money chasing too few goods and services already.

The stupid doesn’t stop there:

The commodity price index is down 7 percent from a year ago. Home sales have been tepid despite mortgage rates lower than anyone could ever have dreamed.

Funny thing about home sales, there was a recent crash caused by a Federal Reserve created bubble. Home sales were through the roof a short while ago, before everybody started losing those houses. On top of that actual unemployed is hover over 20 percent so nobody could afford a new home even if you inject a few trillion more dollars into the economy. More money in circulation doesn’t help those who don’t have jobs to acquire that money.

The central banks have performed three rounds of quantitative easing (basically printing money) already and we’re still in a rut. How is printing more money going to magically cure our economic woes? If printing money fixed economic problems then the Weimar Republic should have been the epitome of economic health when it decided to try printing its way out of debt. Instead they experience hyperinflation, their economy tanked even harder, and the Nazi Party was able to sieze control of Germany.

Every nation that has attempted to print its way out of debt has experienced nothing by hardship. Printing money doesn’t work, it can’t work. When you hear somebody say the problem with our economy is the fact that there isn’t enough money in circulation just walk away because you’re dealing with an individual that has no understanding of economics.

Socialized Medicine

Yuri Maltsev is one of my favorite contributors at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He lived in the Soviet Union and was one of the members of Gorbachev’s team that was looking into economic reform. Unlike many critics of the Soviet Union, Yuri lived there and thus has firsthand experience. Part of the The 30 Day Reading List that will Lead You to Becoming a Knowledgeable Libertarian includes Maltsev’s article that discusses socialized medicine:

In 1918, the Soviet Union became the first country to promise universal “cradle-to-grave” healthcare coverage, to be accomplished through the complete socialization of medicine. The “right to health” became a “constitutional right” of Soviet citizens.

The proclaimed advantages of this system were that it would “reduce costs” and eliminate the “waste” that stemmed from “unnecessary duplication and parallelism” — i.e., competition.

What happens when you remove competition from a market? The market stagnates. The Soviet Healthcare system was a wreck and far behind the technological and basica sanitary conditions of other industrialized nations:

The system had many decades to work, but widespread apathy and low quality of work paralyzed the healthcare system. In the depths of the socialist experiment, healthcare institutions in Russia were at least a hundred years behind the average US level. Moreover, the filth, odors, cats roaming the halls, drunken medical personnel, and absence of soap and cleaning supplies added to an overall impression of hopelessness and frustration that paralyzed the system. According to official Russian estimates, 78 percent of all AIDS victims in Russia contracted the virus through dirty needles or HIV-tainted blood in the state-run hospitals.

Irresponsibility, expressed by the popular Russian saying “They pretend they are paying us and we pretend we are working,” resulted in appalling quality of service, widespread corruption, and extensive loss of life.

Everything humans, and every other creature on the planet, does is done in self-interest. Collectivists do not like this idea and instead try to encourage people to perform acts of altruism instead of acts of self-interest. This is where the collectivist philosophy hits a wall since acts of altruism ultimate have to be based on self-interest.

Medical professionals weren’t hardly motivated to do their best since the pay they were receiving didn’t match the work they were supposed to perform. Instead of providing healthcare altruistically, the medical professionals fo the Soviet Union apathetically stood aside as people died… unless they were paid by the patients:

In order to receive minimal attention by doctors and nursing personnel, patients had to pay bribes. I even witnessed a case of a “nonpaying” patient who died trying to reach a lavatory at the end of the long corridor after brain surgery. Anesthesia was usually “not available” for abortions or minor ear, nose, throat, and skin surgeries. This was used as a means of extortion by unscrupulous medical bureaucrats.

Isn’t it strange how medical care could be found if one was willing to pay? There was another exception as well, if you were an employee of the state:

Not surprisingly, government bureaucrats and Communist Party officials, as early as 1921 (three years after Lenin’s socialization of medicine), realized that the egalitarian system of healthcare was good only for their personal interest as providers, managers, and rationers — but not as private users of the system.

So, as in all countries with socialized medicine, a two-tier system was created: one for the “gray masses” and the other, with a completely different level of service, for the bureaucrats and their intellectual servants. In the USSR, it was often the case that while workers and peasants were dying in the state hospitals, the medicine and equipment that could save their lives was sitting unused in the nomenklatura system.

Marx’s theory always fell apart around the whole “eventually the all powerful state will dissolve and the communist society will be left in the socialist society’s place.” Power corrupts and the more power that is available the more it corrupts. The problem with socialism is the fact that it relies on an all powerful state to control everything. Ideally the state educations people on the wonders of communism and brings in the next era of human society, in reality corrupt power hungry psychopaths seek the positions of power and use them to rule over the proletariat.

The Soviet Union was a classic example of this fact. There were two classes in the Soviet Union, not bourgeoisie and proletariat as Marx claimed, but the state and everybody else. If you were part of the state you received better food, medical care, transportation, alcohol, etc., while everybody else suffered long breadlines, deplorable healthcare, a horribly dilapidated transportation system, poor liquor, etc.

What did socialized medicine get the Soviet Union? Horrible infant fatality rates for starters:

At the end of the socialist experiment, the official infant-mortality rate in Russia was more than 2.5 times as high as in the United States and more than 5 times that of Japan. The rate of 24.5 deaths per 1,000 live births was questioned recently by several deputies to the Russian Parliament, who claim that it is 7 times higher than in the United States. This would make the Russian death rate 55 compared to the US rate of 8.1 per 1,000 live births.

OK, the Soviet Union falled to provide proper medical care. What about the medical paradises of other nations that have implemented socialized medical care? We all know that places like the United Kingdom (UK) have far better medical care than the United States because the healthcare industry in that country is socialized, right? Wrong:

In “civilized” England, for example, the waiting list for surgeries is nearly 800,000 out of a population of 55 million. State-of-the-art equipment is nonexistent in most British hospitals. In England, only 10 percent of the healthcare spending is derived from private sources.

Britain pioneered in developing kidney-dialysis technology, and yet the country has one of the lowest dialysis rates in the world. The Brookings Institution (hardly a supporter of free markets) found that every year 7,000 Britons in need of hip replacements, between 4,000 and 20,000 in need of coronary bypass surgery, and some 10,000 to 15,000 in need of cancer chemotherapy are denied medical attention in Britain.

Age discrimination is particularly apparent in all government-run or heavily regulated systems of healthcare. In Russia, patients over 60 are considered worthless parasites and those over 70 are often denied even elementary forms of healthcare.

In the United Kingdom, in the treatment of chronic kidney failure, those who are 55 years old are refused treatment at 35 percent of dialysis centers. Forty-five percent of 65-year-old patients at the centers are denied treatment, while patients 75 or older rarely receive any medical attention at these centers.

Socialized medical systems have a major issue, shortages of critical medical supplies and technologies. Shortages are unavoidable, it’s a harsh reality that manifests in the fact that there is only a limited amount of resources on the planet. By resources I mean not only the chemicals that are used in the production of medicine but also the labor. Research and development isn’t easy and people need a way to know what is needed and what isn’t needed by society. The government tries determining such things by toiling over statistics, gathered data, and future predictions. Markets accomplish this through the price mechanism. If the price of something goes up is indicates there is a greater demand than supply so companies, hoping to cash in on the profits, start producing more of that thing.

The state doesn’t work on the price mechanism, they don’t receive profits from selling goods and services, so when they see a shortage they merely started regulating who gets access. Suddenly society is divided into groups that receive priority on medical care. If you’re elderly you’ll find yourself without treatment, unless you go to another country that has some semblance of a free market in healthcare and buy your medical needs. Collectivists decry free market medicine because the “poor” have to go without, but the exact same problem occurs under socialized medicine with the exception of who is made to go without. Of course free markets are usually able to take care of the “poor” through mutual aid, which is an option that isn’t usually available in under socialized medicine because mutual aid societies get legislated out of existence due to their “inefficiency” and “parallelism” with state controlled healthcare.

What about the paradise of Canada? Turns out that it’s not as much of a paradise as people make it out to be:

In Canada, the population is divided into three age groups in terms of their access to healthcare: those below 45, those 45–65, and those over 65. Needless to say, the first group, which could be called the “active taxpayers,” enjoys priority treatment.

The state, like individuals, works off of self-interest. If you’re an active taxpayer you get preferential treatment, if you’re collecting welfare or otherwise costing the state money you get substandard treatment.

Socialized healthcare is yet another ploy by the collectivists to hand power over to the state. History has proven it to be a bad idea time and time again but they refuse to listen. In their eyes self-interest is evil and thus they must abolish self-interest. It never dawns on them that their act of abolishing self-interest is an act of self-interest in of itself. They don’t see that they are the thing they claim to be fighting. Because they can’t bring themselves to face such a reality they continue pushing the same ideas that have historically failed. Don’t fall for the ploy the socialized medicine is a good thing, it’s not.