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Ong this is a pretty good post. You are being insightful in your own ways and going for logical consistency.
 Originally Posted by OngBonga
I don't agree that this situation is caused by government intrusion. I believe it's caused by human selfishness.
Well, yes, that is true. Human selfishness is caused by evolution, which is caused by biology, which is caused by physics, which is caused by math, etc etc. When we debate causality with regards to policy, it's typically with respect to the changeable. We can change the economic, social, and political structure we live in, but we can't change our innate selfishness.
There should be a greater incentive in public health.
There certainly should be, but there isn't and there's no reason to believe this can change. Renton's responses are more specific. They're about how regardless of the lack of altruism in humankind, the system of government exacerbates the problem by giving the selfish greater and more pervasive power than they would otherwise have.
No, you remove the 2 ton dead weight, which I would argue is profit.
Agreed. My point is that using government to fix a problem that exists because of the involvement of government in the first place is not removing the weight.
I don't have a problem with high medical salaries, especially given the level of expertise and the training necessary to achieve such standards.
Interesting to note, there actually isn't naturally a high level of expertise and training needed for most medical services. Government, however, has basically made it illegal to practice most medicine without vast over training and expenses. One example, I remember reading a study a while back where a region reduced the licensing required to practice certain types of dentistry. This resulted in a greater amount of poor people getting dental care (because services were more affordable). That's just one documented of the many benefits to reducing the ridiculous licensing problems. Today, the main reason dentistry is epicly expensive is the vast under supply of practitioners due to the crazy barriers to entry in the industry created by law. Keep in mind that these laws exist from the lobbying of medical unions. Government doesn't intend bad, but by nature it has a lobby-able legal monopoly, so its results are bad.
But wages will always be higher in the private sector because the private sector are competing.
Wages are lower in competition. It sounds bad to most people, but one of the benefits to a free market is that wages can be any low amount. This is good economics because it allows every level of laborer to have employment and be productive while building the skills necessary to increase his wages. The lay love wage floors, but (most) economists hate them because they're quite harmful.
Suddenly top doctors are like sports stars, keenly sought after by the private sector. Who pays for these inflated wages? Sick people.
Even sick consumers act in their own self-interest. Singapore is one example of a country with a healthcare system that blows the socks off any European one, and it has done so mostly by acknowledging that even sick consumers act in their own self-interest. The policy is health savings accounts as opposed to blanket insurance for all. Singaporeans get great healthcare for a fraction of the cost, and the savings go into their own pockets. Also, the rock star doctors you're referring to are a product of government killing their competition with the laws like I alluded to earlier.
What, investment from government doesn't happen? Why not? What's the problem with government taking the role of a business? If the private sector can make a tidy profit from medicine, why can't the government make a modest profit while keeping costs down?
Because it's a monopoly. It has very little incentive to keep costs low, which is why every example you can find where government has a lot of deals is unusually, head-scratchingly expensive compared to equivalent types of goods/services where government has few deals. Seriously, make a list. I have yet to see any examples with heavy government involvement and low relative cost with large relative supply. I'd love to find one. To be clear, there are many examples of this in the private sector. Food and software are my go-to examples, because they're both mostly absent of government intrusion (food less so than software), they're both incredibly robust (creating all sorts of amazing things for super cheap "out of thin air"), and one is a necessity while the other a pleasure (more or less).
Yes, but at least when the government monopolises, they are accountable at elections. Can we vote this hedge fund manager out? Can we fuck.
The democratic vote gives you a voice once every two years. It's a muddled voice too. One that you yourself say you don't even wanna partake in.
The choice of consumers in a market gives you multiple voices every day. They're often very specific voices too. Ones that you engage in regularly.
Take a poll asking "do you feel like you get what you want from McDonald's?" and another asking "do you feel like you get what you want from your government?" Compare the results. Come fetch me when you find that a sizable majority claim they get what they want from McDonald's and only a small minority say that of government. The jury is in, the fat lady has sung, the TPS reports have been filed; we know that consumer choice in a market is a more effective vote than the democratic one.
It's just my opinion is that the way the world works is fucked up and results in selfish, greedy behaviour, and a total lack of empathy.
I've posted this many times, but I recommend watching it. It's very short. I think you might find it insightful.
Renton talks about toothbrushes for 30c like that's a good thing. It's not. 30c toothbrushes mean someone isn't getting paid as much as they should, and it means that people consume more than they need to. I'm going on holiday, where's my toothbrush? Fuck it, I'll just buy a new one. Who cares if some Indian kid gets 5p an hour in a sweat shop.
The boiling down to brass tacks of it all is that prosperity is production. Full stop. Productivity is the rate of production, so usually that's what you hear about since we're mostly concerned with increasing rates since that increases our prosperity. Regardless, the one and only creation of prosperity is when resources are manipulated in order to create a more valued resource. This is like how all the resources that make up a pencil you write with have tiny value compared to the pencil itself. From productivity advancements emerge greater amounts of production, and from that comes the large and increasing supply of pencils at low and decreasing costs. This brings the pencil to you. It brings it to everybody. The entire society, from richest to poorest, are made wealthier and more prosperous because of this process. The poor benefit far, far more than the wealthy too.
Renton mentioned the flip side of this, where laborers who make these cheap products are so productive that they can produce a very large amount of them and make good wages. I'll add that this is absolutely true, even in China and SE Asia (where China is losing manufacturing to today). We westerners don't think of the Chinese factories as being a good bargain for the workers, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Western Chinese have been flooding from the dirt poor farm life so they can improve their lives by making cheap products instead. Because of this and other economic elements, wages in China have been rising very rapidly, far faster than anything in West. The people are seeing in their lifetimes much greater increases in relative prosperity than we are. For this they have trade to thank. Watch this video too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXMnAPGY1uE
There's an economic principle called comparative advantage. The short of it is that because there is always an opportunity cost to a behavior, every person (or country) has a comparative advantage in what they can spend their time producing. This is true regardless of their absolute advantage or lack thereof. You can be terrible at producing one specific thing, but if you have a lower opportunity cost by producing that than the next best option, you are more prosperous by doing so.
If this doesn't make sense, don't worry. Just know that just because something looks too low for you doesn't mean it is too low for the person producing it. Comparative advantage is often taught before supply and demand in economics because it's just that robust and important a concept.
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