Is there even a definition of "doesn't work" that exists for you with the NHS? How inefficient and ineffective does it have to be before it's considered "not working"? Because, technically, every healthcare system on the planet has some effect.
Aren't NHS medical workers in a constant state of protest over low wages and bad working conditions? I know the doctor/nurse brain drain from Canada and the UK to the US used to be really bad. I haven't seen what the statistics are recently.
No, some of it is disrupting funding and organizational structure, meaning that NHS regions in England and Wales became structurally less capable due to loss of pooled resources, which also increased coordination burden.
And that's before you get into high level scam/idiocies related to Tory-beloved outsourced providers in IT et al.
The argument that nothing will be saved is that I am trying to say, taxpayer money will be sunk into a failing business until the politicians will find something else to save by nationalizing it.
This bonmot sounded cool and fun years ago, but not anymore. It is actually OK and desirable for governments to help, to organize and to lead toward positive outcome. Governments should do more then just pay military, prisons and police.
Deliberate destruction and expectation of nothing positive from the governments already caused enough damage.
Probably with the exception of a country or two, governments never run a successful business when competition is involved. Never ever. So no, it is not desirable for the government to intervene in any way in private business and "save them".
They don't have to. Private business has to do at least as well as the government business or it won't make any sales, so quality increases and price decreases even if the government business doesn't sell anything.
You do know it is illegal in most places to sell under cost, right? So why would be legal for a government to sell something below cost but illegal for a company to do the same thing?
It never sounded cool and fun. It was government acknowledging its own limitations. Governments don't perform better if we all cheer them on. Right now a government (Russia's) is waging war on a country. Last century governments caused untold death in socialist countries (Venezuela, China, USSR) because they were trying to organise centrally.
Then again, the British East India Company committed plenty of atrocities as a corporation, so if we're going to oversimplify to government bad, it seems corporations bad too. Don't get me started on religious either!
As a counter example, a government (Ukraine) is defending against the Russian invasion and is looking more and more like it might win that fight. Would they be better off without a government?
The governement of Unraine is sending its people to die on the frontlines while the elites party in Kyiev and their president is an entitled choosing beggar. How are they helping the prople again?
> It was government acknowledging its own limitations
No it was not. It was deliberately trying to make government sound as useless as possible, so that its useful programs can be dismantled.
You are ignoring all good things that came out of governments. That is also deliberate choice. If Ukraine government fell, they would be Russians now. Last century, we have see a lot of good coming out of governments - starting with new deal, human rights, historically unprecedented period of peace in Europe and prosperity. Science, education, healthcare all work better when governments work well.
You're conflating issues: governments started wars, they lost, new governments did not want to repeat the war because the people that elected them opposed it.
Human rights, at least in the US, were the won by a lot of suffering from the ordinary people, not by the benevolence of any senator/congressman/president. They passed the laws to appease the people, not because they wanted to.
Science comes when governments do not impede research. Do you think SpaceX would have existed if the government decided to help? NASA has become a shell of its former self, launching rockets into space that cost more than who knows how many Falcon launches. Government at work.
I could go on, but we, as a species, need a government to kind of keep peace amongst our selves and not go overboard too much. But more than that, governments are a hindrance to human evolution and development.
And now we've overcorrected and have people dying from a lack of government care.
It was indeed meant to sound "cool and fun". It was supposed to be a memorable slogan. That's why Reagan used it. Then people made it into a battle cry for letting the hyper-wealthy dismantle regulations that were often written in blood, or for explaining why we need to let people go into bankruptcy from medical bills.
Having some centralized/public ownership of some enterprises doesn't necessarily mean that the government is going to purge people or starve tens of millions.
In the spirit of fairness I have to note the untold deaths caused by non-socialist countries in Cambodia, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, pretty much every country in South America...
I never understood this selfish desire to stop people from killing themselves. What's it to you if a person jumps from a building or shots itself in the head? Did you ever think that they might have had actually good reasons for doing what they did?
Well at least we got to the heart of the issue - it's too costly to try to prevent people from killing themselves. Truly perfect example of how capitalism views life.
Of course, that most people regret their attempt after being saved by those 10-20 cops is irrelevant, right? I wonder what the benefits to society of that person being alive come out to, vs the costs to save them.
Anyway, you've completely missed my point (twice, in fact), so we're done here.
That's not capitalism, it's personal responsibility. Why do you dump all the responsibility on other people to stop someone from killing themselves, and nothing on the person actually doing it?
I don't believe I did that. One could also ask why you put all the responsibility on people who feel they need to kill themselves, and none on other people/society
Agree - the world has horrible things happening, although not on the scale of socialism. The thing that comes close is WW2, but that was an actual war, and not just starving millions of people due to central planning.
However, Cambodia:
> Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were supported for many years by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), led by Mao Zedong;[c] it is estimated that at least 90% of the foreign aid which the Khmer Rouge received came from China, including at least US $1 billion in interest-free economic and military aid in 1975 alone.[11][12][13] After it seized power in April 1975, the Khmer Rouge wanted to turn the country into an agrarian socialist republic, founded on the policies of ultra-Maoism and influenced by the Cultural Revolution. [0]
Last century non-socialist governments caused untold deaths in many Western countries, starting with Germany for a better known example, but the entire list is quite long. So could it be that it wasn't socialism the problem?
If you're talking about the Nazis in Germany, socialism is in their name, you now? If you're talking before Hitler, the Kaiser was socialist. So socialism anyway you slice it.
Uh, the point was that a single ideology caused deaths due to socialism. Unless you think that there's a single ideology that caused all of the deaths in the countries you mentioned, then this isn't "in the spirit of fairness", it's just misrepresentation.
