It's really not. We have more than enough history to corroborate.
> And 2008 has killed plenty of people, by rendering them homeless, hungy, and unable to afford healthcare.
Right, and these events are rare and noteworthy also — the only other time that had happened before that was during the 1930's. The same cannot be said for structural changes in government. In addition, if you think the scale and severity of economic deaths of despair caused by 2008 can be compared with the civil wars in the Middle East, the Balkan Kosovo War, the World Wars (and Holocaust), or what's going on in Central Africa...I really don't know what to say.
1. There is definitely a difference between indirect/preventable deaths and direct deaths due to war/murder. If you died of cancer tomorrow because you couldn't afford treatment, it would be different than if I straight up shot you in the head. The cumulative deaths caused by motor accidents also outnumbers the Kosovo casualty count (by a lot), and yet we do not consider the former to be worse than the latter. Also, drug overdose deaths, while sad, are less devastating to society than war and genocide.
2. Even if indirect/preventable deaths were somehow comparable to war/revolution/genocide, this is pretty much unique to the US, whose government inefficiently allocates welfare. Canada, Germany, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Taiwan, Belgium, Netherlands etc etc etc all rely on the private sector to deliver the majority of their goods & services. The fact that the US has an inefficient welfare system is somewhat orthogonal to the issue at hand: whether the (peaceful) creative destruction yields more efficient outcomes than structural rigidity and institutional sclerosis.
If the US instituted a UBI or more efficiently allocated its public health spending to include those that may be unable to afford healthcare, it doesn't change the fact that in the majority of liberal democracies that rely predominately on the private sector, structural change doesn't need to be brought about through violence, even if the governments and their institutions remain rigid.
1. Maybe not devastating to your particular class of society. Motor accidents are not as strongly linked to economic despair either, and certainly not an effect of ideological choice.
2. It's hard to deny that the cause of this is not fundamentally caused by an over emphasis on free market ideology.
> Maybe not devastating to your particular class of society. Motor accidents are not as strongly linked to economic despair either, and certainly not an effect of ideological choice.
Yes, in fact the upper, upper-middle, and largely the (prudish) middle class of society isn't as impacted by drug overdose deaths as they are about the threat of genocide and war. The latter impacts everyone more or less equally. The former impacts a very narrow segment of society. It should then not come as a surprise that society assesses the risk (and devastation) of the two in different ways.
You need to remember that the median American is NOT an opioid addict. In fact the median American is fairly rich -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c.... While it is truly sad that there exists poor people that are addicted to opioids (and dying as a result), we have to remember that it's a small minority of society as a whole, and the risk of becoming a drug addict isn't uniform.
> It's hard to deny that the cause of this is not fundamentally caused by an over emphasis on free market ideology.
"Free market ideology" is entirely orthogonal to the issue, because the issue you pointed out is isolated in the US, but "free market ideology" is the predominant ideology of the liberal world where the issue you pointed out is notably absent.
The OECD average is 21%. There are countries that have lower public sector size than the US (Netherlands, Germany, South Korea, New Zealand, Japan, Austria) that have comparable (if not higher) human well-being. You cannot compare life in those countries to life in Syria/Iraq/Afghanistan, Kosovo, Central Africa, etc etc.
Since you can't reproduce that causation in other countries, you cannot conclude that there exists such a causation. It's very much a "US" problem. Put simply, the safety net in the US has some holes in it.
I didn't expect you to double-down on "well, it's just the poor anyway" but I probably shouldn't be surprised by now.
I wrote "over emphasis". Then you just go on about some irrelevant stats regarding the size of the public sector etc. While other countries realise that the "free market" needs to be curtailed in many spheres to not do too much damage, the US have decided that this isn't an issue and people need to take care of themselves on the "free market". Hence the lack of proper welfare and universal health care (and we can go on to worker benefits if you'd like, or perhaps higher education?).
> I didn't expect you to double-down on "well, it's just the poor anyway" but I probably shouldn't be surprised by now.
Yes, that is exactly the point I'm making. Strictly from a utilitarian perspective, civil war/genocide affects more people, more uniformly than drug addiction. Attacking that from "won't you think of the poors?" angle isn't a constructive argument to be made.
And lest we forget, the original point of argument was that peaceful restructuring of corporation is preferable to violent restructuring through wars, coups, and genocide. "What about the drug overdoses?" is an odd argument because I don't know anyone that would say "I prefer peaceful creative destruction over war, except if there are opioid overdoses, in which case I prefer civil war and violent coups, yes."
> I wrote "over emphasis". Then you just go on about some irrelevant stats regarding the size of the public sector etc.
Isn't that exactly what "free market" means? Economic freedom and the size of the private sector?
> Hence the lack of proper welfare and universal health care (and we can go on to worker benefits if you'd like, or perhaps higher education?).
Yes, and this is a failure of government policy. The US healthcare system is the least free market there is. I write software for claims processing and healthcare pricing systems for a living, and I can tell you right now that the US's healthcare system is a byzantine nightmare. The only thing remotely "market-like" about the system is that there are an obscene amount of profits...but that's all downstream of asinine incentives brought about by policy. It isn't some grand accident of the free market.
I'm in agreement with you that this needs to be fixed. However the fact that these problems exist in the US but not elsewhere suggests that it also has very little to do with "free market ideologies", and your insistence to the contrary regardless of the empirical evidence suggests that your approach to this is purely driven by ideology.
> I'm in agreement with you that this needs to be fixed. However the fact that these problems exist in the US but not elsewhere suggests that it also has very little to do with "free market ideologies", and your insistence to the contrary regardless of the empirical evidence suggests that your approach to this is purely driven by ideology.
This is absurd. That the US is a country where business, markets, profits have been prioritized over people is blatantly obvious for everyone that's not a free market fundamentalist where every single instance of a negative outcome needs to be excused by either "it's not free enough" or "other's are actually also rather free", or ofc, put the blame on the government.
You also jump onto the wording of course. I mean it in a general sense, free market, capitalist, market oriented society that applies it to much more spheres of society than other countries. So give me a break that I'm the one "purely driven by ideology" when you're writing with a convert's fervour.
> regardless of the empirical evidence
And the differences in worker benefits and welfare (etc...) is not empirical evidence of a society that's gotten way too hooked on capitalism?
> I write software for claims processing and healthcare pricing systems for a living
In a well functioning society your job should not exist.
> This is absurd. That the US is a country where business, markets, profits have been prioritized over people is blatantly obvious for everyone that's not a free market fundamentalist where every single instance of a negative outcome needs to be excused by either "it's not free enough" or "other's are actually also rather free", or ofc, put the blame on the government.
> And the differences in worker benefits and welfare (etc...) is not empirical evidence of a society that's gotten way too hooked on capitalism?
Many countries with strong unions have seen a similar or even greater decline in labor share of income than the US. The US is not really much different than any other advanced economy on that front: https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mckinsey/featured%20insight... (page 5). In the US, labor’s share of income is less than France, about the same as Germany, and more than Spain. It’s significantly higher than Sweden, which has robust unions. Moreover, nearly all the decline in labor’s share of income happened between 2000 and today (page 6). The decrease was very slight from 1947 to 2000. But unions stopped being a significant force in the US long before 2000.
> In a well functioning society your job should not exist.
This reaction of yours is illuminating, because it shows how little you know about how healthcare even works. I don't work for an insurance company, I write software that's used by insurance companies to process claims and price fees. This is an abstract actuarial function that's necessary regardless of whether a private entity or a public entity is the insurer. Public government insurers do not manually process claims by hand one-by-one. Ditto pricing, I work on generating fee schedules. You know where else fee schedules are used? Medicare and Medicaid. Their actuaries use software similar to what I work on to model risk and determine what premiums (or tax contributions) should be, and how much physicians should be paid.
I make a statement that countries have realized that the free market is harmful in certain spheres and you go on about the economy as a whole instead, which I have never claimed to not be capitalist/market economies.
I make a statement about the vast difference in worker benefits and welfare and you go on about the labor's share of income instead, which I have never claimed to be higher.
> I write software that's used by insurance companies to process claims and price fees
Insurance companies should play no role in healthcare, and they certainly don't where I live.
When you’re backed into a corner, you appear to resort to name calling and hostility, as always.
I’m directly addressing your arguments by showing you that reality is a lot more complicated than you seem to think, by the numbers. Your entire world view neatly fits into a packaged ideology that only seems to reconcile with a warped version of how the US actually works (as well as other countries).
> Insurance companies should play no role in healthcare, and they certainly don't where I live.
I understand you feel that way. What I’m saying is that my software is used by your government. My job will exist regardless of who is actually paying for healthcare, because I’m not in the business of financing, I’m in the business of claims processing, provider payment, and automated price generation. These are functions that government payers also use to pay physicians and to drive their per capita costs down also. It will always be a part of the value chain.
Also, private insurance companies play a role in healthcare in many prosperous countries, including Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand.
You haven't directly addressed anything. I just gave you two very clear examples where you just change the subject to something I've never claimed instead of answering the questions/arguments.
> How did you come to the conclusions that, life for life, a drug user's death is any better than someone getting shot in Afganistan?
Because getting shot in Afghanistan (especially during a war) is a random event, and the risk is spread evenly among society. The risk of drug overdose is concentrated. You don't accidentally trip on heroine, it takes a set of (largely predictable) circumstances to get there.
Society correctly assesses this risk, which is why solving the opioid epidemic polls a lot less favorably than policing and defense. The idea that society (writ large) cares more about preventing genocide and war than preventing isolated drug deaths isn't really that controversial.
It's really not. We have more than enough history to corroborate.
> And 2008 has killed plenty of people, by rendering them homeless, hungy, and unable to afford healthcare.
Right, and these events are rare and noteworthy also — the only other time that had happened before that was during the 1930's. The same cannot be said for structural changes in government. In addition, if you think the scale and severity of economic deaths of despair caused by 2008 can be compared with the civil wars in the Middle East, the Balkan Kosovo War, the World Wars (and Holocaust), or what's going on in Central Africa...I really don't know what to say.