That’s it. It’s official. I’ve converted. No more Maoist-Stalinist-Nazi-Marxist-Canadian-style socialism for me. I have joined the Flamer Movement: 1 million strong against socialized… Fire Departments.
We Flamers have a very simple philosophy – Fire Departments should be privatized. The Free Market should decide who gets Fire Care and who doesn’t. If you can’t afford good Fire Care, then you deserve to go broke and/or die when your house catches fire. That’s it. It’s tough, but that’s the real world folks, and I’ll be damned if the government is going to force me to pay for anyone else’s Fire Care.
So join us, and help oppose socialized Fire Care today!
“The tree of Liberty needs to be watered from time to time with water from PRIVATIZED fire departments.”
– Thomas Jefferson
Yay! New comic!
Yay!
Yay indeed!
Also… Um… Pity that it doesn’t make any kind of argument. You’ve responded in the past that you’re only addressing your cartoon to the people who actually say those things… Unfortunately, that makes for an irrelevant debate with people who (as far as I know) aren’t here. It’s not a philosophical debate; it’s neither philosophical (it actually merely makes the journalistic claim that there exist people who make stupid arguments) nor a debate (since you don’t allow the other side to represent itself in any way).
I know there are stupid people. Why are you arguing with them? There are also smart people who support privatization, in spite of the painfully obvious potential problems.
Sorry to be a party pooper. I should be partying too.
-Wm
Wm: Well, of course nobody argues for privatized fire departments (that I know of). But there is an argument here. The “Flamer Movement” is (unless I am mistaken) a parody designed to illustrate that some of the common arguments (made by many people) against things like socialized health care would work just as well against things like socialized fire departments. So, the argument is a reductio of some favorite arguments against socialized health care, and I am presenting it in my own (hopefully humorous) way in the comic.
In addition I am presenting a sort of argument by analogy in the comic. It comes across as (I hope) completely absurd that anyone should be left to die in a burning building because they cannot produce “Fire Insurance”. Why do we see it as any less absurd that people are left to die of treatable illnesses because they cannot produce Health Insurance?
Naturally, anyone who supports privatization of health care and other industries and wants to argue against this reductio or the analogy is welcome to do so in the comments (as always).
Okay. I smell challenge. Now I suppose I’ll have to play devil’s advocate (I’m Canadian and glad of our system, to a degree), so be it!
I should then first attack the analogy itself.
The thing about firefighters is that they have a relatively simple (if very dangerous and essential) job; they put out fires. In fact most healthy individuals can, with some proper training and equipment, be firefighters. The organizational system required for firefighting is not nearly as complex as health care, the same thing for training and knowledge (depending on who in the system). For example, a celebrity who joins a reality TV show and does different jobs in it, would you be more comfortable with them trying a firefighter’s job or a brain surgeons? If you accept these vast differences are in fact the case then the analogy between the fire department and the health care system is faulty.
Moving on. One main problem with socialized government run health care is that it is government run.
Governments are notorious for bungling things, especially complex things. This makes it actually dangerous to hand health care over to government. The nature of a free market, theoretically, is that only the strong and competent survive, as such the private health companies that would exist have to be top notch, unlike a government service. Again, do you want to run the risk of having someone who is not really good and fully trained giving you brain surgery?
Also one of the reasons that governments bungle is that they often cut costs, ie, even if they are not the direct employers, they could send you to a less expensive and possibly less capable surgeon.
Then there is the issue of human nature. Humans like getting stuff, wealth etc. It’s called greed. If the best brain surgeon in the world had a choice between making a decent salary paid by the government that was livable, and an exhorbant salary for working private, which do you suppose he would choose? Chances are the lucrative one. Ie, the best brain surgeon will probably be expensive. Governments don’t like paying for expensive things. And if they do it, it still costs you.
Now there is an old saying (but I don’t know if it is old or where it comes from): you want something? Three options, fast, cheap, and high quality. Pick two. Same thing with health care, you want fast access if you are suffering, after all, time is blood. You don’t want a botched job, obviously, life and death here! So high quality for sure. Cheap? Not with the other two, you will be paying for it one way or another, either personally or through taxes. And at least if you do so personally the choice is in your hands, not the government’s (who tend to botch things and don’t know you as you know yourself (if you know yourself (Who are you?))).
Whew. That’s over with for now. But I feel sick. Must be the effects of playing devil’s advocate. Or, you know, the strep throat starting up again.
The TV Show QI had this thing where Fire departments where actually first created by insurance companies.
The idea being that if you are insured with them, they have an incentive to put the fire out if your house is alight, as they will not have to give you as much money as compensation for loss.
So, when there is an alert of a fire, all the insurance companies will send a van. Then they will check if you are insured with them before they put the fire out. OR if your neighbour is insured with them, they put the fire out just in case it spreads. So if you don’t want to pay for insurance, just live next to someone who does.
So, apparently, there is more truth in your comic than you would think!
chaospet, sorry I misread your argument. I’ve been studying economics so long I didn’t think anyone didn’t know that there are many solid arguments in favor of private fire departments, and in fact many (most?) of the US fire departments (and libraries) were originally private.
The objection you list (to private fire departments) is actually a decent one, and must be answered by explaining how the private fire departments are ‘incentivized’ (what an unpleasant word!). There are several answers to be found in the literature and real life.
Unfortunately, stretching that metaphor into the health care is messy at best. The obvious solution, requiring that medical providers never ask a customer whether they can pay, is the current law of the land in the US, and arguably partakes in the serious problems that the rest of the system has (I’d hate to blame such a tiny part of such a badly broken regulatory system).
I’m going to refer you back to the excellent XKCD parody you made, about physicists doing amateur philosophy… Only substitute philosophers doing amateur economics. 🙂
Canuovea, those are all fair points. There are lots of reason to worry about the government running health care. I just think there are even MORE reasons to worry about corporations running it, as the mess that is the U.S. health care system shows.
Smackle, that’s pretty interesting!
Wm, no see, the argument works for all disciplines except for philosophy. Philosophers can do ANYTHING!
Chaospet… I agree, but to be pessimistic, it really is a case of the devil you know and the devil you don’t. You know what motivates corporations; money, greed, profits etc. Government is a good deal more difficult to figure out. I personally go for the government, after all it is supposed to be accountable to the people in some measure…
And hey! Look at Canada, we have decent health care down (up?) here and the worst that could happen is that you end up waiting a long time in pain for surgery for something that is not life threatening (I think if it is, then they bump you up significantly). The alternative is that you get the surgery, but lose your livelihood, house, left arm, etc. I’ll take Canada thanks.
A quick point, re: Wm vs. chaospet:
Suggesting that a given economic arrangement would be morally wrong is an ethical claim, not an economic one. A really good economic theory might give us interesting descriptive information about what the likely *consequences* of an economic arrangement might be, and that might be relevant to some moral arguments about it, but the descriptive data by itself tells us nothing about the normative question of what our economic arrangements *should* be.
(After all, different ethical theories say different things about the relationship between the moral goodness of actions and their consequences, and even if you assume that that relationship is a fairly intimate one, how exactly to understand it is a fairly complicated question.)
By analogy, a sociologist might be able to tell us interesting things about whether censoring certain kinds of hate speech actually leads to a decrease in racist attitudes among the general public, but even if the answer was an unqualified “yes,” that wouldn’t be enough on its own to settle the ethical argument about whether we should have such laws, or whether we should have more absolutist free speech rights. The sociological data wouldn’t be totally irrelevant, but OTOH no amount of sociological training would by itself give anyone special expertise on the subject of whether the arguments for such were good ones.
….and, of course, to be a more exact and nuanced analogy to the private health care system, the comic would have shown the fire being put out, and then the stick figure declaring bankruptcy because he couldn’t pay off his enormous bills (even if he *had* fire insurance), or having his positions somehow be slowly burned to a crisp without the fire department intervening because it wasn’t an emergency and they don’t have to help you in situations that aren’t immediately life-threatening if you don’t have fire insurance, etc. These versions of the comic, however, would have been a lot more complicated, and a lot less funny.
*”whether the arguments for such were good ones” should have been “whether the arguments for such laws were good ones”
Chaospet: I have to say I like the level of debate you bring about. I didn’t like the level in the comic, but I have to admit it _worked_. There’s a saying the people I work with (Navy) has: “If it’s stupid, but it works, it wasn’t stupid.” I didn’t say your comic was stupid (it wasn’t), but MAN did it ever _work_.
That’s a fair point, and true. Unfortunately, what we’re dealing with here is not “the government” in the abstract, but “a large network of government programs”. If you think for one moment that a large network of government programs is accountable to the people, well… No. It’s accountable to the people who work in it. Once we vote it in, it’s here (normally) forever, no matter how well it works (or doesn’t work). The people who are hired to work there will continue running it, and we won’t have any say in that.
Is the IRS accountable to us (sort of, but not to the extent that we can change what they do). The CIA (not at all)? The FBI? The State dept? Treasury? The Fed? The Dept. of the Interior? National Park System? Navy? Defense? FDA? DHS? HMFIC?
Sorry. Got carried away. One of those acronyms is not like the others.
My point is that although those are all created by public consent (in one way or another), they’re not vulnerable to public dissent in any way. Even nominally public companies like the USPS are barely vulnerable to dissent — because they’re hedged in by regulations, they’re not allowed to fail (for example, the USPS isn’t allowed to close offices for “merely economic reasons”, such as not having enough money to operate seemingly as many offices as there are Starbucks).
A private company, on the other hand, unless it’s propped up by government, can fail when it loses the confidence of its customers.
This doesn’t help us decide how to fix our health system, and I regret that I have little to contribute to that debate. I do strongly believe the way lies along a path that includes personal freedom, including stronger Health Savings Accounts, perhaps bolstered by government funding; but there’s a lot more details than that, and some of the problems are in the details of the current regulatory system, which STRONGLY needs a dose of Systems Analysis. (The current plans all involve strapping a new system on top of the current system, and frankly that strikes me as blindly foolish. Has anyone at all even CONSIDERED the role of the FDA in the current cost problem? How about the interactions between the FDA and patent law?)
Ah well.
-Wm
Wm
I know what you mean. That’s why I said “supposed” to be accountable to the people. They aren’t, or not as much as I would like, but they are supposed to be (at least indirectly, and very indirectly at that).
Corporations are not accountable to anyone, they just need to survive and make profits, so everything they do is (usually) what they think is in their interests. From time to time those might coincide with yours but don’t be fooled, if they don’t there is nothing you can really do about it. At least for government you can say whoever is in charge bungled and kick em out. There is a kind of indirect influence the people can exert against government. There is some against corporations I suppose, but it is even less then against government.
As for all those departments you mentioned… well they are part of a greater whole, and the people do indeed have an effect on part of that whole, which in turn effects how the rest is run (but not how the west is won… sorry, couldn’t resist wordplay). You bet the CIA behaves differently now with Obama in power than they did with Bush junior.
Canuovea, I’d like to back up a couple of steps on my claims. See, you’re right that government is supposed to be accountable and often isn’t; but I’m also right that corporations are supposed to be responsible (and you’re right that they often aren’t). The common factor — I think — isn’t corporatism or statism; I think it’s simply something I’ll call bureaucracy (in both cases), or more to the point, rule by policy-based managers.
Government governs best by laws administered by wise leaders; and companies serve customers best by innovation discovered and executed by clever entrepreneurs. But when we don’t have an entrepreneur or wise leader, we make do with a manager, AKA a bureaucrat. There are a LOT more competent managers than there are wise leaders or clever entrepreneurs, and they shake things up a lot less.
Governmental departments have the same characteristics –except that they don’t need to make a profit, and they survive by convincing higher managers to continue to fund them. These higher managers almost never actually USE the products the departments produce.
Companies actually have to sell products to people who use them.
BUT…This doesn’t always hold. The bigger the company, the more it acts out of policy and NOT according to customers. If it’s big enough, it can get positively destructive. I’ve long thought that small companies are a better idea than large corporations. They have a smaller customer base, so satisfying those customers matters more; also, they have more people who are not customers, so there are more people who are not biased when it comes to deciding how to regulate the companies. When they do mess up, they can be driven out of business without destroying the economy.
Usually you can’t. Sometimes you can, but usually you don’t have any power over the actual bungler — even assuming there was a bungle. Is the USPS a bungle? Should we fire someone? If we did, the new manager would have to continue doing the exact same things — the law requires that the post office work the way it does.
(And, of course, there’s the added complication that this is a democracy — you have to convince a HUGE number of people that there was a bungle in the first place.)
That’s an odd thing to say. Truly odd. To stop a corporation, stop giving it money (probably by giving to its competition). Government has no competition, and has the power to compel. I’m not an anarchist (nor even a libertarian), so I don’t think that’s a bad thing about government; but it does mean that we have less power over government than we have over a corporation.
Grin. We need to remember where we are :-)!
Other than the very important problem of waterboarding, though, what’s changed? It’s certain that the CIA didn’t change just because Bush was “in charge” of it. Neither Obama nor Bush performed a massive firing nor a massive policy change; therefore the CIA we’re dealing with now is the exact same one we had under Clinton. Only the leaders and a couple of policies (one in particular — torture — being a very important one) have changed. (Well, some of the laws since then changed how the CIA interacts with the other agencies, but …)
-Wm
Wm: Okay. interesting. There is a problem with the concept of bureaucracies… well they are important in a government they don’t get a carte blanche. Governmental bureaucracies are constantly fighting over funding and influence in decision making process… the leader has a say in this, and the allocation of resources within the larger government bureaucracy. In this respect, even a good manager has this ability, in fact it is essential.
And you bet what a leader’s beliefs and policies are effect funding and other things like that, which in turn effect the different bureaucracies involved.
This means that ‘if’ a leader is elected for certain policies, then they will be reflected in other bureaucratic departments, even if the faces of those departments themselves do not change. In other words, we have a say over governmental policy even if it is indirect and limited.
“I’ve long thought that small companies are a better idea than large corporations.”
I hear that and second it. Makes sense to me. Personally the idea of a large corporation that extends it’s branches into several different markets scares the living daylights out of me. If they aren’t specialized they do not appear accountable or controllable.
“Sometimes you can, but usually you don’t have any power over the actual bungler — even assuming there was a bungle”
Yes, we have no direct power. But for the big things I’d say that there is. Besides, have a problem with the postal system? Write your representative. Maybe something will be done in the next fifty years… or get a really large petition, I guarantee that someone will make a fuss about it, especially if you all threaten to change your vote. (though… yeah, good luck with that… but hey, it works if the bungle is big enough).
” but it does mean that we have less power over government than we have over a corporation.”
Well, the government as a whole entity does not have competition, but when you take bits of it apart there certainly is. Unhappy with how it is run? Change your vote. Petition. Email. Write letters. Reason with them! You can do those things. And in the US it isn’t just about the competition between parties and representatives, but also different branches! The executive is at odds with the legislative half the time, the Senate and Congress would rather rip each other’s throats out than cooperate most of the time as well. And not only do you get a say in who the President is, you get a say in who your congress representative is, your senator, and again on the state level. And again on the municipal level! All these are people you elect and have some kind of power or influence with, and the smaller the electorate the more influence per voter…
All you can do is not buy a corporation’s products, and/or buy products from the competition, which is much the same thing. Corporations are not obligated to listen to you in any way other than that.
There is also the matter of access, most politicians are rather accessible (well, they have to at least appear to be).
So I definitely believe that we have more control over government than corporations, they are more accountable to us, after all that is supposed to be the nature of democracy, yes? (Again, note the use of “supposed”!)
“We need to remember where we are 🙂 ! ”
“The West is the best/ The West is the best/ Get here, and we’ll do the rest”
huh? Oh, right…
About the CIA: Yes, the people may not be all that different, but there are things that Obama would authorize that Bush would not, and vice versa. That is an important difference…
Nonetheless, you are right, in a free market, without monopolies etc, corporations and companies alike are supposed to be kept in check, they are supposed to be accountable. But it only looks good on paper, doesn’t actually happen that way most of the time… kinda like communism… wow, capitalism and communism have something in common!
And we haven’t had any really decent leaders (or groups of leaders) or anything else for awhile, and I think that managers is a good term to use. Still, those managers do have competing policies…
“My trust in any bureaucracy is directly proportional to how far I can throw it. The larger it is, the shorter the distance.” -Me (yes, you can quote me on that, you know, before you ask).
Hehehe. Ahem. I’m not funny when I try to be.