plodder wrote: ↑Mon Jun 14, 2021 6:44 pm
I love the idea that things people need must by definition be "co-ordinated centrally".
I'm no libertarian (honestly) but you mentioned you'd worked in government procurement - which is a dreadful model for getting anything done effectively or efficiently, especially if they "co-ordinate centrally". Everything we hear about the NHS is that the staff are fabulous, it's the idiots who make careers out of "centrally co-ordinating" everything that create tiers of inefficient and out of touch management, each with their own cottage industries. Similarly the railways etc.
I don't adhere to the idea that the state is unnecessary, but you're going to have to try harder than that.
I did write an earlier post in this thread on these matters. I wrote in particular about roads, and the failure of private provision of roads in the past. Perhaps direct yourself to the provision of an efficient network of highways in a state that has money and no government. You can charge people tolls, but probably not enough for the less busy roads, that was the previous problem. And putting the roads where they ought to go without eminent domain will be very difficult.
We have private provision of much of our other infrastructure, which is made easier when it is a service people have to pay for by units. But we still need the state to specify the standard of service and regulate the price, or we'd be stuffed by all the monopolists.
The irony of the US health service is it spends almost as much per capita as the UK on its publicly funded health services, and that only supplies a minority of the population. For the rest, voluntary health insurance leaves the can't-afford-its or I'll-wing-its uninsured, unless you have a state backstop. And the US health outcome per unit of money spent is among the worst in the rich world. It's not better than the UK, poor as our health outcomes are, we spend so much less than the US. Even the US doesn't leave bleeding people to die in the road, insurance or not, but it doesn't do much to treat their diseases if they are uninsured and can't pay the full cost.
I earlier started trying to write a description of a voluntary insurance model of policing to show that it couldn't work, but stopped because my heart isn't in putting up a convincing model. Really if you advocate it, it is your job to write a detailed description that might work and have others criticise it. But let me put up my model, and show why it doesnt' work. And you can pick it apart and suggest a working model. I think if such a model existed, then someone sensible would have written about it and promoted is.
The first issue is coverage. Do we have a state where the police ignore the murdering and robbing of the uninsured? Does everyone else have to pay extra for the policing when it's a don't-want-to-pay who suffers the crime? So I think it has to be compulsory, not voluntary insurance, or there is massive free-riding problem. If paying is compulsory, then that's a tax. An important difference between police and health is that police has large elements that are inefficient if locally duplicated, so you would have a local monopoly element, as with network utilities. So as with the network utilities you would need an authority to specify the service and the price, and make it behave itself, or we'd be ripped off. Unlike say water service, you wouldn't be able to charge people for specific services rendered. If you charged people a fixed charge per head, well Mrs Thatcher tried that. We get away with it for TV licences, but in theory you can't watch if you don't pay, and it's in the category of things we expect to pay a fixed cost. If you charge people proportional to their income - for protection of their person - and per unit of wealth - for protection of their property, and they have to pay, then what you have really is a tax. Businesses would have to pay to on some scale. So actually what you've ended up with is local taxation and local government to fund and control the police. As happens everywhere with good governance.
And ultimately, if you have minimal governance, who stops the police force taking us over and ruling us? That's sort-of what's happened in Russia.