Compare: Google's founders can buy all the yachts they could possibly eat, yet Google Searches are offered for free.
If we could get healthcare to that level, it would be great.
For a less extreme example: Wal-Mart and Amazon have made plenty of people very rich, and they charge customers for their goods; but their entrance into the markets have arguable brought down prices.
> Google's founders can buy all the yachts they could possibly eat, yet Google Searches are offered for free.
Google searches cost many billions of dollars: your confusion is because the customer isn’t the person searching but the advertisers paying to influence them. Healthcare can’t work like that not just because the real costs are both much higher and resistant to economies of scale but, critically, there aren’t people with deep pockets lining up to pay for you to be healthy. That’s why every other developed country sees better results for less money: keeping people healthy is a social good, and political forces work for that better than raw economic incentives.
We know that from observing evidence such as how much the government pays out in welfare to Wal-Mart employees.
Customers continue shopping there because human beings are typically incapable of accepting a short-term loss (higher price) for a long-term gain (product lasts more than three uses).
> We know that from observing evidence such as how much the government pays out in welfare to Wal-Mart employees.
That's a weird metric. If tomorrow Wal-Mart laid off all employees and replaced them with robots, they would surely be worse off, but by your metric Wal-Mart would look less evil?
> Customers continue shopping there because human beings are typically incapable of accepting a short-term loss (higher price) for a long-term gain (product lasts more than three uses).
I mean, I could tell you are disingenuous from the get-go, so it is not surprising you would take an off-the-cuff metric which is accurate right now and invent a strawman scenario where I might continue to use it beyond a point where it makes sense.
Likewise, I would not use my flippant 3 times metric regarding durability to cover the quality of produce.
Well, feel free to propose a different metric for seeing how Wal-Mart is evil. And instead of Wal-Mart firing all employees, we can have a look at the more plausible scenario of Aldi vs Wal-Mart. Aldi runs a different labour model: their shifts are much more intense but pay more. Their model can't and doesn't utilise the kind of older and less fit people that Wal-Mart employs.
You have to look at the counterfactual of what these people would do, if Wal-Mart weren't around. You seem to implicitly assume that they'd be getting higher paying jobs somewhere else (so they wouldn't have to rely on welfare)? If so, what's stopping those people from switching to these better jobs right now, even while Wal-Mart is still around?
And sure, let's disregard how many times you can eat your groceries. That was a cheap shot. However I think quality vs price trade-off is something customers have to make for themselves anyway. Who am I to judge their choices?
And Google search, a service on the level of a public utility, has been degrading noticeably for years in the face of shareholders demanding more and more returns.
Comparing something to a public utility is not me saying it's literally a public utility. Google runs a monopolistic service that is essential to a lot of our public life, in a segment that has high cost of entry and infrastructure cost. They make the service worse to make more money. It should be a regulated utility like electricity or railroads, we should have a public alternative like the post office is to UPS, or it should be nationalized. The situation gets more dire when you consider their browser monopoly.
Other search engines exist. Bing is right there, and Microsoft is more than willing to eat the high cost of entry and infrastructure cost.
> It should be a regulated utility like electricity or railroads, we should have a public alternative like the post office is to UPS, or it should be nationalized.
I agree that electricity and railroads should be regulated like Google Search.
It's really weird that snail mail in the US is a government monopoly. When even social democratic Germany managed to privatise them.
> The situation gets more dire when you consider their browser monopoly.
Don't a lot of people in the US use iPhones? They don't ship with Chrome as the default browser, do they?
(And yes, Safari is built on top of the same open source engine as Chrome. But you can hardly call using the same open source project a 'monopoly'. Literally anyone can fork it.)
The existence of few competitors is not proof that monopolistic power doesn't exist and isn't being leveraged. Saying Google isn't monopolistic is being willfully wrong. You're more wrong when we look at the browser market, and Google has lost anti-trust suits on this very topic in the past couple years.
A public mail service is required by our constitution. It's cheaper than the private options and often the only option for many rural areas. It's not a monopoly.
> A public mail service is required by our constitution.
Where does it say so in your constitution? All I can find is the postal clause which Wikipedia summarises as follows, but whose full text isn't much longer:
> Article I, Section 8, Clause 7, of the United States Constitution, the Postal Clause, authorizes the establishment of "post offices and post roads"[1] by the country's legislature, the Congress.
The Postal Clause certainly allows the government to run a public postal service, but I don't see how the constitution _requires_ it. It doesn't even require the federal government to regulate postal services, it merely allows it.
Perhaps I missed something?
> It's cheaper than the private options and often the only option for many rural areas.
If you want to subsidise rural areas, I would suggest to do so openly, transparently and from general taxation. At least general taxation is progressive etc. Instead of just making urban folks pay more for their mail, whether they be rich or poor.
I would also suggest only subsidising poor rural areas. Rich rural areas don't need our help.
IDK, the owners of retail clothing chains buy yachts and yet that sector is jaw-droppingly efficient at delivering clothes to people. Executives can be annoying tools but I don't think their pay is the problem.
Shame those same owners have plenty of money for buying yachts and not enough money to pay their sweat-shop employees a living wage or to provide decent work conditions. Executives don't "earn" huge paychecks, they merely exploit others by figuring out a way to not pay them their worth.
