>Louis Proyect wrote:
>
>> >Oh right, struggle is what matters. The institutional arrangements
>>>will take care of themselves if a properly righteous attitude is
>>>applied to the problem.
>>>
>>>Doug
>>
>>What are institutional arrangements? I am afraid we are speaking different
>>languages.
>
>How do get food on people's tables. Social relations of production.
>It's not that obscure.
>
>Doug
It seems to me that even the socialism of the Soviet Union (which we
all agree wasn't neither as democratic nor as efficient as it could
have been) put food on people's tables better than capitalism.
At 1:39 AM -0500 7/14/00, Ken Hanly wrote:
>Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 01:39:18 -0500
>From: Ken Hanly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: [PEN-L:21624] Re: Re: To glib or not too glib?
>
>Why would there only be state patronage and bailout in a planned
>system? At least
>before the system in the USSR broke down people had a life
>expectancy of 69 as
>compared to 59 now, in spite of bailouts and patronage in the
>planned system. So
>are tens of millions of bankruptcies efficient?
> It would be inefficient in strict nc terms to keep the
>non-productive alive.
>Assuming they are better off alive there may be no way to keep them
>alive without
>making others worse off--costing them money-- without any possible
>compensation.
>That is there would be no potential pareto improvement. Why would
>one make such a
>concept as efficiency a core value in welfare economics or anywhere
>else? It is
>efficient in a market system to respond for millionaires demands for facelifts
>but not to provide food for penniless millions who are starving
>unless there are
>enough benefactors willing to foot the bill. To plan and produce
>basic foodstuffs
>on the basis of need not monetary demand would be inefficient. No?
>If the variety
>and quality and quantity are poor under planning surely ,as Devine points out,
>consumer input can help correct that. However in the USSR consumer
>input was not
>listened to and was not a significant part of the planning process. Why does
>planning have to be like that?
> We have a non-market hospital system in Saskatchewan and
>Manitoba. Hospitals
>came to be built partly due to planning but also due to patronage
>and lobbying.
>In Saskatchewan in particular medical facilities were probably
>overbuilt in terms
>of any type of efficiency. But the system works reasonably well,
>better than the
>more market oriented US system. Competition in a health care system
>can be quite
>wasteful.
>In the US every hospital needs to have state-of-the-art equipment
>that is often
>quite costly. Some equipment could easily be shared by a half dozen or so
>hospitals. Instead in order to compete every hospital buys the
>equipment driving
>up costs. It is not surprising that the market oriented system in US
>health care
>is the most expensive in terms of share of GDP going to health but at the same
>time leaves many without adequate insurance or care.
> I have always thought of markets as a means of rationing by wealth. Isn't
>that basically what they are?
>All the rest is rhetoric and mathematics and libertarian self-deception. Free
>choice for those with bucks.
>Charity for those without.
> The beauty of markets is that they appear non-coercive whereas planning
>appears coercive. But if there is significant citizen input it
>represents a free
>collective choice.
> Cheers, Ken Hanly
Don't you agree? The main struggle now is against privatization,
against competition, against the market.
Yoshie
