alt Hacker NewsIt should be more about making certain levels of consolidation and deep erosion of local ownership illegal.
We have run this country on an assumption that we must give businesses a high amount of freedom. An argument can be made that businesses have been given too much freedom in our system. We’ve allowed Amazon and Ticketmaster and Walmart to exist and they shouldn’t exist in their present form.
Healthcare practices that provide necessary care shouldn’t even really be allowed to be for-profit entities if you ask me. The incentives become too perverse as a result.
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> Healthcare practices that provide necessary care shouldn’t even really be allowed to be for-profit entities if you ask me. The incentives become too perverse as a result.
You don't need to disallow them for necessary care to be provided. You can just have public healthcare programs. That can look like publicly-owned hospitals or regulation that private hospitals must provide certain services under certain conditions if they want to keep operating. Private healthcare then works to provide more than that basic service that fulfills necessary care, to the benefit of the public that can afford more.
Should Doctors have a legally enforced max pay? Same with the web devs, max $150K, anything else is just profit driven bullshit right?
Can you define profit? Would a doctor be allowed to earn more than $200 per hour? $300 per hour? $400 per hour? Is a doctor allowed to be paid per procedure or time?
How much would you want to sacrifice your 20s and early 30s? How much would you need to work in the middle of nowhere where your kids won’t have the best opportunities?
"We’ve allowed Amazon and Ticketmaster and Walmart to exist and they shouldn’t exist in their present form."
Do you realize that when Walmart moves into a community, prices charged for everyday things overall drop significantly, both at Walmart and their competition, which means that poor families are able to buy more with every dollar.
What do you have against poor people?
> We’ve allowed Amazon and Ticketmaster and Walmart to exist and they shouldn’t exist in their present form.
Unpopular knowledge is that these businesses are generally illegal in their current forms under existing US law. The relevant laws are still in effect, they are just rarely enforced. The scale of the lawbreaking runs to the trillions of dollars annually, and it directly harms every US consumer.
The illegal conduct is so pervasive that even explaining the existing federal law makes one sound ridiculous, because companies have been explicitly advertising illegal behavior for decades. Because there is no sanction.
One of my faves is the notion that $BIG_RETAILER can buy in bulk and get better pricing, which they pass on to the consumer. You may have seen a company advertise something like this. It sounds like smart business! There is an active federal law[1] that explicitly prohibits this arrangement.
Lack of enforcement of that law is a factor in the disappearance of the American "high street" and the demise of many small retailers.
My #1 call for reform in the US is to simply start enforcing laws, even if doing so makes rich people/companies uncomfortable.
>Healthcare practices that provide necessary care shouldn’t even really be allowed to be for-profit entities if you ask me. The incentives become too perverse as a result.
Why stop at healthcare? Why not other essentials of life, like food or toilet paper?