> the valorization of profit has blinded them to seeing the advantages of the public good as a worthy bottom line
This is, IMO, the critical line, and also one of the deepest problems in the world (and especially America).
A focus on profit is so frequently completely opposed to human wellbeing and a flourishing society. Just look at health insurance companies for a prime example: they make profit by denying claims. The result is a catastrophically expensive insurance bureaucracy and worse health outcomes. Not to mention the extreme stress any American feels when interacting with an insurance company over any meaningful amount of money. (Which I’ve experienced, and I have far better coverage than the average American.)
These companies are so clearly, obviously bad for human flourishing. But profit is great!
The incentives are so deeply messed up. Our economy only allows profit as an incentive, which works well when aligned with human wellbeing-being. But as the economy grows, companies consolidate, and profit growth is still expected, nearly every single sector looks for ways to cut costs. And with fewer competitors, it’s easier and easier for entrenched, powerful companies to raise prices and reduce quality with little consequence.
This is clearly bad for human flourishing. But profits are fantastic!
Just because profit is actually aligned with human flourishing in a couple sectors doesn’t mean the system as a whole will continue scaling effectively. It’s clearly not, and it must change to avoid completely suffocating us.
I would argue that greed is the problem, not profit.
One could argue that government policies are anything but altruistic. They fund public education because you need an educated workforce. They fund public health insurance because a healthy workforce is a productive workforce. You distribute the cost over the entire population. Both remove direct costs from employers (e.g. training and providing private health insurance). Both have a tendancy to reduce costs and improve consistency because you are working at a larger scale. It also creates order in society since people generally feel as though more of their needs are being met, and they feel less exploited. All of this contributes to profit both on a social scale and for individual businesses.
Somewhere along the line people forgot the lessons of the 20th century. They forgot that profit goes beyond a line on the current financial statement. It also reflects long term interests.
Human nature (greed) is never the problem, because it cannot be changed. Focus only on what can be changed. Design a system that manages human nature, pointing it in a direction that is beneficial, while taming its side effects.
A denial of human nature is how you get authoritarian socialism with centralized planning, which leads to catastrophe because of the local knowledge problem, and because people have no private incentive to do anything.
"Capitalism" is an incomplete first step towards a system which channels greed into something that's beneficial for all stakeholders. A profit-driven actor making their production more efficient to increase profits is a good thing for everyone.
But capitalism is incomplete because the profit-motive can become pathological. Market failures are commonplace.
The only solution that is proven to work is a mixed economy done right, with clever and lean regulations, and a government not influenced by money, and with the government stepping in occasionally to provide public goods that the market cannot, and with private actors otherwise free to make profits as long as they are not harming any third parties.
> Human nature (greed) is never the problem, because it cannot be changed. Focus only on what can be changed.
The statement might appear to be pedantically true, but it's not true in practice. Sure, greed cannot be eliminated, but you certainly have systems which control the actions which result from greed. In reality, the actions brought on by greed are the real problem and we have an entire branch of the US govt(the legislature) dedicated to setting up mechanisms(laws) to discourage unwanted actions via threat of consequences.
So, it's certainly possible to mitigate the effects of greed. What people are pointing out is that of late corporations(and more specifically the C suite) have faced few if any consequences for detrimental behaviour driven by greed.
> centralized planning, which leads to catastrophe because of the local knowledge problem, and because people have no private incentive to do anything.
The local knowledge problem might have been an issue with central planning a few decades ago, but I don't think it is anymore. Everyone now has in their pocket a device with which they're able to instantly send any kind of information anywhere. We now have computers and software powerful enough to process all this information. The price mechanism is an ancient, inefficient and slow way to transmit information compared to what we could achieve today if we really wanted to.
People have all kinds of incentives other than profit. People wouldn't just lie down and die if they couldn't make money by owning things. The failures of past attemps at planning had more to do with the limited technology they had and the poor decision-making structure that centralized power and allowed too much corruption. That doesn't mean planning will always have that kind of a result.
> a government not influenced by money
This is impossible in capitalism, which will always over time create concentrations of capital large enough that influencing the people in government will become affordable, no matter how hard you make it. Government is just people, and there'll always be ways to influence people using money. In a well designed government it would be hard and expensive, but you can never make it impossible. Eventually a corporation or an individual will become so wealthy that they can afford it, and at some point conditions will arise where influencing the government will be a cheaper way to increase profits than fairly competing in the market.
> The local knowledge problem might have been an issue with central planning a few decades ago, but I don't think it is anymore.
I think you are right in principle. The signals can be centrally computed, if all the relevant edge data was somehow made available to the central compute. I see two practical problems. What is the actual probability that a government won't royally screw it up? I would give a pessimistic assessment given the lack of theory and lack of empirical case studies. If a government wanted to run a small opt-in test case, I would not be opposed to it, but I would expect it to fail. In any case, why would you want to risk it? Why not just do market socialism?
The other practical problem is the incentive question. I read what you wrote, but I can't help but feel it's a bit hand-wavey. Maybe you have a personal constitution that means you don't need to work for profit. But I believe most people, including myself, would only do the minimum if no personal gain was involved, unless it was a truly unusual circumstance like someone invaded my country which stoked nationalist fervor. But in a normal economy in a normal country, I do not believe you will be able to sustain high output or high innovation.
> This is impossible in capitalism
It's an ideal that's impossible, but you can asymptote rather close, there are a number of social democracies (which are mixed economy, i.e. capitalist) in Europe that attest to that.
Because markets are based on competition, and that causes a lot of issues on it's own, even in the absence of capitalism. It's because of competition that we consume too much resources, have wars between nations, etc. I don't think we can get rid of a lot of the problems we have unless we start actually planning long term and co-operating instead of competing. I agree with you that it'd be hard and risky to build a working planned economy, and that it'd be best to start with small scale tests. I just don't see how humanity will survive unless we start planning at a very large scale and stop competing with each other. A global planned economy is the only way to do that.
> But I believe most people, including myself, would only do the minimum if no personal gain was involved
I don't think all personal gain needs to be removed in a planned economy. There could be different rewards for different tasks, if achieving the plan requires it. What is not necessary is the ridiculously large differences between rewards. It's enough that the reward is somewhat motivating, there's no need to have some tasks be thousands or millions of times more rewarding than others. If there are tasks that wouldn't get done in the absence of rewards so large, surely they are rare and worth leaving undone for the other benefits of a planned economy.
> there are a number of social democracies (which are mixed economy, i.e. capitalist) in Europe that attest to that.
I live in one of the best managed ones, and still we're slowly but surely losing our government to the influence of capital. Media is concentrating, worker rights and unions are being attacked, etc. It takes a long time in a well designed system, but eventually capital will win. Even if we manage to get a government that tries to protect the rights of people over capital, the realities of a global economy based on competition don't allow that anymore. If we try, we lose to countries that don't and then we can no longer afford it.
I don't believe there's any connection between market competition and security competition, even though they both belong to the abstract category of "competition".
Conflict deaths were higher before modern capitalism, and were the highest per capita in hunter gatherer societies that don't have the social construction of private property. The 20th century communist states weren't more peaceful than capitalist states. The level of brutalization was often more extreme, like the Holodomor or the ethnic cleansing of Tartars from Crimea perpetrated by Stalin. China being no exception as the invasion of Vietnam shows. Or the agrarian communist Pol Pot and his genocide of his own people with a focus on ethnic Vietnamese. Or compare the brutality of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to the US invasion of Afghanistan. Conflict deaths were the lowest in all of human history in the most capitalist era of human history, the 1990s, during American unipolar hegemony.
The primary driver of conflict is the absence of a stable polar power, whether that power is capitalist or communist, and the resulting security competition that naturally emerges between actors with different interests when they're put inside this anarchic power vacuum with nobody to protect them but themselves, causing paranoia and preemption. The easiest path to return to a low conflict world would be just to return to American hegemony as it was in the 1990s before Russian imperial belligerence and Chinese revisionism around Taiwan were even possible due to American unipolar deterrence being unquestionable. It would be a capitalist world, but it would certainly also be the most peaceful world in human history, notwithstanding the relatively small number of conflicts that would still occur.
The liberal perspective on all this would be that the biological drive to compete with our fellow people is not something that can be suppressed, because it's an evolved trait that is part and parcel of existing as a primate. It's something to channel into less destructive activities like sports, games, or interests, and it's something to control and shape and unleash with regulations and systems. And no liberal would say that this is a perfect state of affairs, only that it's the least bad state of affairs that can be practically achieved given our biology and the real-world constraints that we need to work with.
Security competition is about securing resources. Markets are a mechanism for deciding who owns and how to use those resources. They are very closely related. If one country gets competitive advantage in the global market for owning a piece of land with some resource, that creates an incentive for conflict over that piece of land. If instead the two countries were a part of the same planned economic system that distributes resources in a fair way towards a plan that both countries have agreed upon, there would be no such incentive. There wouldn't even be a need for separate nations to exist, as the primary purpose of those is to secure resources in a competitive environment to your group of people.
You're right that conflict did exist before capitalism and even markets, but the systems before capitalism were also based on competition. Tribes competed for hunting grounds, kings competed for land, etc. They didn't come together and agree upon a plan that would best provide for all people equally. They had no means to do so. With modern technology we now do. Even the conflict within communist countries I would say was due to competition over positions of power and competition against countries trying to fight communism. A working planned economy would need to prevent such positions of power from existing to prevent that from happening. We'd need to design ways to make good decisions using direct democracy to avoid centralizing power and the competition over that power.
There might be a biological drive behind greed and competition, but I don't think that's a reason to use them as the base of our economic and political systems. We also have a biological drive to co-operate with each other, we should try create more systems based on that.
> If instead the two countries were a part of the same planned economic system
What you are proposing is a unipolar world order. That would create peace, but not due to its economic system. The shared security architecture is what causes peace. Any unipolar order is good enough for this task; see American capitalist hegemony in the 1990s. You can even have world peace with a mix of capitalist and communist states, as long as there is a unipolar security architecture that they're all part of.
Ask yourself, why is there no security competition between Texas and California? They are both capitalist entities, they could have been separate nation states had history run its course differently. The reason is the shared security architecture of the federal state that sits on top of them both. Their economic system is not relevant, but the power structure they exist in is. Why is there no security competition between the UK and France? It's because NATO sits on top of them both as the dominant polar security architecture. Why was there security competition between communist China and communist Russia during the Sino-Soviet split? It wasn't because of their economic system, it was the lack of a security architecture sitting on top of them both as China grew in power to the point it became a challenge to Russia.
> Security competition is about securing resources.
I would slightly deemphasize the role of resource competition. Competition over resources does happen, but it's often instrumental in nature. Hitler invaded the USSR to secure oil, but the oil wasn't the point, being able to continue the war economy on the Western front while having little access to indigenous oil was the point. Japan did a blitz through South East Asia in pursuit of oil in response to the US oil embargo, but again the oil wasn't the point, securing oil was instrumental to sustaining the imperial war machine. Even conflicts seemingly over land ownership often have a security component that is not well appreciated. You need land to ensure strategic depth, to preempt future belligerency, to ensure hydrosecurity, or to deny key staging points or radar locations. All of these zero-sum motivations for conflict disappear with a unipolar security architecture that subsumes all peoples.
But why is there a need for a security architecture in the first place? Because if you don't have it, some competing entity will come and take the resources that you cannot protect. In the absence of such a competing entity, there'd be no need for a security architecture. No one would come take your resources if everyone was equally a part of managing those resources. So yes, a security force strong enough to enforce peace among competing countries and businesses is one way to achieve peace, but another is to remove the need for such architectures altogether by getting rid of competition.
Of course if we did manage to create a global planned economy with no need for security, there's still a chance that some group of people would establish some entity that would try to take a bigger share for itself than what the planned system would provide them. That would mean there'd have to be some form of security even without competition to prevent us from "devolving" into a competitive state again. You might be right. We would not be able to get rid of conflict just by getting rid of competition, we'd need a security architecture to enforce it, and it could do that for any system. Maybe there'd be less need for enforcement in a system without competition, but you are right.
So a planned economy might not be a way to achieve lasting peace, but it'd still be a way to avoid the other issues caused by a competition based economy.
> Hitler invaded the USSR to secure oil, but the oil wasn't the point, being able to continue the war economy on the Western front while having little access to indigenous oil was the point.
Sure, but what was the point of expanding German land to begin with? Was it not to secure more resources for the German people and its leadership? Would they have attacked if there was no resources to be gained from it? If the reward for victory was that Hitler gets to see a bigger country on a map, bigger numbers under statistics of the population of Germany, some respect or whatever, but nothing in terms of resources, would the war have started? Wasn't one of the triggers the anger caused by the reparations that Germany was forced to pay for ww1?
Human nature is not greed though. Human nature is very very varied and adaptive. And the historical norm of human nature is one of sharing, community and support, as much as such a claim can even be made.
And human nature is subject to the whole bigger system in which it lives.
Capitalism is in many ways such a system, one that is built around driving the worst parts of human nature. And the thing is the profit motive becoming pathological is not a bug. This is the key defining feature of the system. Capitalism really isnt even about markets. Its about consumption, and producing things specifically to sell them in order to make some markup. The goal is specifically to find ways to make money, and stuff like fulfilling peoples needs, quality, workers rights, and regulations are clearly things that are getting in the way.
Exactly. I can't express the degree to which people thinking we can fix it with just one more surgical precision law drive me up the wall. They've clearly never tried to do anything regulated.
The second, third and Nth order consequences of the sum of the shortsighted quick fixes these people have peddled result in a world where only sociopathic corporate entities can do anything, and of course those entities are incredibly "greedy", they wouldn't be able to remain profitable if they weren't.
Those vacant main street store fronts (metaphorical or literal, your pick) are only half vacant because the PE fueled megacorp that owns them doesn't deem it worthwhile to rent them. The other half are vacant because the cost of jumping through the regulatory hoops to rent them in a lawful manner is unjustifiable for the small time owner.
> I can't express the degree to which people thinking we can fix it with just one more surgical precision law drive me up the wall.
I think there is misattribution here. Us neoliberals do not believe that things can be easily improved through incrementalism. We believe that the alternative methods proposed by other political/economic systems lack credibility, and so we are stuck with the least bad option that reality has forced upon us. We also believe that things can get much, much worse, which is not a belief that's emotionally salient to other camps, who we see as assuming that things can only get better, when what usually happens is some tinpot authoritarian takes over and everything gets worse despite the naive ideals of the political entrepreneurs who tried to cause change. We also perceive a deep ignorance of basic economic facts to be commonplace in other camps; people who push for proven bad ideas like rent control, and this is discrediting.
Iterating on less bad still goes bad with time. The fact that you've boiled the frog slowly doesn't mean the frog is any less boiled than if some extremist shows up and sticks their dick in various sectors of the economy in a short time period.
If anything the slow boil is worse because it more thoroughly cements the dysfunction as people eek out various niches within it.
The "neoliberal" approach that you are advocating for has been done for the past 50-100yr depending on were you want to measure the start and the results are all around us. Just because things can get worse doesn't mean the current approach and it's peddlers aren't all some combination of wrong and/or evil.
Fractional central planning, which is basically what the current approach aims for with it's carrot and stick policy solution to literally everything, is still central planning. It just gets co-opted and fails slower so instead of the 2nd or 3rd iteration of decision makers sending it all to hell it's the 12th or 13th or whatever. Whatever the level of sustainable central planning is is clearly less than we have now.
Neoliberalism is unable to address the growing inequalities of our societies (in fact, it is often to blame for them). This, in turn, is driving us toward right-wing authoritarianism as populists are taking advantage of the growing frustration of the middle class.
Fascism is the logical end point of neoliberalism. It is the time when things are so bad you need to find scapegoats to prevent the rise of class consciousness and continue financial liberalization.
My view is that neoliberalism is not the "least bad" ideology, it is a slow and sinister destruction of our society for the benefit of the capital owners, hiding behind a mask of humanism that slips off the minute it becomes inconvenient to keep wear it.
>I would argue that greed is the problem, not profit.
I would point out that's precisely what the "private equity firm"--is that true or just a buzzword? no private equity group is taking this library private--is saying about the current library, that the greed of the unionized employees is running the library for their own benefit and at great cost to library and at the expense of the public, and it could be run more efficiently. So, you agree with them at least that much.
>Somewhere along the line people forgot the lessons of the 20th century. They forgot that profit goes beyond a line on the current financial statement.
huh? that wasn't "the lesson of the 20th century". if anything, the 20th century represents democracy and market capitalism's greatest joint achievement, with much less disease and starvation and much more freedom at the end vs the beginning.
you live in one of the greatest times to be alive, and all you can do is complain. when and where from the past would you rather live out your life expectancy of half what it is now, coupled with no HN to bitch on?
Totally agree. I think another angle to look at it is not "a couple sectors" but "a certain scale", as suggested by your remark about how companies consolidate. When businesses are small and need every customer, they are motivated to do a good job at what they do, build goodwill, protect their reputation. The larger they become, the more they tend to work against their customers rather than for them. They cross multiple markets, making them less responsive to the demands of any one. They become "too big to fail". And so on.
What we see in the modern era is a system in which success is defined as becoming large enough that your customers have no other option but to deal with you. That's not a healthy system.
You see that scale problem everywhere. Once a business has become large, it no longer cares about “small” costs like unused buildings. That’s basically the reason so many buildings in towns and cities can be left unused for decades.
The impact it has on that town is often huge. But for the business, it’s just a small overhead. A small landlord couldn’t afford to leave their asset unproductive. A multinational conglomerate can.
The death of local high streets is in part due to the unwillingness of landlords to actually rent their properties out for market rate.
I don't understand how massive corporations are both ruthless slash and burn cost-cutting profit optimizers and sloppy businessmen who don't care about the small things, even in aggregate.
What's the economics of not renting out high street retail properties? There must be millions of them across the first world, with a theoretical annual rent roll in the 11 or 12 figures. Are they owned by a million multinational conglomerates foregoing a hundred grand each? In that case we are stretching the definition of "multinational conglomerate". Or are they concentrated in the hands of the same hundred companies? In that case they are each missing out on ten billion a year in opportunity. There isn't a company in the world where you couldn't make your name as Head of Global Unused Property managing ten billion a year of revenue.
I don't have an answer for this either, but it must be more complicated than "they're all owned by multinationals who don't care about such small numbers" - the point of multinational companies is that those numbers are no longer small at scale.
Well, one relevant angle may just be that the companies are big enough to have an incentive calculus that's not aligned with the effects on local areas where such unused businesses are. They can maybe take some kind of tax writeoff, hold it as a hedge in case land values rise, etc. But the basic idea is they are using the property in a manner that crosscuts multiple markets, whereas for average citizens in the town with the vacant building, it's just a vacant building. It's not good for the scale of business operations to diverge so much from the scale of ordinary humans.
Many commercial properties are on relatively short-term mortgages and are remortgaged regularly. If they rent it out cheaply, then the paper 'value' of the building has dropped, which can make it difficult or impossible to remortgage. It's why you see so many high rent but 'free for the first year' deals - it technically isn't reducing the rent on paper, but many of the tenants vanish 13 months after moving in
I hear people say this but I don't understand why mortgage lenders would be fooled by this. How is renting something out for the low price of $X "less" than not renting it out at all? Wouldn't a property that isn't rented and produces no income be considered the least valuable of all?
> Just look at health insurance companies for a prime example: they make profit by denying claims.
Ok but why do people pick those insurance companies?
We see this across the board too and not just insurance companies. Governments low to pick the lowest bidder who then has massive cost overruns which has to put them above the second lowest bid in the end. Why is counter party risk never accounted for?
Germany has a different structure for company ownership than the USA. Members representing relevant stakeholders (employees, the community, environment, etc.) must be present on the board and advocate for their interests.
UBI would go a long ways to enforcing democracy. Money talks, so just give people money. Everything else is too abstract. We can't seem to encode justice into law but at least if everyone got UBI it would be harder to oppress poor people
It’s not difficult, it’s impossible under freedom of religion and just independent thought generally.
One person’s “well being” might be measured by how many wives and children you have. Another’s might be education level and physical fitness. Another’s could be financial independence.
These all clash with each other in fundamentally incompatible ways.
> And with fewer competitors, it’s easier and easier for entrenched
so the problem isn't with profit after all, it's with low competition? So what is causing the lack of competition in the sector? Why can't that problem be fixed?
Public-private "partnerships" backed by private equity will always raise prices, cut costs arbitrarily, reduce service, take out loans, and saddle the organization with debt to pay themselves huge dividends before driving it into bankruptcy. This is what happens when corrupt, unregulated capitalism is allowed to run amok and have zero skin in the game except to extract maximum profit like vampires.
Health insurance isn’t a great example. Profits are capped relative to premium costs so denying claims isnt a good strategy.
The only way denying claims can become a profit booster is to deny enough that premiums can be lowered enough to bring over more new members than was lost in revenue through the premium discount.
So denied claims come from people shopping for the cheapest insurance coverage possible.
Conceptually neoliberal societys do not have a strong way to seperate community and social goals from economic ones, because their very philosophy is that prosperity creates social improvement.
Meanwhile everyone is living in low trust economic zones with no community observable, other than anonymous services.
1) Americans spend less than OECD average out of pocket as a percentage of healthcare costs. This is much larger in absolute terms but the multiplier - cost of healthcare is nearly entirely due to provider costs.
2) Health outcomes are really different between states despite having basically the same system. demographically controlled iirc outcomes are not different and sometimes better (e.g. japanese americans).
3) Insurance company profits are pretty low relative to cost of healthcare. while the bureaucracy is more expensive its not "catastrophically" by any means and iirc there are oecd countries with similar overhead although im too lazy to search on myvphone.
4) Rationing healthcare has to and does happen in all advanced economies. again modulo cost in the us, id rather it happen via money than government or inforrmal scarcity (like in Canada).
4a) Frankly while i dont have evidence for this 4a, lookinng at us spending by age (and eg the enormous money usg spends on kidney dialysis for people thay mostly just die in a few years anyway), I wonder if an important reason US providers are so expensive is, we ration limited supply properly for most people but then don't ration keeping a bedridden grandma alive for 6 more months at extreme cost, cause hey, the govt pays.
> Just look at health insurance companies for a prime example: they make profit by denying claims
Despite being from Europe, I find this to be a shocking and erroneous interpretation.
Clearly, health insurances have the duty to allocate limited resources (“premiums”) across members. Denying and accepting claims is the mechanism to that end. Accepting all claims would increase premiums and reduce membership (by pricing people out). Would that an ideal state? Clearly not.
Healthcare debates in the United States are difficult because so many assume that insurers have very high profit margins and that arbitrarily denying claims is the reason they have high profit margins.
If you look at the actual profit margins it’s low single digit percentages. You could eliminate profits altogether and virtually nothing would change. We even have non-profit insurers to look at
It’s strange how the high prices of drugs and services aren’t drawing the ire of people who complain about costs. Drug prices are nearly 3X higher here than international averages and doctors here also earn a lot more with in many cases fewer restrictions on prescribing or offering services than in most EU countries.
The meme that insurance company denials are generating huge profits comes mostly from the public murder of a health insurance CEO last year. For some reason people assumed that insurance companies and their profits must therefore be the core problem with high costs, without making the effort to see where the money actually goes in our health care system.
As you said, there is no health care system which does not have approval processes, deny requests deemed unnecessary, require step therapy, and establish standards of care.
> If you look at the actual profit margins it’s low single digit percentages.
Didn't I see somewhere that that's an artifact of Hollywood-style accounting? If you spin up a sub-business then have that sub-business charge high fees for services you can't live without, the main business might even be losing money!
What's indisputable is:
* in America, we pay more for less healthcare
* most of the money does not go to the doctors and nurses actually providing services
* it also does not go to research, which is funded elsewhere (assuming it keeps being funded at all)
* it's often possible to pay less for a service if you pay the provider directly rather get your insurance involved
I’m not sure where you’re getting your info, but it seems like well over half of US healthcare spending is on wages for doctors, nurses, and other patient-facing staff (such as RMTs, techs, and physios). Administrative and drug costs are definitely above the OECD average, but not the sole drivers.
> If you look at the actual profit margins it’s low single digit percentages. You could eliminate profits altogether and virtually nothing would change. We even have non-profit insurers to look at
Look at administrative overhead instead of profit. People understand that there are problems with the system, and maybe they’re misattributing the problems, sure.
The "profit" isn't money in the bank. It's overpaid bullshit jobs and work and perks that benefit the people in and around the organization.
It makes me understand better how the horrors of the history books came to be when the same exact demographics who'll complain about nominally nonprofit hospitals or educational institutions paying their people insane sums and doing random BS to burn money or comparable behavior from charity entities set up as tax shields by the wealthy refuse to see that having a profit cap creates an incentive for the insurance industry to behave the same way.
While the critique is valid, that does not offer a path to the solution.
Utilitarism is the ruling moral philosophy, and the only possible countermeasure is externalities but that depends on an effective government which is even more unlikely that asking for ethical behavior to corporations.
That may be widely believed but there are plenty of government institutions that actually function well. Libraries are a good example.
What’s more: the belief in govt “inefficiency” is one of the hardest to overcome factors that makes it hard to build good institutions, leading to a vicious cycle.
I agree, and that’s the case for dismantling as much of the federal government as possible - it is too big to work. Break up Apple, Google, Amazon, Washington DC.
You’re forgetting the corollary - all small organizations are also inefficient, just at different things.
It’s all trade offs - do you want everyone in your country to have a baseline education that can be relied on as a given but perhaps it suffers in its administration and effectiveness? Or are you OK with pockets of your country having tremendous quality of education and others having very poor quality, as an example.
Public utilities and services are the default and work well in the majority of developed countries. This is true for everything from local transport to water distribution. As the joke says "universal healthcare is so difficult to get right that only all developed countries except the US have managed to put it in place".
> Just look at health insurance companies for a prime example: they make profit by denying claims.
This has been repeated so many times that I think people don’t understand just how small the profit margins are for health insurers. Low to middle single digit percentages. As low as 2-3% in recent years, and much lower than the average S&P 500 corporation.
There are also non-profit insurance companies out there. Their rates are not appreciably different, as you’d expect after seeing how low the profit margins are in for-profit insurers.
I also think people don’t realize that countries with nationalized health care also deny procedures, have pre-approval processes, require step therapy, and will not authorize procedures they don’t believe to be medically necessary or to have enough evidence. There is no health care system in the world which will simply approve and pay for every request.
So while health insurer profit margins are convenient bogeyman, if you deleted their profits entirely from the system it wouldn’t move the needle on costs. It also wouldn’t open the floodgates for approving everything, because no health care system will allow unlimited services. The amount of excess and unnecessary care would be astronomically expensive. I do agree that we need a more robust system in place for ensuring that incorrect denials don’t happen, but health insurance profit margins are barely a blip on the overall cost of health care in the United States.
It’s a combination of high prices for services, American’s unusually high utilization of health care services, and very high rates of drug prescribing that mostly contribute to the cost. I think most Americans would be surprised to discover that a lot of nations with nationalized health care would also be restrictive in their access to many services and prescription drugs. For as much as we talk about insurance companies denying claims, Americans still get far more services and prescriptions than most of their counterparts in other countries.
i have no doubt that other countries have some problems in their healthcare systems too, but i think you are downplaying a few key points:
1) united healthcare made 90 billion dollars gross profit in the last 12mo, and that's only one health insurance company. claiming that it's not a great business at a 2-3% profit margin ignores the scale of money involved, and ignores that the customer for health insurance is truly captive.
2) you're right that america has very high prices in healthcare. doesn't it seem bad that private insurance companies are incentivized to make things cost as much as possible so they can skim that 2-3% off the top? insurance companies negotiate and set prices for services and pharmaceuticals. they now own the pharmacy benefit management companies that would normally be incentivized to negotiate for lower prices.
i would expect in a public health care system that rejects procedures, they would follow consistent guidelines and rules. american health insurance companies will arbitrarily reject a percentage of procedures that they know they should be accepting in order to keep their profit margin in the right range.
i think it's hard for me to see the argument that health insurance companies are a net-positive or even net-neutral party in the united states. i don't think it's a coincidence that we have some of the highest prices and some of the worst outcomes.
The insurer margins can be whatever small but when the same company also owns the hospital and drug distribution it doesnt matter.
Somebody in the process makes extreme margins.
Also americans cant be at same time avoiding going to hospital because of costs and “still get far more services than most of their counterparts in other countries”
Believe it or not there are countries where there is mandatory health insurance (your employer or you or state have to pay it) and doctors dont look at costs because they dont really know them. They for sure try to not be wasteful but nobody is second guessing obviously best treatment because it costs 40% more.
You are just making things up to fit what you already believe. We have a few huge publicly traded companies in this space that file with the SEC but reality is not what you are interested in.
What i am making up? That US healthcare has high margins?
“ study from Yale School of Medicine (YSM) found that large U.S. health care corporations spent 95% of their net income — totaling $2.6 trillion — on shareholder payouts over the past two decades, raising questions about industry priorities and their impact on patient care and affordability”
> doctors dont look at costs because they dont really know them
They know enough to prescribe only the pre-approved drugs and they know that things will happen at due time when the already budgeted people and equipment are available.
Sure they prescribe pre-approved drugs. They even prefer some brands which they know or are “sponsored by”. But afaik they dont care if they prescribe something expensive because it doesnt cost them anything.
Items which should not be routinely prescribed in primary care
This policy guidance includes medicines:
[…]
that are clinically effective but not the most cost-effective intervention available
that are clinically effective but deemed a low priority for NHS funding.
Prescribers are advised that no new patients should be started on these items, that they should be deprescribed for current patients and that, where possible, suitable alternatives should be identified for patients.
I've heard a horror stories about NHS and Canada's Medicare. Their systems are backed up, so treatment goes untreated for long periods of time.
Presumably healthcare professionals are performing as many surgeries as they can per day. Just because one person was denied, doesn't mean another person isn't approved.
We're about to do to Medicare what the UK has been doing to the NHS. Government programs don't work when you cut all their funding. There are plenty of normal countries with functional healthcare systems.
Leaving aside that the article is about the EU and largely says less about where is better to have cancer and more about where you're statistically more likely to be an old smoker and get cancer, it says it's better to have cancer in the US when you're over 65 and therefore get the socialised healthcare.
Get cancer aged 25 and you may be in some trouble.
As long as you can get past your GP and actually get the diagnosis the system works pretty well. Get onto the Two Week Wait, and you automatically will if your diagnostic test is positive or falls into the needs further investigation category, and that's highly competitive with, say American time to intervention: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6396925
The typical UK "horror story" fuck-up is your GP fobs you off over and over until you turn up in (overwhelmed due to people who can't get GP or social care) A&E with advanced and now-incurable cancer, they scan you, say "why the fuck haven't you been referred months ago that's atrocious", and then you die. GPs are all private in the UK and get charged more when they refer to hospitals. Either it's a traditional small partnership where the GPs themselves are invested or it's a kind of consultancy where a company employs GPs on contract and puts pressure on them to improve returns/cut costs. Either way, that's where the profit incentive comes in and coincidentally, this area is what kills people.
The GPs aren't themselves at fault mostly, they also need more funding and staff, but both have been cut drastically. I am, however, deeply suspicious that companies cut from the same cloth as Serco, Capita and G4S will not have patient outcomes anywhere in mind except under "cost centre".
It astounds me how so many people can have such strong opinions about systems they have so little experience with.
I've lived long term in 4 countries (Canada, USA, Japan, Germany) and have dealt extensively with the medical systems in all of them (plus some experiences in Portugal and France).
Every system has its warts, and this is the first thing that naysayers will latch onto, of course. People love to use tu-quoque as a defense mechanism. "See? They're just as bad as we are because you have to wait sometimes, and look at this extreme case right here! It's probably even WORSE than us!"
The fact is, none of the systems are really that bad (with the EXCEPTION of the American system). There's a reason why travel insurance companies have two tiers: All of the world EXCEPT America, and all of the world INCLUDING America.
Have I had to wait for a procedure in Canada? Sure, but they do a pretty decent job of triaging, so yeah outside of the HORROR STORIES (of which you can find anywhere if you dig enough), it's pretty damn good. In Japan I paid a percentage of costs (which are pretty damn reasonable). In France I actually didn't have insurance, so I had to pay FULL price when I came down with pneumonia: 50 euros for the doctor and the antibiotics. In Portugal, I caught COVID, and got treatment within 2 hours of arriving at the hospital in Lisbon.
If you haven't actually been in the medical system of another country, you don't know what you're talking about.
> If you haven't actually been in the medical system of another country, you don't know what you're talking about.
Being in the medical system doesn’t give you a leg to stand on either.
I grew up with insurance and have insurance now in the US. I’ve never had problems getting medical care and the worst year was ~$1000 out of pocket.
The conclusion from that isn’t that it’s a good system for everyone and nobody who complains knows what they are talking about. It’s that anecdotes of good or bad treatment are meaningless.
>Being in the medical system doesn’t give you a leg to stand on either.
If anything it gives one an incentive to see the problem in a way that doesn't threaten their paycheck.
Every nurse will say they're over worked. Every paper pusher will say their job is essential. The guy selling overpriced gloves to the hospital, the landscaper making the grounds look like a country club, they all have justifications as do the people paying them. And they're all on the take to some degree. The whole system is one of top to bottom plausibly deniable unneeded expenditure. Nobody not at the very top is getting rich off it just because so many are in on it. But the fact that they're not getting rich doesn't mean it's not a waste of everyone's money.
> I also think people don’t realize that countries with nationalized health care also deny procedures, have pre-approval processes, require step therapy, and will not authorize procedures they don’t believe to be medically necessary or to have enough evidence
Lines in private medical care are shorter because people with no insurance don't get in line.
Interesting pattern here: manufacture a crisis (book banning complaints → funding cuts), then propose private "efficiency" as the solution. Meanwhile, this library was founded in 1799, is the second-oldest in Virginia, just won the 2024 state Library of the Year award, and had 400k+ checkouts last year. Hardly sounds broken.
I walk the corner to the rubble that used to be a library/
Line up to the mind cemetery now/
What we don't know keeps the contracts alive and movin'/
They don't gotta burn the books they just remove 'em
And they keep going for it: in France the neoliberal government is pushing further the privatisation of railroad (they ask the national company to invest in the shared infrastructure, but spare the competition from this burden; then they will probably point out how the private competitors are more cost efficient), subway and buses in Paris, they renew the private management of public funded highways despite them being a cash machine, they let the public hospitals understaffed to the point that many medium sized cities do not have 24/7 access anymore to emergency services, and now many colleagues and friends of mine prefer to go in private hospitals
In American politics, this has been an incredibly successful strategy, most notably starting with Reagan. It's called "starving the beast" [1]. The playbook is simple:
1. Cut taxes
2. "Pay" for those tax cuts by cutting expenditure;
3. Those programs begin to fail because of the funding cuts;
4. Use those failures to justify further cuts, usually by privatizing something or some form of public-private partnership, which is nothing more than a transfer of government wealth to the already-wealthy.
We saw something similar play out recently with Jane Street in India [2], which seems to boil down to market manipulation between options and the underlying securities.
Back in the 1980s we had corporate raiders who were famous for buying up companies that were trading below book value and then simply breaking them up for parts and selling those parts. I'm sure this went as far as corporate raiders manipulating the price.
Private equity is the latest form of this cancer. Here's the PE playbook:
1. Raise a bunch of money;
2. Buy some company with a large amount of debt, a so-called leveraged buyout ("LBO");
3. Once you control the company, take out massive loans on the company's assets;
4. Sell off any real estate holdings, often to some interested party who most certainly isn't at arms length, possibly for a discounted price, to raise further capital then lease back those holdings you need, ideally with complicated leases that hie the true future cost;
5. Use those loans to pay back the original investors and loans;
6. Sell the debt-ridden husk to whoever is stupid enough to buy it.
Now (6) is the tricky part because you have to make it look like the company is profitable, that you've added value by cutting costs or otherwise increased efficiency. And you do that with complicated debt. Sort of like ARMs in the subprime crisis.
I cannot think of a single success story with PE that has created a successful company that hasn't imploded. I belive most PE funds lose money too. Why anyone would buy a company that a PE fund has gotten its hooks into is beyond me.
I suspect you can make a market-beating fund that simply follows the index but does not buy any PE-infected company.
> Why anyone would buy a company that a PE fund has gotten its hooks into is beyond me.
From my own life experiences, I believe that, across a population, there is no correlation between the amount of money people have and their individual rational decision making ability.
> I cannot think of a single success story with PE that has created a successful company that hasn't imploded.
Safeway had a leveraged buyout in the 80s, and was so successful the merger/acquisition with Kroger was blocked due to monopoly concerns. Hilton also had a leveraged buyout.
PE exists to buy bargain bin companies and extract maximum value from them. Sometimes that’s actually rehabilitating the company. Usually they are just the best at milking a dying cow.
By this point, I suspect that PE is simply a sophisticated liquidation service. Where an owner doesn't want to deal with a company anymore and want to cash out, but can't just easily sell everything. By this perspective, any fault on a company's discontinuation lies solely with whoever sold it to a PE as it's him who actually wants to kill it.
I consider PE to be equivalent to a crypto rugpull.
There's PE the theory and PE the practice.
The theory is that the buyers improve operational efficiency, restructure the business, dispose of underperforming assets, etc and "transform" the business. As another commenter reminded me, there are a handful of examples of this, most notably HIlton. And any of these successes will throw around "operational efficiency" a lot. Maybe Blackstone really did massively improve Hilton's operations. If so, I still consider it an outlier.
PE in practice seems much closer to the 1980s corporate raiders. It's done by people who have zero understanding of the business and zero interest in it. They've essentially decided to do a rugpull and ripoff the new owners so the "financial engineering" is how to structure the exploding debt in such a way that the new buyers don't realize it before it's too late.
That seems to be the case with many high-profile cases such as Toys'R'Us and Red Lobster.
I personally think this model of loading up a company with debt to pay off the LBO should be illegal.
"cannot think of a single success story with PE that has created a successful company that hasn't imploded. I belive most PE funds lose money too. Why anyone would buy a company that a PE fund has gotten its hooks into is beyond me."
It's funny that the narrative where a bunch of generally smart well connected people renowned for their greed set money on fire for decades doesn't make you rethink your priors.
It is worth noting that per the linked article below[0]. The library has a system for preventing readers under the age of 18 from accessing the books in the New Adult section of the library, and it's one that requires parents to opt into their child having access to those materials.
The library should serve the entire community, not a loud minority or even exclusively the majority. If 20% of the community wants LGBTQ books, 30% don't, and 50% don't care, why should the 30% be able to decide that the other 20% shouldn't have access to these books? The majority should not be able to strip rights that the minority should have access to. Tyranny of the majority is a real thing.
I find it hard to believe that even a plurality wants these books banned. Do we have proportions, or is it just a number of complaints?
It's the loudness of the minority that wants them banned. That, and the fact that they are often people who have enough privilege (land owning, ability to take off work to go to council meetings, and (most importantly) own a business) to be able to throw around to get there way.
Happens a lot at universities and non profits. A big donor will sometimes only agree to donate if certain conditions are met, and as a result can strong arm the other party into whatever they want. The public sector is the same; At the local level it's often business owners that have enough influence over the local economy.
And frankly, it’s a library. Every group should have access to books they’re interested in. But that doesn’t mean those groups should be able to ban books they don’t like, even if 75% of people want to ban them.
I honestly cannot understand how having LGBTQ books in a library even affects people who don't like them. Just don't read the books. It's not like their eyeballs are being glued open and they're being forced to read them. Book banners are such weirdos.
It's obvious. They probably don't even go to the library, they just want control over other people. They don't want other people reading books which could help them out, they want those people to go to church where they can be told they will burn in hell instead.
Evangelicals presumably don’t want their children to be influenced by the environment that having those materials present would foster. They’d much rather have their children influenced by real-life sexual predators present within their church, who upon being discovered (multiple times) choose to address the situation with prayer and allow the predator to remain within the church and around children without ever reporting them to law enforcement. But that’s just my experience.
You've met evangelicals who would much rather have their children influenced by sexual predators than books? Or you're trying to make a snarky comment, so you're tying together two unrelated things, both of which evangelicals would like to avoid?
In fact I have. I grew up in the 1990s evangelical movement, deeply within the culture, home schooled, pro-life rallies, had 10+ kids, women wore denim dresses, etc. Those people. They were hot and ready to ban anything they could get their hands on. Cabbage Patch dolls were demonic, Pokemon were demonic. Gay-anything, it goes without saying, were forces of demons. They were exactly the people who would praise book banning or book burnings.
Meanwhile within their church, on several occasions it was discovered that a man had sexually assaulted little boys. Did they kick him out of the church and go to the police? No, he was a sinner who could be saved by prayer. Until he did it again, and again. Some stupid parents even let him take their boy on a weekend trip years after the situation first came to light. You don't need me to tell you what happened on that trip. I think they finally did get the police involved, but that's after my family finally wised up and left the church.
Unfortunately this wasn't the only incident. There was another family that had two teenage boys. Their teenage boys? Molesting little girls on multiple occasions. Call the police? No, instead have the boys admit their guilt in front of the entire congregation, laying-on hands, prayer, etc. Until they did it again. That family finally high-taled it out of the state.
To this day I wonder why I got out unscathed, except second-hand knowing what was going on. So, yes I have met these evangelicals. Yes, I know their priorities and how they would rather turn a blind eye to sexual assault going on within their own church all the while trying to have Pride parades or whatever banned. Sure, they don't _want_ sexual assault happening, but did they do the slightest to prevent it? No. They tried to pray it away, but meanwhile were happy to expend countless man-hours protesting about obscene books to protect their children. No, I'm not making a purely-snarky comment.
If you're moved by this more in-depth explanation, I'd appreciate if you unflagged my comment.
Were any of these books in the kids' section? That could be one reason.
Also, we shouldn't dilute the meaning of the term "book banners" to refer to anyone who doesn't want a particular book in a particular place (even if that place is a public library). In the US, we are spoiled to have zero actually banned books. Anyone who wants to is free to purchase any book they want, as long as it's for sale somewhere. People who don't want books that have sexual content (which a disproportionate number of sexuality-focused books do) in the kids' section might be fine with those books existing in a different section, or in a private bookstore. True "book banners" would want to enforce a ban on them existing anywhere. This is a subset — and quite possibly a small one — of the former group.
It's not just "sexual content". Take a look at any of the ban lists, like the one provided by the ACLU (https://www.aclu.org/cases/e-k-v-department-of-defense-educa...) from earlier this year. Many of the books are related to slavery, civil rights, climate change, and media literacy, and the orders banning them apply to schools on every military base around the world.
What counts as sexual content? Does any book with gay or trans characters count because that's what people are trying to ban. Maybe we should ban the Bible from libraries because it has plenty of sexual content as well.
I think part of the issue is that books about sexuality are much more likely than regular kid books to have sexually explicit illustrations. Some depict fellatio or other sex acts. Most people don't want their kids to have access to such content, regardless of the type of sexual act shown. I certainly fall into that camp.
That was the only book that patrons sought to have removed from the kids' section?
Thanks for the wikipedia link. The criticism section is particularly enlightening:
> In a 2023 Slate article, Aymann Ismail, who until then had considered most attempts to ban books hysterical, was taken aback by the book's explicitness.
The important thing to note is that the book is being called "pornography" by the Clean Up Samuels group. It is explicit, but it is not pornographic. There are many many other books they want to ban completely simply because they features trans or gay characters.
While digging for this there does seem to be a young adult novel about a young gay man that does feature sexually explicit content (although it doesn't appear pornographic at all). The library keeps it in the "New Adults section. Which requires that anyone under age get explicit permission from their guardian to access, and they even created a new kind of library card to help moderate said access.
Your distinction between "explicit" and "pornographic" is important, and often not well understood (or actively ignored) by book opponents. There is nothing wrong with explicit, but age appropriate content. You can't really properly teach someone about sex without getting explicit, after all. A book that says "When two people love each other, they go into the bedroom together, and uhhhhh.... , and then a baby arrives!" is not really doing the job.
Does it really matter? If a parent is so intent on restricting their child's access to certain text, then maybe they should accompany their child to the library.
This feels less and less like you're interested in discussing this and more like you're grasping for some kind of "gotcha" argument. I'm probably not going to respond again unless it feels productive.
I guess I feel like you're not engaging in good faith when you use ambiguous terms like "access" in order to make it seem like books are inaccessible to kids, when in fact they aren't.
If you think that asking to clarify that is a "gotcha" question, so be it. I view the original statement as intentionally misleading, and aimed to be kind in asking for a clarification instead of just calling out your misleading statement.
Libraries were not expected to confine children to the children's section in my childhood.
I saw a few restricted sections like they described in recent years. Policy prohibited children without permission entering. None had full time guards however. Deterrence seemed to rely on what would happen if caught. Like many rules and laws.
It seems that reference is actually slightly cherry picked. The article it is lifted from [0], is the author reflecting on his own discomfort with the text, the same discomfort he believes drives the people wanting it be be banned. Ultimately he makes the case that books like this are actually ultimately a good thing.
I'm curious how you would feel about your local library carrying The Turner Diaries, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or The Camp of the Saints? What percentage of the local population would have to want those books for you to believe the library should serve them?
Are there any books that a public community library should not be willing to carry?
I think that access to disinformation within a context such as a library is actually quite a good thing. You can read it, and then research it, and think critically about it. In an open ecosystem of information, with a little critical thought and media literacy, most people are able to spot bullshit when they need to.
Most University Libraries carry those text. I'm not sure if it would be particularly useful in the context of a public library (as the goal is to serve a local community with a wide range of needs). However, if there was interest then it would likely be put into circulation.
I would speculate that there was likely a time when each of those were on shelves, but they were likely weeded out due to lack of interest.
Do libraries carry Mein Kampf? Would the books you suggest be categorized and contextualized appropriately? (… like all other books, and a job that I believe librarians already perform.) "Categorized and contextualized appropriately" might also mean "not on the shelf / by request, but available for research"; a good many books that are considerably less objectionable and of greater literary value already are in libraries, as there is only so much shelf. Again, deciding what merits shelf space is a function of the librarian.
But you see no qualitative difference between {a book written by a white supremacist, neo-Nazi organization; a fabricated text (i.e., propaganda); and a book the SPLC describes as "'widely revered by American white supremacists' and 'a sort of anti-immigration analog to The Turner Diaries', and attributed its popularity to the plot's parallels with the white genocide conspiracy theory."} and "The book Pride Colors by Robin Stevenson, which explains the meaning of the rainbow colors in the Pride flag"[1]?
What is the literary value of white supremacist drivel or a fabricated text to a community library? (I'd wager approximately none.) Versus the books being complained about (anything and everything LGBTQ+). (Definite value from helping people exploring LGBTQ+ topics for themselves, simply trying to learn about LGBTQ people, to helping non-homophobic parents raise inclusive, tolerant children who don't want to spread hate & intolerance, and which need only be checked out by those who actually desire to read them.) There is demand for books of the nature being banned here; I cannot see there being anywhere near the same demand for books filled with bile.
And again, the empirical position (and for some subsets, outright stated position) of the right is to remove any and all traces of LGBTQ media from libraries. (And more broadly, from society, as well.)
In this particular instance[1], we can see this in one of the complaints:
> “Our library should not be carrying ANY material about LGBT,” one person wrote.
and,
> “Family has 2 moms — unacceptable,” the person wrote of another book. They also complained, “This book makes LGBTQ+ look ‘harmless’ and acceptable.”
Someone else points out exactly your quip; what about equal representation?
> She continued, “You said taxation without representation. What about my representation in the library? What about what I want my children to read? What about the 4 percent [of] LGBTQ members in your community that you represent that only get 1 percent of the books? Are they not being represented fairly with their tax dollars?”
In the broader national debate, we've seen this pattern endlessly; "protect the children" is a wedge to open a fissure towards a wholesale and complete ban. E.g., see the FL Don't Say Gay Act, which started as objections that education on such topics needed to be "age appropriate" but was then subsequently expanded until is was a wholesale ban on education of numerous topics.
Was it really adults trying to prevent other adults from those materials, or trying to prevent minors from accessing adult materials? (I'll interpret downvotes without response as confirmation of the latter, and that people want minors accessing adult material.)
I increasingly think that our society isn't sustainable without some recalibration of the notion of responsibility, liability, justice and due process. The problem we face is that it is very easy for unscrupulous operators to exploit loopholes and cause lots of damage, but the process for holding them accountable faces a heavy burden of proof and itself can be exploited (e.g., by dragging out lawsuits for years).
We need some kind of sliding scale where certain actions by people who either "should have known better" (i.e., are exploiting insider knowledge) or "had no basis for acting" (i.e., are rich enough to not need to make any more money) can be quickly curtailed without a need to specifically prove everything that they did. Something loosely akin to "if you had a billion dollars, you'd better be able to affirmatively prove you did everything squeaky clean or we're just going to take $500 million".
Brendan Ballou’s book “Plunder” is an excellent read about the effects of private equity across industries, if you want to go deeper on the topic. I recently had him on my podcast talking about the effects of PE in HVAC. There are quirks in each realm but the themes are common (I guess in libraries, too).
You're accusing the article of being one sided, while espousing a view that to most on here is going to seem one sided. "They want to contract it out to a contractor." This completely leaves out that the contractor is also trying to get the transaction to happen, or at least to improve the likelihood.
So if some article offends your sensibilities enough to call it stupid, maybe give a more balanced take.
You're just getting confused by the article, it seems. Nowhere in the article does it make any specific claims about LS&S is "trying to get the transaction to happen", rather it makes vague begging-the-question claims that it's a "takeover attempt". It's probably a slick way to make people assume the conclusion was proved somehow, without actually doing it.
But, on another level, what in the holy name of my increasingly annoyed sensibilities are you even talking about? A contractor wants a contract? Did IBM bid on the healthcare.gov job? What did LS&S do that IBM didn't?
If the current public management is bad, the solution should be to bring in new public management. The fact that the alternative is private equity should be the indication that this fight is purely ideological rather than a fight against bad management.
Based on my experience with county boards of supervisors and their interactions with library management and library funding decisions, the Warren County Board of Supervisors' statement that the library has poor management shouldn't be given much credence unless backed up by evidence.
Somewhat amusingly, the library is a subordinate of the county. If the library is in fact poorly managed, the poor management is the fault of the board of supervisors.
It really depends on how "library of the year" is determined.
Some years back now, our local library got a new boss who was determined to do everything the new and modern way. In the process, the boss drove away half of the paid staff, I don't know what fraction of the volunteer staff, and the entire community support organization. But hey, those are all old people and their values clearly don't matter (who cares if they're the ones with tons of free time?). Help, I don't have the money or people to run programs anymore! Better run away and get another job. Now, the library still exists but a lot of people are going to the next town over, and the new new boss is struggling to rebuild from scratch.
It would be completely unsurprising if "do things the modern way" and "chases awards" are significantly overlapped without corresponding to "improves things for the actual users", and "support LGBT" is code for "gerontophobia".
Ah yes, critical thinking, like taking an advertising article on the internet at face value and ignoring that there might be more to the story. Who needs Knoll's Law? Also, awards are always given to the party that deserves them and have absolutely no politicking or signaling involved.
I don't claim what I saw locally is exactly what's happening there, but ... my point is, there's probably a lot happening at the local level, and only the locals can really know more. And even then, until the dust settles, you may need to be careful which faction of local politics (which often is completely unrelated to the factions in national politics) you're talking to.
I understand the concern about local accountability, and you're absolutely right that libraries should be responsive to their communities. But the data here suggests the broader community was actually supporting the library.
Most public libraries follow professional collection development standards that try to serve their entire diverse community including families who want those books available. It's a tough balance, but the goal is usually having something for everyone rather than letting any single group determine what everyone else can access.
The community seems to have spoken pretty clearly by successfully defending their library. Sometimes the loudest voices aren't representative of the broader sentiment.
Your comment is inline with how the libraries operate, and I can't tell if some of the others here are just a little homophobic or just woefully misinformed about how libraries function.
Books that aren't being circulated frequently enough get weeded and removed from the collection, usually once or twice a year. Moreover, if books are requested frequently from other branches, or have long hold times, then that volume will typically be added to a collection.
I don't think your understanding is accurate. Their positions are overwhelmingly in support of freedom of information, freedom of speech, privacy, and the public domain. They're opposed to anything that locks down and restricts information, generally oppose unnecessary copyright extension and overbearing copyright laws and rules (including the DMCA and DRM). They have a wide array of positions that are both frequently aligned with and opposed by both major American political parties.
People distort the ALA's position as pushing LGBTQ books on children, but that's just the most in the limelight right now because those are the books that are being challenged the most, and the ALA is generally against book banning.
The ALA is aligned largely with classical liberalism, not modern progressivism, and most American conservatives I knew before 2016 would have agreed with their positions on freedom of information and personal privacy.
> This is a perversion of the phrase "book banning". Choosing not to have certain books in libraries, or in the kids section of libraries, is not "book banning".
Yes it is. It is by the dictionary definition of the two words 'banning' and 'book' to be banning books, from a library. You are wrong.
Yes. But the majority of the community seems to be explicitly against the removal of these text from the library. It is an extremely small and loud group of traditional Catholics whose stance on this is unpopular even among other catholics in the community.
Interesting; other commenters here were blaming evangelicals. I wonder what the evidence is for it being one or the other group, or if people just have their favorite groups to demonize.
The ALA is a ideological organization that advocates for open access to information and resources. Those damn communist, they always want well informed citizens!!
While we're at it someone should really buy out and shut down wikipedia! Have you seen their article on Hitler? They make him sound like a criminal!!
This sounds like a response from someone who is not especially informed about the ALA. I work in a related field and am aware of the policy positions they have taken on lightning rod cultural issues. Perhaps you could look into this before claiming that they just want "open access to information and resources".
If that's the case, then please feel free to inform me of what policy positions they take on lightning rod issues that isn't related to their stated goal of providing open access to the public?
Drag queen story hour wasn't a policy created by the ALA it was a popular program at some libraries.
The ALA did create a collection of resources for Libraries that wanted to host them, but even they are clear that that is a decision made at the local level [0]. You said you were very familiar with the ALA, because you "work in a related field". It might be helpful to actually read their standards and guidelines [1]. Just in case we're talking past each other, this might also be helpful [2]
Of course drag queen story hour isn't a policy — it's an event. And just because the ALA didn't invent it doesn't mean they haven't expressed support for it.
Look, you asked what positions they've taken that aren't related to open access to the public and I answered. Now you're moving the goalposts. That's a game you can play by yourself; I am done playing along.
Not at all, accountability works both ways. The elected officials tried to defund the library, but then the community pushed back and the takeover was withdrawn. That's exactly how democratic accountability should work.
Libraries need to follow constitutional principles and serve their whole community, not just the loudest subset. The broader community clearly supported keeping their award-winning library intact.
No. Libraries exist to serve the communities they are in. Whether it be the public, specialized fields, or universities. Collections are curated by librarians based on the needs of the community. That isn't a decision that is an elected official is qualified to make.
Billionaires buy elections, elected officials break funding for public facilities, billionaires get tax cuts, public facilities get bought out with tax cuts.
I wonder when they start introducing their own currencies like in the old mining towns.
Where did you get the idea it was already owned by private equity?
A public library delivers value to a community. Profit is not necessary for that, and can be argued to actually be harmful to delivering value to a community.
Efficiency might not deliver maximum value either when the community is the focus. Something taking a little more time or involving more human effort can actually be fulfilling for those doing and receiving. Firing the librarian that knows all the childrens' names so you can have a kiosk instead isn't delivering value.
Well, a subset at best. I've moved to a new town where the sole library is available to normal 9-5 workers for three hours on a Saturday morning. I don't even know what it stocks because it just isn't open when most people would be able to use it.
The library is owned by Samual Library Inc which is not the government or a public company.
Profit is not neccessary to deliver value, but it helps optimize it.
If someone knowing kids names is worth it people would be willing to pay more for the service. If people would rather pay less and use kiosks then that may be a better option.
It's a very common "gotcha" comment on HN unfortunately — latch on some specific definition of a term then dismiss anything that doesn't fit it. Not sure what we can do about it unfortunately
Samual Library Inc is a "not-for-profit nonstock corporation ... organized exclusively for charitable and educational purposes." Its bylaws prohibit distributing earnings to "directors, officers, or other private persons, except that the corporation shall be authorized and empowered to pay reasonable compensation for services and to make payments and distributions in furtherance of the purposes set forth in article 6 hereof." - https://samuelslibrary.net/images/about/policies-more/articl...
And you think that makes it a private equity company?
My LLC, which I ran my consulting business under, was neither a government nor a public company ... and neither was it a private equity company.
You are the one strangely claiming a 401(3)(c) not-for-profit nonstock company is a private equity company.
I assume you have changed the topic because you know you are wrong.
As the article says, Library Systems & Services is 'private equity owned'. If you can't tell the difference being a private equity owned company and being a private equity company then you really don't understand this topic at all.
A non-profit like this literally cannot be owned and thus no equity to be public or private. It is a legal entity controlled by its board and there are no ownership shares which can be bought, sold, or transfered.
Do roads turn a direct profit? Water works? Canals? Flood Dams? Dikes? Are public parks profitable? Should schools be profitable? Is the police profitable? Does the fire department charge for every blaze they contain? Is the congress profitable? Are the courts? The president? The government as a whole?
Society funds a lot of public services because they cannot reasonably be billed to the individual, but enable the society to function and are the underpinning of economic activity. They are profitable because they allow society and the individuals to engage in economic activity which they otherwise could not.
We should strive to make public services efficient, but aiming for profit is against their very nature.
Libraries, the fire department, the police department, congress, the courts, and the government are a "cost center". Their services are not directly charged for and on our balance sheet they cost money, however in general the benefit they provide allows all the other beneficial things we want to do to happen and support our "profit centers" like industry. We should work to ensure the money invested is used effectively, but a "cost center" will _never_ turn a profit and asking it to produce one does not make sense.
And for those not following... yes, this is exactly like the IT or legal department in a typical company. At Joe's Widgets the IT department does not charge the customers any money and therefore is a pure cost. But without IT keeping the machinery and networks online, they don't produce many widgets. They pay for their IT department because _overall_ the outcome is better versus going back to manually stamping widgets without computers or automation because "IT costs money". We want to make sure IT isn't spending wastefully, but we can't simply say "IT needs to turn a profit or else we're going to shut them down" otherwise overall things end up less efficient and more expensive and we go out of business.
(As an aside, it's really wild to me how many people in IT can hold the position that "things that don't directly turn a profit shouldn't exist!" while half of our industry is in positions that don't directly turn a profit.)
A library will not profit from its members being able to read books for free, but society as a whole will profit.
Demanding each individual component of society be profitable leads to the overall detriment of the whole. It leads to hospitals only treating the rich and only for money, it leads to no-one producing art, it leads to homeless shelters not existing. It leads to society becoming an inhumane machine to produce and consume money, and nothing more.
Humans are more important than money, society is more important than money.
It should be an anti-goal. If it can be provided adequately at a profit (that is, if the benefits of purchasing the service to direct purchasers are sufficient to warrant direct users paying a sufficient price to not only offset the costs of providing a service but also to provide a profit to the service provider), then there is probably no reason to have a public service.
The reason to have a public service is primariy that it is desirable but not profitable, probably because of externalized benefits, or because the utility provided is concentrated in a financially disadvantaged population, such that the amount that they are able to pay underrates the utility delivered (the use of money as a proxy for delivered utility is only at best a loose proxy when money itself is unequally distributed), or for some other reason.
If it should be a public service at all, then it should almost without exception be publicly subsidized in whole or in part. Profitability in a public service is a "code smell" that you have something that likely should be a private industry that has instead been unnecessarily monopolized by the state.
Public parks don't turn profits. Public roads don't turn a profit. Food stamp programs and housing assistance don't generate a profit.
Public goods can increase efficiency and well-being in a way that indirectly translates into increased economic efficiency, but no, profit is not a good direct long term goal of most public goods and services.
> If people don't want to fund such things people in those programs should make or buy their own food and housing.
The country of Ireland still hasn't recovered from the British government saying this kind of thing with different words 175 years ago. Today the Irish-descended population in the USA is higher than the population of Ireland because of all the people who left as a result of the same event.
> If people don't care enough about a park to fund it, then that space may be of better use to something else
Once the land is used for something else, it will never become a park again.
It is important for us to safeguard land for greenspace like parks and playgrounds and community gardens and stuff, because it is incredibly difficult to reclaim space to make those sorts of spaces once there is a building or different zoning on the land
I am saying they should make money to use to buy food. Or they should make their own food if they do not have the means to pay someone else to do it for them.
>If people don't care enough about a park to fund it, then that space may be of better use to something else.
No, public parks are awesome. They should remain free.
>They are a loss leader aimed to make more money elsewhere.
You're starting to get it. We pay for public services with our taxes, and in exchange, we get free stuff back that benefits society.
>If people don't want to fund such things people in those programs should make or buy their own food ans housing.
Oh my fucking god. This is seriously the most asinine sentence I have ever read. Bar none. It's honestly difficult to respond to something like this. I'm at a loss for words.
I genuinely don't give a single fuck if you, or anyone else, don't want to fund food stamps. We absolutely should continue funding it. The entire point of those projects is that the recipients specifically CANNOT afford to do these things on their own. You're advocating for further oppression of the downtrodden; it's difficult to understand how one comes to this position.
If that's how you see it, literally everything costs money at some point in the line. So I guess nothing is free. But we have a word for it, so let's give it an actual use.
You enter at no cost (with exceptions, of course). That's free. They should continue to be open and free; a world without parks, without use of public funds for public good, isn't a good one. Profits be damned, I want my parks.
Imagine what would happen if Uber never ran at a loss. It wouldn't have been able to grow into what it is now. Losing money in the short term can bring long term wins.
I interpreted your question to be why I thought they should focus on long term profit instead of short term profit. As to your question it is for efficiently allocating resources.
Think it is easier to just point at something like Defense. Without more active imperialism, I am not sure how the Army/Navy/Airforce is going to pay for all of that Freedom they protect.
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”
“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”
“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”
He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”
I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.
“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.
“Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”
It didn’t seem like they did.
“Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”
Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.
I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.
“Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.
Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.
“Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.
I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”
He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.
“All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”
“Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.
“Because I was afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”
I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.
“Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.”
He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me for arresting him.
> the valorization of profit has blinded them to seeing the advantages of the public good as a worthy bottom line
This is, IMO, the critical line, and also one of the deepest problems in the world (and especially America).
A focus on profit is so frequently completely opposed to human wellbeing and a flourishing society. Just look at health insurance companies for a prime example: they make profit by denying claims. The result is a catastrophically expensive insurance bureaucracy and worse health outcomes. Not to mention the extreme stress any American feels when interacting with an insurance company over any meaningful amount of money. (Which I’ve experienced, and I have far better coverage than the average American.)
These companies are so clearly, obviously bad for human flourishing. But profit is great!
The incentives are so deeply messed up. Our economy only allows profit as an incentive, which works well when aligned with human wellbeing-being. But as the economy grows, companies consolidate, and profit growth is still expected, nearly every single sector looks for ways to cut costs. And with fewer competitors, it’s easier and easier for entrenched, powerful companies to raise prices and reduce quality with little consequence.
This is clearly bad for human flourishing. But profits are fantastic!
Just because profit is actually aligned with human flourishing in a couple sectors doesn’t mean the system as a whole will continue scaling effectively. It’s clearly not, and it must change to avoid completely suffocating us.
I would argue that greed is the problem, not profit.
One could argue that government policies are anything but altruistic. They fund public education because you need an educated workforce. They fund public health insurance because a healthy workforce is a productive workforce. You distribute the cost over the entire population. Both remove direct costs from employers (e.g. training and providing private health insurance). Both have a tendancy to reduce costs and improve consistency because you are working at a larger scale. It also creates order in society since people generally feel as though more of their needs are being met, and they feel less exploited. All of this contributes to profit both on a social scale and for individual businesses.
Somewhere along the line people forgot the lessons of the 20th century. They forgot that profit goes beyond a line on the current financial statement. It also reflects long term interests.
Human nature (greed) is never the problem, because it cannot be changed. Focus only on what can be changed. Design a system that manages human nature, pointing it in a direction that is beneficial, while taming its side effects.
A denial of human nature is how you get authoritarian socialism with centralized planning, which leads to catastrophe because of the local knowledge problem, and because people have no private incentive to do anything.
"Capitalism" is an incomplete first step towards a system which channels greed into something that's beneficial for all stakeholders. A profit-driven actor making their production more efficient to increase profits is a good thing for everyone.
But capitalism is incomplete because the profit-motive can become pathological. Market failures are commonplace.
The only solution that is proven to work is a mixed economy done right, with clever and lean regulations, and a government not influenced by money, and with the government stepping in occasionally to provide public goods that the market cannot, and with private actors otherwise free to make profits as long as they are not harming any third parties.
> Human nature (greed) is never the problem, because it cannot be changed. Focus only on what can be changed.
The statement might appear to be pedantically true, but it's not true in practice. Sure, greed cannot be eliminated, but you certainly have systems which control the actions which result from greed. In reality, the actions brought on by greed are the real problem and we have an entire branch of the US govt(the legislature) dedicated to setting up mechanisms(laws) to discourage unwanted actions via threat of consequences.
So, it's certainly possible to mitigate the effects of greed. What people are pointing out is that of late corporations(and more specifically the C suite) have faced few if any consequences for detrimental behaviour driven by greed.
Hence the problem.
We are saying the same thing.
> centralized planning, which leads to catastrophe because of the local knowledge problem, and because people have no private incentive to do anything.
The local knowledge problem might have been an issue with central planning a few decades ago, but I don't think it is anymore. Everyone now has in their pocket a device with which they're able to instantly send any kind of information anywhere. We now have computers and software powerful enough to process all this information. The price mechanism is an ancient, inefficient and slow way to transmit information compared to what we could achieve today if we really wanted to.
People have all kinds of incentives other than profit. People wouldn't just lie down and die if they couldn't make money by owning things. The failures of past attemps at planning had more to do with the limited technology they had and the poor decision-making structure that centralized power and allowed too much corruption. That doesn't mean planning will always have that kind of a result.
> a government not influenced by money
This is impossible in capitalism, which will always over time create concentrations of capital large enough that influencing the people in government will become affordable, no matter how hard you make it. Government is just people, and there'll always be ways to influence people using money. In a well designed government it would be hard and expensive, but you can never make it impossible. Eventually a corporation or an individual will become so wealthy that they can afford it, and at some point conditions will arise where influencing the government will be a cheaper way to increase profits than fairly competing in the market.
> The local knowledge problem might have been an issue with central planning a few decades ago, but I don't think it is anymore.
I think you are right in principle. The signals can be centrally computed, if all the relevant edge data was somehow made available to the central compute. I see two practical problems. What is the actual probability that a government won't royally screw it up? I would give a pessimistic assessment given the lack of theory and lack of empirical case studies. If a government wanted to run a small opt-in test case, I would not be opposed to it, but I would expect it to fail. In any case, why would you want to risk it? Why not just do market socialism?
The other practical problem is the incentive question. I read what you wrote, but I can't help but feel it's a bit hand-wavey. Maybe you have a personal constitution that means you don't need to work for profit. But I believe most people, including myself, would only do the minimum if no personal gain was involved, unless it was a truly unusual circumstance like someone invaded my country which stoked nationalist fervor. But in a normal economy in a normal country, I do not believe you will be able to sustain high output or high innovation.
> This is impossible in capitalism
It's an ideal that's impossible, but you can asymptote rather close, there are a number of social democracies (which are mixed economy, i.e. capitalist) in Europe that attest to that.
> Why not just do market socialism?
Because markets are based on competition, and that causes a lot of issues on it's own, even in the absence of capitalism. It's because of competition that we consume too much resources, have wars between nations, etc. I don't think we can get rid of a lot of the problems we have unless we start actually planning long term and co-operating instead of competing. I agree with you that it'd be hard and risky to build a working planned economy, and that it'd be best to start with small scale tests. I just don't see how humanity will survive unless we start planning at a very large scale and stop competing with each other. A global planned economy is the only way to do that.
> But I believe most people, including myself, would only do the minimum if no personal gain was involved
I don't think all personal gain needs to be removed in a planned economy. There could be different rewards for different tasks, if achieving the plan requires it. What is not necessary is the ridiculously large differences between rewards. It's enough that the reward is somewhat motivating, there's no need to have some tasks be thousands or millions of times more rewarding than others. If there are tasks that wouldn't get done in the absence of rewards so large, surely they are rare and worth leaving undone for the other benefits of a planned economy.
> there are a number of social democracies (which are mixed economy, i.e. capitalist) in Europe that attest to that.
I live in one of the best managed ones, and still we're slowly but surely losing our government to the influence of capital. Media is concentrating, worker rights and unions are being attacked, etc. It takes a long time in a well designed system, but eventually capital will win. Even if we manage to get a government that tries to protect the rights of people over capital, the realities of a global economy based on competition don't allow that anymore. If we try, we lose to countries that don't and then we can no longer afford it.
I don't believe there's any connection between market competition and security competition, even though they both belong to the abstract category of "competition".
Conflict deaths were higher before modern capitalism, and were the highest per capita in hunter gatherer societies that don't have the social construction of private property. The 20th century communist states weren't more peaceful than capitalist states. The level of brutalization was often more extreme, like the Holodomor or the ethnic cleansing of Tartars from Crimea perpetrated by Stalin. China being no exception as the invasion of Vietnam shows. Or the agrarian communist Pol Pot and his genocide of his own people with a focus on ethnic Vietnamese. Or compare the brutality of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to the US invasion of Afghanistan. Conflict deaths were the lowest in all of human history in the most capitalist era of human history, the 1990s, during American unipolar hegemony.
The primary driver of conflict is the absence of a stable polar power, whether that power is capitalist or communist, and the resulting security competition that naturally emerges between actors with different interests when they're put inside this anarchic power vacuum with nobody to protect them but themselves, causing paranoia and preemption. The easiest path to return to a low conflict world would be just to return to American hegemony as it was in the 1990s before Russian imperial belligerence and Chinese revisionism around Taiwan were even possible due to American unipolar deterrence being unquestionable. It would be a capitalist world, but it would certainly also be the most peaceful world in human history, notwithstanding the relatively small number of conflicts that would still occur.
The liberal perspective on all this would be that the biological drive to compete with our fellow people is not something that can be suppressed, because it's an evolved trait that is part and parcel of existing as a primate. It's something to channel into less destructive activities like sports, games, or interests, and it's something to control and shape and unleash with regulations and systems. And no liberal would say that this is a perfect state of affairs, only that it's the least bad state of affairs that can be practically achieved given our biology and the real-world constraints that we need to work with.
Security competition is about securing resources. Markets are a mechanism for deciding who owns and how to use those resources. They are very closely related. If one country gets competitive advantage in the global market for owning a piece of land with some resource, that creates an incentive for conflict over that piece of land. If instead the two countries were a part of the same planned economic system that distributes resources in a fair way towards a plan that both countries have agreed upon, there would be no such incentive. There wouldn't even be a need for separate nations to exist, as the primary purpose of those is to secure resources in a competitive environment to your group of people.
You're right that conflict did exist before capitalism and even markets, but the systems before capitalism were also based on competition. Tribes competed for hunting grounds, kings competed for land, etc. They didn't come together and agree upon a plan that would best provide for all people equally. They had no means to do so. With modern technology we now do. Even the conflict within communist countries I would say was due to competition over positions of power and competition against countries trying to fight communism. A working planned economy would need to prevent such positions of power from existing to prevent that from happening. We'd need to design ways to make good decisions using direct democracy to avoid centralizing power and the competition over that power.
There might be a biological drive behind greed and competition, but I don't think that's a reason to use them as the base of our economic and political systems. We also have a biological drive to co-operate with each other, we should try create more systems based on that.
> If instead the two countries were a part of the same planned economic system
What you are proposing is a unipolar world order. That would create peace, but not due to its economic system. The shared security architecture is what causes peace. Any unipolar order is good enough for this task; see American capitalist hegemony in the 1990s. You can even have world peace with a mix of capitalist and communist states, as long as there is a unipolar security architecture that they're all part of.
Ask yourself, why is there no security competition between Texas and California? They are both capitalist entities, they could have been separate nation states had history run its course differently. The reason is the shared security architecture of the federal state that sits on top of them both. Their economic system is not relevant, but the power structure they exist in is. Why is there no security competition between the UK and France? It's because NATO sits on top of them both as the dominant polar security architecture. Why was there security competition between communist China and communist Russia during the Sino-Soviet split? It wasn't because of their economic system, it was the lack of a security architecture sitting on top of them both as China grew in power to the point it became a challenge to Russia.
> Security competition is about securing resources.
I would slightly deemphasize the role of resource competition. Competition over resources does happen, but it's often instrumental in nature. Hitler invaded the USSR to secure oil, but the oil wasn't the point, being able to continue the war economy on the Western front while having little access to indigenous oil was the point. Japan did a blitz through South East Asia in pursuit of oil in response to the US oil embargo, but again the oil wasn't the point, securing oil was instrumental to sustaining the imperial war machine. Even conflicts seemingly over land ownership often have a security component that is not well appreciated. You need land to ensure strategic depth, to preempt future belligerency, to ensure hydrosecurity, or to deny key staging points or radar locations. All of these zero-sum motivations for conflict disappear with a unipolar security architecture that subsumes all peoples.
But why is there a need for a security architecture in the first place? Because if you don't have it, some competing entity will come and take the resources that you cannot protect. In the absence of such a competing entity, there'd be no need for a security architecture. No one would come take your resources if everyone was equally a part of managing those resources. So yes, a security force strong enough to enforce peace among competing countries and businesses is one way to achieve peace, but another is to remove the need for such architectures altogether by getting rid of competition.
Of course if we did manage to create a global planned economy with no need for security, there's still a chance that some group of people would establish some entity that would try to take a bigger share for itself than what the planned system would provide them. That would mean there'd have to be some form of security even without competition to prevent us from "devolving" into a competitive state again. You might be right. We would not be able to get rid of conflict just by getting rid of competition, we'd need a security architecture to enforce it, and it could do that for any system. Maybe there'd be less need for enforcement in a system without competition, but you are right.
So a planned economy might not be a way to achieve lasting peace, but it'd still be a way to avoid the other issues caused by a competition based economy.
> Hitler invaded the USSR to secure oil, but the oil wasn't the point, being able to continue the war economy on the Western front while having little access to indigenous oil was the point.
Sure, but what was the point of expanding German land to begin with? Was it not to secure more resources for the German people and its leadership? Would they have attacked if there was no resources to be gained from it? If the reward for victory was that Hitler gets to see a bigger country on a map, bigger numbers under statistics of the population of Germany, some respect or whatever, but nothing in terms of resources, would the war have started? Wasn't one of the triggers the anger caused by the reparations that Germany was forced to pay for ww1?
Who decides the clever and lean regulations? How do we maintain the best ones when power changes hands in government?
Human nature is not greed though. Human nature is very very varied and adaptive. And the historical norm of human nature is one of sharing, community and support, as much as such a claim can even be made. And human nature is subject to the whole bigger system in which it lives.
Capitalism is in many ways such a system, one that is built around driving the worst parts of human nature. And the thing is the profit motive becoming pathological is not a bug. This is the key defining feature of the system. Capitalism really isnt even about markets. Its about consumption, and producing things specifically to sell them in order to make some markup. The goal is specifically to find ways to make money, and stuff like fulfilling peoples needs, quality, workers rights, and regulations are clearly things that are getting in the way.
Exactly. I can't express the degree to which people thinking we can fix it with just one more surgical precision law drive me up the wall. They've clearly never tried to do anything regulated.
The second, third and Nth order consequences of the sum of the shortsighted quick fixes these people have peddled result in a world where only sociopathic corporate entities can do anything, and of course those entities are incredibly "greedy", they wouldn't be able to remain profitable if they weren't.
Those vacant main street store fronts (metaphorical or literal, your pick) are only half vacant because the PE fueled megacorp that owns them doesn't deem it worthwhile to rent them. The other half are vacant because the cost of jumping through the regulatory hoops to rent them in a lawful manner is unjustifiable for the small time owner.
> I can't express the degree to which people thinking we can fix it with just one more surgical precision law drive me up the wall.
I think there is misattribution here. Us neoliberals do not believe that things can be easily improved through incrementalism. We believe that the alternative methods proposed by other political/economic systems lack credibility, and so we are stuck with the least bad option that reality has forced upon us. We also believe that things can get much, much worse, which is not a belief that's emotionally salient to other camps, who we see as assuming that things can only get better, when what usually happens is some tinpot authoritarian takes over and everything gets worse despite the naive ideals of the political entrepreneurs who tried to cause change. We also perceive a deep ignorance of basic economic facts to be commonplace in other camps; people who push for proven bad ideas like rent control, and this is discrediting.
Iterating on less bad still goes bad with time. The fact that you've boiled the frog slowly doesn't mean the frog is any less boiled than if some extremist shows up and sticks their dick in various sectors of the economy in a short time period.
If anything the slow boil is worse because it more thoroughly cements the dysfunction as people eek out various niches within it.
The "neoliberal" approach that you are advocating for has been done for the past 50-100yr depending on were you want to measure the start and the results are all around us. Just because things can get worse doesn't mean the current approach and it's peddlers aren't all some combination of wrong and/or evil.
Fractional central planning, which is basically what the current approach aims for with it's carrot and stick policy solution to literally everything, is still central planning. It just gets co-opted and fails slower so instead of the 2nd or 3rd iteration of decision makers sending it all to hell it's the 12th or 13th or whatever. Whatever the level of sustainable central planning is is clearly less than we have now.
You're a victim of capitalist realism (we all are tbh).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism
Neoliberalism is unable to address the growing inequalities of our societies (in fact, it is often to blame for them). This, in turn, is driving us toward right-wing authoritarianism as populists are taking advantage of the growing frustration of the middle class.
Fascism is the logical end point of neoliberalism. It is the time when things are so bad you need to find scapegoats to prevent the rise of class consciousness and continue financial liberalization.
My view is that neoliberalism is not the "least bad" ideology, it is a slow and sinister destruction of our society for the benefit of the capital owners, hiding behind a mask of humanism that slips off the minute it becomes inconvenient to keep wear it.
> Human nature (greed) is never the problem, because it cannot be changed.
Citation needed.
>I would argue that greed is the problem, not profit.
I would point out that's precisely what the "private equity firm"--is that true or just a buzzword? no private equity group is taking this library private--is saying about the current library, that the greed of the unionized employees is running the library for their own benefit and at great cost to library and at the expense of the public, and it could be run more efficiently. So, you agree with them at least that much.
>Somewhere along the line people forgot the lessons of the 20th century. They forgot that profit goes beyond a line on the current financial statement.
huh? that wasn't "the lesson of the 20th century". if anything, the 20th century represents democracy and market capitalism's greatest joint achievement, with much less disease and starvation and much more freedom at the end vs the beginning.
you live in one of the greatest times to be alive, and all you can do is complain. when and where from the past would you rather live out your life expectancy of half what it is now, coupled with no HN to bitch on?
Totally agree. I think another angle to look at it is not "a couple sectors" but "a certain scale", as suggested by your remark about how companies consolidate. When businesses are small and need every customer, they are motivated to do a good job at what they do, build goodwill, protect their reputation. The larger they become, the more they tend to work against their customers rather than for them. They cross multiple markets, making them less responsive to the demands of any one. They become "too big to fail". And so on.
What we see in the modern era is a system in which success is defined as becoming large enough that your customers have no other option but to deal with you. That's not a healthy system.
You see that scale problem everywhere. Once a business has become large, it no longer cares about “small” costs like unused buildings. That’s basically the reason so many buildings in towns and cities can be left unused for decades.
The impact it has on that town is often huge. But for the business, it’s just a small overhead. A small landlord couldn’t afford to leave their asset unproductive. A multinational conglomerate can.
The death of local high streets is in part due to the unwillingness of landlords to actually rent their properties out for market rate.
I don't understand how massive corporations are both ruthless slash and burn cost-cutting profit optimizers and sloppy businessmen who don't care about the small things, even in aggregate.
What's the economics of not renting out high street retail properties? There must be millions of them across the first world, with a theoretical annual rent roll in the 11 or 12 figures. Are they owned by a million multinational conglomerates foregoing a hundred grand each? In that case we are stretching the definition of "multinational conglomerate". Or are they concentrated in the hands of the same hundred companies? In that case they are each missing out on ten billion a year in opportunity. There isn't a company in the world where you couldn't make your name as Head of Global Unused Property managing ten billion a year of revenue.
I don't have an answer for this either, but it must be more complicated than "they're all owned by multinationals who don't care about such small numbers" - the point of multinational companies is that those numbers are no longer small at scale.
Well, one relevant angle may just be that the companies are big enough to have an incentive calculus that's not aligned with the effects on local areas where such unused businesses are. They can maybe take some kind of tax writeoff, hold it as a hedge in case land values rise, etc. But the basic idea is they are using the property in a manner that crosscuts multiple markets, whereas for average citizens in the town with the vacant building, it's just a vacant building. It's not good for the scale of business operations to diverge so much from the scale of ordinary humans.
Many commercial properties are on relatively short-term mortgages and are remortgaged regularly. If they rent it out cheaply, then the paper 'value' of the building has dropped, which can make it difficult or impossible to remortgage. It's why you see so many high rent but 'free for the first year' deals - it technically isn't reducing the rent on paper, but many of the tenants vanish 13 months after moving in
I hear people say this but I don't understand why mortgage lenders would be fooled by this. How is renting something out for the low price of $X "less" than not renting it out at all? Wouldn't a property that isn't rented and produces no income be considered the least valuable of all?
> Just look at health insurance companies for a prime example: they make profit by denying claims.
Ok but why do people pick those insurance companies?
We see this across the board too and not just insurance companies. Governments low to pick the lowest bidder who then has massive cost overruns which has to put them above the second lowest bid in the end. Why is counter party risk never accounted for?
> Ok but why do people pick those insurance companies?
Because they are bundled with their job and most people don't have a choice?
Does HR get their own health insurance?
Is there a way to reward and incentivize improving human well being?
Perhaps a society where all income comes from the government in proportion to how much one improves the overall well being of society?
(Yes, it's difficult to measure this objectively, and even harder to agree on what the priorities for societal well being are)
Germany has a different structure for company ownership than the USA. Members representing relevant stakeholders (employees, the community, environment, etc.) must be present on the board and advocate for their interests.
UBI would go a long ways to enforcing democracy. Money talks, so just give people money. Everything else is too abstract. We can't seem to encode justice into law but at least if everyone got UBI it would be harder to oppress poor people
(half serious)
It’s not difficult, it’s impossible under freedom of religion and just independent thought generally.
One person’s “well being” might be measured by how many wives and children you have. Another’s might be education level and physical fitness. Another’s could be financial independence.
These all clash with each other in fundamentally incompatible ways.
> And with fewer competitors, it’s easier and easier for entrenched
so the problem isn't with profit after all, it's with low competition? So what is causing the lack of competition in the sector? Why can't that problem be fixed?
> A focus on profit is so frequently completely opposed to human wellbeing and a flourishing society.
Not surprising considering the profit is taken from people in the society.
Public-private "partnerships" backed by private equity will always raise prices, cut costs arbitrarily, reduce service, take out loans, and saddle the organization with debt to pay themselves huge dividends before driving it into bankruptcy. This is what happens when corrupt, unregulated capitalism is allowed to run amok and have zero skin in the game except to extract maximum profit like vampires.
Health insurance isn’t a great example. Profits are capped relative to premium costs so denying claims isnt a good strategy.
The only way denying claims can become a profit booster is to deny enough that premiums can be lowered enough to bring over more new members than was lost in revenue through the premium discount.
So denied claims come from people shopping for the cheapest insurance coverage possible.
how do we fight this?
There is even worse, genocide profiteers. [1]
[1] https://www.un.org/unispal/document/a-hrc-59-23-from-economy...
Conceptually neoliberal societys do not have a strong way to seperate community and social goals from economic ones, because their very philosophy is that prosperity creates social improvement.
Meanwhile everyone is living in low trust economic zones with no community observable, other than anonymous services.
this narrative is basically a lie
1) Americans spend less than OECD average out of pocket as a percentage of healthcare costs. This is much larger in absolute terms but the multiplier - cost of healthcare is nearly entirely due to provider costs.
2) Health outcomes are really different between states despite having basically the same system. demographically controlled iirc outcomes are not different and sometimes better (e.g. japanese americans).
3) Insurance company profits are pretty low relative to cost of healthcare. while the bureaucracy is more expensive its not "catastrophically" by any means and iirc there are oecd countries with similar overhead although im too lazy to search on myvphone.
4) Rationing healthcare has to and does happen in all advanced economies. again modulo cost in the us, id rather it happen via money than government or inforrmal scarcity (like in Canada).
4a) Frankly while i dont have evidence for this 4a, lookinng at us spending by age (and eg the enormous money usg spends on kidney dialysis for people thay mostly just die in a few years anyway), I wonder if an important reason US providers are so expensive is, we ration limited supply properly for most people but then don't ration keeping a bedridden grandma alive for 6 more months at extreme cost, cause hey, the govt pays.
> Just look at health insurance companies for a prime example: they make profit by denying claims
Despite being from Europe, I find this to be a shocking and erroneous interpretation.
Clearly, health insurances have the duty to allocate limited resources (“premiums”) across members. Denying and accepting claims is the mechanism to that end. Accepting all claims would increase premiums and reduce membership (by pricing people out). Would that an ideal state? Clearly not.
The point was not that all claims should be accepted. It's that adding a profit incentive to denials leads to worse outcomes.
Healthcare debates in the United States are difficult because so many assume that insurers have very high profit margins and that arbitrarily denying claims is the reason they have high profit margins.
If you look at the actual profit margins it’s low single digit percentages. You could eliminate profits altogether and virtually nothing would change. We even have non-profit insurers to look at
It’s strange how the high prices of drugs and services aren’t drawing the ire of people who complain about costs. Drug prices are nearly 3X higher here than international averages and doctors here also earn a lot more with in many cases fewer restrictions on prescribing or offering services than in most EU countries.
The meme that insurance company denials are generating huge profits comes mostly from the public murder of a health insurance CEO last year. For some reason people assumed that insurance companies and their profits must therefore be the core problem with high costs, without making the effort to see where the money actually goes in our health care system.
As you said, there is no health care system which does not have approval processes, deny requests deemed unnecessary, require step therapy, and establish standards of care.
> If you look at the actual profit margins it’s low single digit percentages.
Didn't I see somewhere that that's an artifact of Hollywood-style accounting? If you spin up a sub-business then have that sub-business charge high fees for services you can't live without, the main business might even be losing money!
What's indisputable is:
* in America, we pay more for less healthcare
* most of the money does not go to the doctors and nurses actually providing services
* it also does not go to research, which is funded elsewhere (assuming it keeps being funded at all)
* it's often possible to pay less for a service if you pay the provider directly rather get your insurance involved
I’m not sure where you’re getting your info, but it seems like well over half of US healthcare spending is on wages for doctors, nurses, and other patient-facing staff (such as RMTs, techs, and physios). Administrative and drug costs are definitely above the OECD average, but not the sole drivers.
Here is one source, but there are many more: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/03/u-s-pays-more...
> If you look at the actual profit margins it’s low single digit percentages. You could eliminate profits altogether and virtually nothing would change. We even have non-profit insurers to look at
Look at administrative overhead instead of profit. People understand that there are problems with the system, and maybe they’re misattributing the problems, sure.
The "profit" isn't money in the bank. It's overpaid bullshit jobs and work and perks that benefit the people in and around the organization.
It makes me understand better how the horrors of the history books came to be when the same exact demographics who'll complain about nominally nonprofit hospitals or educational institutions paying their people insane sums and doing random BS to burn money or comparable behavior from charity entities set up as tax shields by the wealthy refuse to see that having a profit cap creates an incentive for the insurance industry to behave the same way.
That second paragraph is a wild ride. I don’t think you’ve gotten a good understanding of history if this is how you’re connecting things.
they’re the obvious scapegoat so they get blamed. i’m ok with that.
the US needs a healthcare system that doesn’t have a profit motive. (Or limit it to a second, premium market)
While the critique is valid, that does not offer a path to the solution.
Utilitarism is the ruling moral philosophy, and the only possible countermeasure is externalities but that depends on an effective government which is even more unlikely that asking for ethical behavior to corporations.
That may be widely believed but there are plenty of government institutions that actually function well. Libraries are a good example.
What’s more: the belief in govt “inefficiency” is one of the hardest to overcome factors that makes it hard to build good institutions, leading to a vicious cycle.
Exactly, people who think the government is inefficient has never worked at any company of scale ever. All large organizations are inefficient.
A major problem of the US is just corruption. If people went to jail for things like congressional insider trading, we’d solve a lot of these issues.
All large organizations are inefficient.
I agree, and that’s the case for dismantling as much of the federal government as possible - it is too big to work. Break up Apple, Google, Amazon, Washington DC.
You’re forgetting the corollary - all small organizations are also inefficient, just at different things.
It’s all trade offs - do you want everyone in your country to have a baseline education that can be relied on as a given but perhaps it suffers in its administration and effectiveness? Or are you OK with pockets of your country having tremendous quality of education and others having very poor quality, as an example.
Public utilities and services are the default and work well in the majority of developed countries. This is true for everything from local transport to water distribution. As the joke says "universal healthcare is so difficult to get right that only all developed countries except the US have managed to put it in place".
Not to mention all the developing countries that have universal healthcare.
> Just look at health insurance companies for a prime example: they make profit by denying claims.
This has been repeated so many times that I think people don’t understand just how small the profit margins are for health insurers. Low to middle single digit percentages. As low as 2-3% in recent years, and much lower than the average S&P 500 corporation.
There are also non-profit insurance companies out there. Their rates are not appreciably different, as you’d expect after seeing how low the profit margins are in for-profit insurers.
I also think people don’t realize that countries with nationalized health care also deny procedures, have pre-approval processes, require step therapy, and will not authorize procedures they don’t believe to be medically necessary or to have enough evidence. There is no health care system in the world which will simply approve and pay for every request.
So while health insurer profit margins are convenient bogeyman, if you deleted their profits entirely from the system it wouldn’t move the needle on costs. It also wouldn’t open the floodgates for approving everything, because no health care system will allow unlimited services. The amount of excess and unnecessary care would be astronomically expensive. I do agree that we need a more robust system in place for ensuring that incorrect denials don’t happen, but health insurance profit margins are barely a blip on the overall cost of health care in the United States.
It’s a combination of high prices for services, American’s unusually high utilization of health care services, and very high rates of drug prescribing that mostly contribute to the cost. I think most Americans would be surprised to discover that a lot of nations with nationalized health care would also be restrictive in their access to many services and prescription drugs. For as much as we talk about insurance companies denying claims, Americans still get far more services and prescriptions than most of their counterparts in other countries.
i have no doubt that other countries have some problems in their healthcare systems too, but i think you are downplaying a few key points:
1) united healthcare made 90 billion dollars gross profit in the last 12mo, and that's only one health insurance company. claiming that it's not a great business at a 2-3% profit margin ignores the scale of money involved, and ignores that the customer for health insurance is truly captive.
2) you're right that america has very high prices in healthcare. doesn't it seem bad that private insurance companies are incentivized to make things cost as much as possible so they can skim that 2-3% off the top? insurance companies negotiate and set prices for services and pharmaceuticals. they now own the pharmacy benefit management companies that would normally be incentivized to negotiate for lower prices.
i would expect in a public health care system that rejects procedures, they would follow consistent guidelines and rules. american health insurance companies will arbitrarily reject a percentage of procedures that they know they should be accepting in order to keep their profit margin in the right range.
i think it's hard for me to see the argument that health insurance companies are a net-positive or even net-neutral party in the united states. i don't think it's a coincidence that we have some of the highest prices and some of the worst outcomes.
> private insurance companies are incentivized to make things cost as much as possible
> will arbitrarily reject a percentage of procedures that they know they should be accepting in order to keep their profit margin in the right range
So which one is it? Do they want to spend more or less?
> i don't think it's a coincidence that we have some of the highest prices and some of the worst outcomes.
It’s not a coincidence either that doctor compensation is one of the highest in the world.
The insurer margins can be whatever small but when the same company also owns the hospital and drug distribution it doesnt matter.
Somebody in the process makes extreme margins.
Also americans cant be at same time avoiding going to hospital because of costs and “still get far more services than most of their counterparts in other countries”
Believe it or not there are countries where there is mandatory health insurance (your employer or you or state have to pay it) and doctors dont look at costs because they dont really know them. They for sure try to not be wasteful but nobody is second guessing obviously best treatment because it costs 40% more.
You are just making things up to fit what you already believe. We have a few huge publicly traded companies in this space that file with the SEC but reality is not what you are interested in.
What i am making up? That US healthcare has high margins?
“ study from Yale School of Medicine (YSM) found that large U.S. health care corporations spent 95% of their net income — totaling $2.6 trillion — on shareholder payouts over the past two decades, raising questions about industry priorities and their impact on patient care and affordability”
> doctors dont look at costs because they dont really know them
They know enough to prescribe only the pre-approved drugs and they know that things will happen at due time when the already budgeted people and equipment are available.
Sure they prescribe pre-approved drugs. They even prefer some brands which they know or are “sponsored by”. But afaik they dont care if they prescribe something expensive because it doesnt cost them anything.
https://www.england.nhs.uk/medicines-2/items-which-should-no...
Items which should not be routinely prescribed in primary care
This policy guidance includes medicines:
[…]
that are clinically effective but not the most cost-effective intervention available
that are clinically effective but deemed a low priority for NHS funding.
Prescribers are advised that no new patients should be started on these items, that they should be deprescribed for current patients and that, where possible, suitable alternatives should be identified for patients.
Whatever. Simply come to a decent EU country and see how much it costs you for a bad cold or a cancer. Then compare that to the same event in the US.
I've heard a horror stories about NHS and Canada's Medicare. Their systems are backed up, so treatment goes untreated for long periods of time.
Presumably healthcare professionals are performing as many surgeries as they can per day. Just because one person was denied, doesn't mean another person isn't approved.
For example, I'd rather get cancer in the USA than UK: https://www.politico.eu/article/cancer-europe-america-compar...
We're about to do to Medicare what the UK has been doing to the NHS. Government programs don't work when you cut all their funding. There are plenty of normal countries with functional healthcare systems.
when funding is cut, do surgeons perform less surgeries or the supply of healthcare remain the same, but there is lower demand due to limited access?
Leaving aside that the article is about the EU and largely says less about where is better to have cancer and more about where you're statistically more likely to be an old smoker and get cancer, it says it's better to have cancer in the US when you're over 65 and therefore get the socialised healthcare.
Get cancer aged 25 and you may be in some trouble.
As long as you can get past your GP and actually get the diagnosis the system works pretty well. Get onto the Two Week Wait, and you automatically will if your diagnostic test is positive or falls into the needs further investigation category, and that's highly competitive with, say American time to intervention: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6396925
The typical UK "horror story" fuck-up is your GP fobs you off over and over until you turn up in (overwhelmed due to people who can't get GP or social care) A&E with advanced and now-incurable cancer, they scan you, say "why the fuck haven't you been referred months ago that's atrocious", and then you die. GPs are all private in the UK and get charged more when they refer to hospitals. Either it's a traditional small partnership where the GPs themselves are invested or it's a kind of consultancy where a company employs GPs on contract and puts pressure on them to improve returns/cut costs. Either way, that's where the profit incentive comes in and coincidentally, this area is what kills people.
The GPs aren't themselves at fault mostly, they also need more funding and staff, but both have been cut drastically. I am, however, deeply suspicious that companies cut from the same cloth as Serco, Capita and G4S will not have patient outcomes anywhere in mind except under "cost centre".
Did you read the article?
A big reason the US does better is Medicare (socialized medicine) not because we suffer for-profit insurance.
I'm interested in your point, but do you have any articles backing up your statements?
Oh bloody hell.
It astounds me how so many people can have such strong opinions about systems they have so little experience with.
I've lived long term in 4 countries (Canada, USA, Japan, Germany) and have dealt extensively with the medical systems in all of them (plus some experiences in Portugal and France).
Every system has its warts, and this is the first thing that naysayers will latch onto, of course. People love to use tu-quoque as a defense mechanism. "See? They're just as bad as we are because you have to wait sometimes, and look at this extreme case right here! It's probably even WORSE than us!"
The fact is, none of the systems are really that bad (with the EXCEPTION of the American system). There's a reason why travel insurance companies have two tiers: All of the world EXCEPT America, and all of the world INCLUDING America.
Have I had to wait for a procedure in Canada? Sure, but they do a pretty decent job of triaging, so yeah outside of the HORROR STORIES (of which you can find anywhere if you dig enough), it's pretty damn good. In Japan I paid a percentage of costs (which are pretty damn reasonable). In France I actually didn't have insurance, so I had to pay FULL price when I came down with pneumonia: 50 euros for the doctor and the antibiotics. In Portugal, I caught COVID, and got treatment within 2 hours of arriving at the hospital in Lisbon.
If you haven't actually been in the medical system of another country, you don't know what you're talking about.
> If you haven't actually been in the medical system of another country, you don't know what you're talking about.
Being in the medical system doesn’t give you a leg to stand on either.
I grew up with insurance and have insurance now in the US. I’ve never had problems getting medical care and the worst year was ~$1000 out of pocket.
The conclusion from that isn’t that it’s a good system for everyone and nobody who complains knows what they are talking about. It’s that anecdotes of good or bad treatment are meaningless.
>Being in the medical system doesn’t give you a leg to stand on either.
If anything it gives one an incentive to see the problem in a way that doesn't threaten their paycheck.
Every nurse will say they're over worked. Every paper pusher will say their job is essential. The guy selling overpriced gloves to the hospital, the landscaper making the grounds look like a country club, they all have justifications as do the people paying them. And they're all on the take to some degree. The whole system is one of top to bottom plausibly deniable unneeded expenditure. Nobody not at the very top is getting rich off it just because so many are in on it. But the fact that they're not getting rich doesn't mean it's not a waste of everyone's money.
> I also think people don’t realize that countries with nationalized health care also deny procedures, have pre-approval processes, require step therapy, and will not authorize procedures they don’t believe to be medically necessary or to have enough evidence
Lines in private medical care are shorter because people with no insurance don't get in line.
You can assert that but the US spends more while having worse outcomes.
As long as you have money or good insurance US is WAY way better than pretty much every other country in that regards.
Having seen the results of both, I think i'll take the Australian current system.
Interesting pattern here: manufacture a crisis (book banning complaints → funding cuts), then propose private "efficiency" as the solution. Meanwhile, this library was founded in 1799, is the second-oldest in Virginia, just won the 2024 state Library of the Year award, and had 400k+ checkouts last year. Hardly sounds broken.
I walk the corner to the rubble that used to be a library/ Line up to the mind cemetery now/ What we don't know keeps the contracts alive and movin'/ They don't gotta burn the books they just remove 'em
It worked so well in Europe with train companies, energy companies and local utilities.
And they keep going for it: in France the neoliberal government is pushing further the privatisation of railroad (they ask the national company to invest in the shared infrastructure, but spare the competition from this burden; then they will probably point out how the private competitors are more cost efficient), subway and buses in Paris, they renew the private management of public funded highways despite them being a cash machine, they let the public hospitals understaffed to the point that many medium sized cities do not have 24/7 access anymore to emergency services, and now many colleagues and friends of mine prefer to go in private hospitals
In American politics, this has been an incredibly successful strategy, most notably starting with Reagan. It's called "starving the beast" [1]. The playbook is simple:
1. Cut taxes
2. "Pay" for those tax cuts by cutting expenditure;
3. Those programs begin to fail because of the funding cuts;
4. Use those failures to justify further cuts, usually by privatizing something or some form of public-private partnership, which is nothing more than a transfer of government wealth to the already-wealthy.
We saw something similar play out recently with Jane Street in India [2], which seems to boil down to market manipulation between options and the underlying securities.
Back in the 1980s we had corporate raiders who were famous for buying up companies that were trading below book value and then simply breaking them up for parts and selling those parts. I'm sure this went as far as corporate raiders manipulating the price.
Private equity is the latest form of this cancer. Here's the PE playbook:
1. Raise a bunch of money;
2. Buy some company with a large amount of debt, a so-called leveraged buyout ("LBO");
3. Once you control the company, take out massive loans on the company's assets;
4. Sell off any real estate holdings, often to some interested party who most certainly isn't at arms length, possibly for a discounted price, to raise further capital then lease back those holdings you need, ideally with complicated leases that hie the true future cost;
5. Use those loans to pay back the original investors and loans;
6. Sell the debt-ridden husk to whoever is stupid enough to buy it.
Now (6) is the tricky part because you have to make it look like the company is profitable, that you've added value by cutting costs or otherwise increased efficiency. And you do that with complicated debt. Sort of like ARMs in the subprime crisis.
I cannot think of a single success story with PE that has created a successful company that hasn't imploded. I belive most PE funds lose money too. Why anyone would buy a company that a PE fund has gotten its hooks into is beyond me.
I suspect you can make a market-beating fund that simply follows the index but does not buy any PE-infected company.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
[2]: https://www.ft.com/content/6789512f-8775-450b-b0a6-9d9d0c371...
> Why anyone would buy a company that a PE fund has gotten its hooks into is beyond me.
From my own life experiences, I believe that, across a population, there is no correlation between the amount of money people have and their individual rational decision making ability.
> I cannot think of a single success story with PE that has created a successful company that hasn't imploded.
Safeway had a leveraged buyout in the 80s, and was so successful the merger/acquisition with Kroger was blocked due to monopoly concerns. Hilton also had a leveraged buyout.
PE exists to buy bargain bin companies and extract maximum value from them. Sometimes that’s actually rehabilitating the company. Usually they are just the best at milking a dying cow.
2 examples, one from half a century ago?
I can’t think of one
Here are two
Why only two?
Because it almost never happens.
By this point, I suspect that PE is simply a sophisticated liquidation service. Where an owner doesn't want to deal with a company anymore and want to cash out, but can't just easily sell everything. By this perspective, any fault on a company's discontinuation lies solely with whoever sold it to a PE as it's him who actually wants to kill it.
I consider PE to be equivalent to a crypto rugpull.
There's PE the theory and PE the practice.
The theory is that the buyers improve operational efficiency, restructure the business, dispose of underperforming assets, etc and "transform" the business. As another commenter reminded me, there are a handful of examples of this, most notably HIlton. And any of these successes will throw around "operational efficiency" a lot. Maybe Blackstone really did massively improve Hilton's operations. If so, I still consider it an outlier.
PE in practice seems much closer to the 1980s corporate raiders. It's done by people who have zero understanding of the business and zero interest in it. They've essentially decided to do a rugpull and ripoff the new owners so the "financial engineering" is how to structure the exploding debt in such a way that the new buyers don't realize it before it's too late.
That seems to be the case with many high-profile cases such as Toys'R'Us and Red Lobster.
I personally think this model of loading up a company with debt to pay off the LBO should be illegal.
"cannot think of a single success story with PE that has created a successful company that hasn't imploded. I belive most PE funds lose money too. Why anyone would buy a company that a PE fund has gotten its hooks into is beyond me."
It's funny that the narrative where a bunch of generally smart well connected people renowned for their greed set money on fire for decades doesn't make you rethink your priors.
There's actually a fair amount of research.
Pure performance https://www.nber.org/digest/jul12/private-equity-performance
Effects on employment and productivity E.g. https://www.nber.org/digest/feb20/economic-effects-private-e... Notable numbers for me are for public vs private firms. Apparently principal - agent problem is a real thing!
Tangential on how betting your own money is more efficient than other's https://www.nber.org/papers/w13061
For anyone curious about what books the group wanted banned:
https://www.advocate.com/news/front-royal-samuels-library-co...
Here's an opinion pledge where they stated their demands: https://royalexaminer.com/parents-matter-make-the-pledge/
It is worth noting that per the linked article below[0]. The library has a system for preventing readers under the age of 18 from accessing the books in the New Adult section of the library, and it's one that requires parents to opt into their child having access to those materials.
[0]: https://www.nvdaily.com/nvdaily/catholic-library-supporters-...
Books:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/91010302-you-need-to-chi... ref: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16YUZFgYY2/
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53241064-this-is-why-the... ref: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/16kKwC3PDD/
Found the list: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vRzUaZiy2h4gi-c_...
The library should serve the entire community, not a loud minority or even exclusively the majority. If 20% of the community wants LGBTQ books, 30% don't, and 50% don't care, why should the 30% be able to decide that the other 20% shouldn't have access to these books? The majority should not be able to strip rights that the minority should have access to. Tyranny of the majority is a real thing.
I find it hard to believe that even a plurality wants these books banned. Do we have proportions, or is it just a number of complaints?
It's the loudness of the minority that wants them banned. That, and the fact that they are often people who have enough privilege (land owning, ability to take off work to go to council meetings, and (most importantly) own a business) to be able to throw around to get there way.
Happens a lot at universities and non profits. A big donor will sometimes only agree to donate if certain conditions are met, and as a result can strong arm the other party into whatever they want. The public sector is the same; At the local level it's often business owners that have enough influence over the local economy.
There's a whole essay by N. Taleb analyzing this phenomenon: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
This all would be so much easier, if libraries could give out electronic books
… libraries can, and do, give out eBooks.
And frankly, it’s a library. Every group should have access to books they’re interested in. But that doesn’t mean those groups should be able to ban books they don’t like, even if 75% of people want to ban them.
My local library has stacks and stacks of steamy Christian romance and I’ve never once complained about them being a waste of money or space.
But the same library orders one copy of Heartstopper and all hell breaks loose.
I honestly cannot understand how having LGBTQ books in a library even affects people who don't like them. Just don't read the books. It's not like their eyeballs are being glued open and they're being forced to read them. Book banners are such weirdos.
It's obvious. They probably don't even go to the library, they just want control over other people. They don't want other people reading books which could help them out, they want those people to go to church where they can be told they will burn in hell instead.
Evangelicals presumably don’t want their children to be influenced by the environment that having those materials present would foster. They’d much rather have their children influenced by real-life sexual predators present within their church, who upon being discovered (multiple times) choose to address the situation with prayer and allow the predator to remain within the church and around children without ever reporting them to law enforcement. But that’s just my experience.
You've met evangelicals who would much rather have their children influenced by sexual predators than books? Or you're trying to make a snarky comment, so you're tying together two unrelated things, both of which evangelicals would like to avoid?
In fact I have. I grew up in the 1990s evangelical movement, deeply within the culture, home schooled, pro-life rallies, had 10+ kids, women wore denim dresses, etc. Those people. They were hot and ready to ban anything they could get their hands on. Cabbage Patch dolls were demonic, Pokemon were demonic. Gay-anything, it goes without saying, were forces of demons. They were exactly the people who would praise book banning or book burnings.
Meanwhile within their church, on several occasions it was discovered that a man had sexually assaulted little boys. Did they kick him out of the church and go to the police? No, he was a sinner who could be saved by prayer. Until he did it again, and again. Some stupid parents even let him take their boy on a weekend trip years after the situation first came to light. You don't need me to tell you what happened on that trip. I think they finally did get the police involved, but that's after my family finally wised up and left the church.
Unfortunately this wasn't the only incident. There was another family that had two teenage boys. Their teenage boys? Molesting little girls on multiple occasions. Call the police? No, instead have the boys admit their guilt in front of the entire congregation, laying-on hands, prayer, etc. Until they did it again. That family finally high-taled it out of the state.
To this day I wonder why I got out unscathed, except second-hand knowing what was going on. So, yes I have met these evangelicals. Yes, I know their priorities and how they would rather turn a blind eye to sexual assault going on within their own church all the while trying to have Pride parades or whatever banned. Sure, they don't _want_ sexual assault happening, but did they do the slightest to prevent it? No. They tried to pray it away, but meanwhile were happy to expend countless man-hours protesting about obscene books to protect their children. No, I'm not making a purely-snarky comment.
If you're moved by this more in-depth explanation, I'd appreciate if you unflagged my comment.
Were any of these books in the kids' section? That could be one reason.
Also, we shouldn't dilute the meaning of the term "book banners" to refer to anyone who doesn't want a particular book in a particular place (even if that place is a public library). In the US, we are spoiled to have zero actually banned books. Anyone who wants to is free to purchase any book they want, as long as it's for sale somewhere. People who don't want books that have sexual content (which a disproportionate number of sexuality-focused books do) in the kids' section might be fine with those books existing in a different section, or in a private bookstore. True "book banners" would want to enforce a ban on them existing anywhere. This is a subset — and quite possibly a small one — of the former group.
It's not just "sexual content". Take a look at any of the ban lists, like the one provided by the ACLU (https://www.aclu.org/cases/e-k-v-department-of-defense-educa...) from earlier this year. Many of the books are related to slavery, civil rights, climate change, and media literacy, and the orders banning them apply to schools on every military base around the world.
I dug up the list https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44517341
What counts as sexual content? Does any book with gay or trans characters count because that's what people are trying to ban. Maybe we should ban the Bible from libraries because it has plenty of sexual content as well.
I think part of the issue is that books about sexuality are much more likely than regular kid books to have sexually explicit illustrations. Some depict fellatio or other sex acts. Most people don't want their kids to have access to such content, regardless of the type of sexual act shown. I certainly fall into that camp.
No. It seems like there was an age appropriate sexual health book for 9-12 year olds
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_Perfectly_Normal
I have another comment on this thread where I linked a lot of related information about this.
That was the only book that patrons sought to have removed from the kids' section?
Thanks for the wikipedia link. The criticism section is particularly enlightening:
> In a 2023 Slate article, Aymann Ismail, who until then had considered most attempts to ban books hysterical, was taken aback by the book's explicitness.
The important thing to note is that the book is being called "pornography" by the Clean Up Samuels group. It is explicit, but it is not pornographic. There are many many other books they want to ban completely simply because they features trans or gay characters.
While digging for this there does seem to be a young adult novel about a young gay man that does feature sexually explicit content (although it doesn't appear pornographic at all). The library keeps it in the "New Adults section. Which requires that anyone under age get explicit permission from their guardian to access, and they even created a new kind of library card to help moderate said access.
Your distinction between "explicit" and "pornographic" is important, and often not well understood (or actively ignored) by book opponents. There is nothing wrong with explicit, but age appropriate content. You can't really properly teach someone about sex without getting explicit, after all. A book that says "When two people love each other, they go into the bedroom together, and uhhhhh.... , and then a baby arrives!" is not really doing the job.
By "access" you mean check out to take home, or take off the shelf to peruse?
Does it really matter? If a parent is so intent on restricting their child's access to certain text, then maybe they should accompany their child to the library.
This feels less and less like you're interested in discussing this and more like you're grasping for some kind of "gotcha" argument. I'm probably not going to respond again unless it feels productive.
I guess I feel like you're not engaging in good faith when you use ambiguous terms like "access" in order to make it seem like books are inaccessible to kids, when in fact they aren't.
If you think that asking to clarify that is a "gotcha" question, so be it. I view the original statement as intentionally misleading, and aimed to be kind in asking for a clarification instead of just calling out your misleading statement.
Access is a common term although ambiguous.
Libraries were not expected to confine children to the children's section in my childhood.
I saw a few restricted sections like they described in recent years. Policy prohibited children without permission entering. None had full time guards however. Deterrence seemed to rely on what would happen if caught. Like many rules and laws.
It seems that reference is actually slightly cherry picked. The article it is lifted from [0], is the author reflecting on his own discomfort with the text, the same discomfort he believes drives the people wanting it be be banned. Ultimately he makes the case that books like this are actually ultimately a good thing.
[0]: https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/09/banned-books-list-i...
I'm curious how you would feel about your local library carrying The Turner Diaries, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or The Camp of the Saints? What percentage of the local population would have to want those books for you to believe the library should serve them?
Are there any books that a public community library should not be willing to carry?
I think that access to disinformation within a context such as a library is actually quite a good thing. You can read it, and then research it, and think critically about it. In an open ecosystem of information, with a little critical thought and media literacy, most people are able to spot bullshit when they need to.
Most University Libraries carry those text. I'm not sure if it would be particularly useful in the context of a public library (as the goal is to serve a local community with a wide range of needs). However, if there was interest then it would likely be put into circulation.
I would speculate that there was likely a time when each of those were on shelves, but they were likely weeded out due to lack of interest.
Do libraries carry Mein Kampf? Would the books you suggest be categorized and contextualized appropriately? (… like all other books, and a job that I believe librarians already perform.) "Categorized and contextualized appropriately" might also mean "not on the shelf / by request, but available for research"; a good many books that are considerably less objectionable and of greater literary value already are in libraries, as there is only so much shelf. Again, deciding what merits shelf space is a function of the librarian.
But you see no qualitative difference between {a book written by a white supremacist, neo-Nazi organization; a fabricated text (i.e., propaganda); and a book the SPLC describes as "'widely revered by American white supremacists' and 'a sort of anti-immigration analog to The Turner Diaries', and attributed its popularity to the plot's parallels with the white genocide conspiracy theory."} and "The book Pride Colors by Robin Stevenson, which explains the meaning of the rainbow colors in the Pride flag"[1]?
What is the literary value of white supremacist drivel or a fabricated text to a community library? (I'd wager approximately none.) Versus the books being complained about (anything and everything LGBTQ+). (Definite value from helping people exploring LGBTQ+ topics for themselves, simply trying to learn about LGBTQ people, to helping non-homophobic parents raise inclusive, tolerant children who don't want to spread hate & intolerance, and which need only be checked out by those who actually desire to read them.) There is demand for books of the nature being banned here; I cannot see there being anywhere near the same demand for books filled with bile.
And again, the empirical position (and for some subsets, outright stated position) of the right is to remove any and all traces of LGBTQ media from libraries. (And more broadly, from society, as well.)
In this particular instance[1], we can see this in one of the complaints:
> “Our library should not be carrying ANY material about LGBT,” one person wrote.
and,
> “Family has 2 moms — unacceptable,” the person wrote of another book. They also complained, “This book makes LGBTQ+ look ‘harmless’ and acceptable.”
Someone else points out exactly your quip; what about equal representation?
> She continued, “You said taxation without representation. What about my representation in the library? What about what I want my children to read? What about the 4 percent [of] LGBTQ members in your community that you represent that only get 1 percent of the books? Are they not being represented fairly with their tax dollars?”
In the broader national debate, we've seen this pattern endlessly; "protect the children" is a wedge to open a fissure towards a wholesale and complete ban. E.g., see the FL Don't Say Gay Act, which started as objections that education on such topics needed to be "age appropriate" but was then subsequently expanded until is was a wholesale ban on education of numerous topics.
[1]: https://www.advocate.com/news/front-royal-samuels-library-co...
Was it really adults trying to prevent other adults from those materials, or trying to prevent minors from accessing adult materials? (I'll interpret downvotes without response as confirmation of the latter, and that people want minors accessing adult material.)
If it mirrors national trends, then some of both (but lots of the latter).
I love Front Royal. I'm also not surprised private equity tried to buy the library there. Money has been corrupting Northern Virginia for too long.
I increasingly think that our society isn't sustainable without some recalibration of the notion of responsibility, liability, justice and due process. The problem we face is that it is very easy for unscrupulous operators to exploit loopholes and cause lots of damage, but the process for holding them accountable faces a heavy burden of proof and itself can be exploited (e.g., by dragging out lawsuits for years).
We need some kind of sliding scale where certain actions by people who either "should have known better" (i.e., are exploiting insider knowledge) or "had no basis for acting" (i.e., are rich enough to not need to make any more money) can be quickly curtailed without a need to specifically prove everything that they did. Something loosely akin to "if you had a billion dollars, you'd better be able to affirmatively prove you did everything squeaky clean or we're just going to take $500 million".
Brendan Ballou’s book “Plunder” is an excellent read about the effects of private equity across industries, if you want to go deeper on the topic. I recently had him on my podcast talking about the effects of PE in HVAC. There are quirks in each realm but the themes are common (I guess in libraries, too).
Here’s that episode if any of you are curious: https://www.heatpumped.org/p/plunder-how-private-equity-is-r...
Is there anything provided by the state for people and not for profit in the US?
What is their business proposition here?
America has some very good public services. None perfect but many good. I don't understand when American try to tear them down.
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You're accusing the article of being one sided, while espousing a view that to most on here is going to seem one sided. "They want to contract it out to a contractor." This completely leaves out that the contractor is also trying to get the transaction to happen, or at least to improve the likelihood.
So if some article offends your sensibilities enough to call it stupid, maybe give a more balanced take.
You're just getting confused by the article, it seems. Nowhere in the article does it make any specific claims about LS&S is "trying to get the transaction to happen", rather it makes vague begging-the-question claims that it's a "takeover attempt". It's probably a slick way to make people assume the conclusion was proved somehow, without actually doing it.
But, on another level, what in the holy name of my increasingly annoyed sensibilities are you even talking about? A contractor wants a contract? Did IBM bid on the healthcare.gov job? What did LS&S do that IBM didn't?
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If the current public management is bad, the solution should be to bring in new public management. The fact that the alternative is private equity should be the indication that this fight is purely ideological rather than a fight against bad management.
It's a non-profit, they can't just replace their management.
They've created a new library board charged with determining how to provide library services in the county: https://www.nvdaily.com/nvdaily/warren-supervisors-appoint-n...
Based on my experience with county boards of supervisors and their interactions with library management and library funding decisions, the Warren County Board of Supervisors' statement that the library has poor management shouldn't be given much credence unless backed up by evidence.
Somewhat amusingly, the library is a subordinate of the county. If the library is in fact poorly managed, the poor management is the fault of the board of supervisors.
If doing a bad job is being the 2024 Virginia library of the year I doubt it.
It really depends on how "library of the year" is determined.
Some years back now, our local library got a new boss who was determined to do everything the new and modern way. In the process, the boss drove away half of the paid staff, I don't know what fraction of the volunteer staff, and the entire community support organization. But hey, those are all old people and their values clearly don't matter (who cares if they're the ones with tons of free time?). Help, I don't have the money or people to run programs anymore! Better run away and get another job. Now, the library still exists but a lot of people are going to the next town over, and the new new boss is struggling to rebuild from scratch.
It would be completely unsurprising if "do things the modern way" and "chases awards" are significantly overlapped without corresponding to "improves things for the actual users", and "support LGBT" is code for "gerontophobia".
What library is this? Put a name to the story so we can actually confirm what you're saying.
You just fantasized an entire line of reasoning to hate a library for checks notes winning a best library award. Use more critical thinking.
Ah yes, critical thinking, like taking an advertising article on the internet at face value and ignoring that there might be more to the story. Who needs Knoll's Law? Also, awards are always given to the party that deserves them and have absolutely no politicking or signaling involved.
I don't claim what I saw locally is exactly what's happening there, but ... my point is, there's probably a lot happening at the local level, and only the locals can really know more. And even then, until the dust settles, you may need to be careful which faction of local politics (which often is completely unrelated to the factions in national politics) you're talking to.
Dang yeah you are right libraries are a hotbed of evil and we should look at them more critically.
Might be a case of ginned up accusations of “poor management” to cover for political animus.
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I understand the concern about local accountability, and you're absolutely right that libraries should be responsive to their communities. But the data here suggests the broader community was actually supporting the library.
Most public libraries follow professional collection development standards that try to serve their entire diverse community including families who want those books available. It's a tough balance, but the goal is usually having something for everyone rather than letting any single group determine what everyone else can access.
The community seems to have spoken pretty clearly by successfully defending their library. Sometimes the loudest voices aren't representative of the broader sentiment.
Your comment is inline with how the libraries operate, and I can't tell if some of the others here are just a little homophobic or just woefully misinformed about how libraries function.
Books that aren't being circulated frequently enough get weeded and removed from the collection, usually once or twice a year. Moreover, if books are requested frequently from other branches, or have long hold times, then that volume will typically be added to a collection.
This is against the ethics standards of the ALA, and the entire philosophy that underpins libraries as a whole.
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I don't think your understanding is accurate. Their positions are overwhelmingly in support of freedom of information, freedom of speech, privacy, and the public domain. They're opposed to anything that locks down and restricts information, generally oppose unnecessary copyright extension and overbearing copyright laws and rules (including the DMCA and DRM). They have a wide array of positions that are both frequently aligned with and opposed by both major American political parties.
People distort the ALA's position as pushing LGBTQ books on children, but that's just the most in the limelight right now because those are the books that are being challenged the most, and the ALA is generally against book banning.
The ALA is aligned largely with classical liberalism, not modern progressivism, and most American conservatives I knew before 2016 would have agreed with their positions on freedom of information and personal privacy.
This is a much better response than the one I gave. Thank you for having the patience that I did not <3
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> This is a perversion of the phrase "book banning". Choosing not to have certain books in libraries, or in the kids section of libraries, is not "book banning".
Yes it is. It is by the dictionary definition of the two words 'banning' and 'book' to be banning books, from a library. You are wrong.
Yes. But the majority of the community seems to be explicitly against the removal of these text from the library. It is an extremely small and loud group of traditional Catholics whose stance on this is unpopular even among other catholics in the community.
Interesting; other commenters here were blaming evangelicals. I wonder what the evidence is for it being one or the other group, or if people just have their favorite groups to demonize.
Only 1 person mentioned evangelicals. And they said they were speaking about their experience. Not the Samuels Public Library.
I did research
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44517341
The ALA is a ideological organization that advocates for open access to information and resources. Those damn communist, they always want well informed citizens!!
While we're at it someone should really buy out and shut down wikipedia! Have you seen their article on Hitler? They make him sound like a criminal!!
This sounds like a response from someone who is not especially informed about the ALA. I work in a related field and am aware of the policy positions they have taken on lightning rod cultural issues. Perhaps you could look into this before claiming that they just want "open access to information and resources".
If that's the case, then please feel free to inform me of what policy positions they take on lightning rod issues that isn't related to their stated goal of providing open access to the public?
Drag queen story hours come to mind.
Drag queen story hour wasn't a policy created by the ALA it was a popular program at some libraries.
The ALA did create a collection of resources for Libraries that wanted to host them, but even they are clear that that is a decision made at the local level [0]. You said you were very familiar with the ALA, because you "work in a related field". It might be helpful to actually read their standards and guidelines [1]. Just in case we're talking past each other, this might also be helpful [2]
[0]: https://www.ala.org/advocacy/libraries-respond-drag-queen-st...
[1]: https://www.ala.org/tools/guidelines
[2]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/policy
Of course drag queen story hour isn't a policy — it's an event. And just because the ALA didn't invent it doesn't mean they haven't expressed support for it.
Look, you asked what positions they've taken that aren't related to open access to the public and I answered. Now you're moving the goalposts. That's a game you can play by yourself; I am done playing along.
And why stop at LGBTQ books? Remove anything that I or my religion don't like!
And why stop at removing them? Burn them!
Whoa, so much smoke! Better repeatedly wave it away from my chest with an outstretched, downward-facing palm!
So are you saying they shouldn't be accountable to elected officials?
Not at all, accountability works both ways. The elected officials tried to defund the library, but then the community pushed back and the takeover was withdrawn. That's exactly how democratic accountability should work.
Libraries need to follow constitutional principles and serve their whole community, not just the loudest subset. The broader community clearly supported keeping their award-winning library intact.
No. Libraries exist to serve the communities they are in. Whether it be the public, specialized fields, or universities. Collections are curated by librarians based on the needs of the community. That isn't a decision that is an elected official is qualified to make.
That seems orthogonal to what I am saying, which is that:
1. Book banning/burning is really bad (duh).
2. The worst book banners/burners throughout history have employed the same justifications as you now employ.
To the question about accountability: Who knows, but it isn't as important as avoiding book banning/burning.
peak capitalism :/
Billionaires buy elections, elected officials break funding for public facilities, billionaires get tax cuts, public facilities get bought out with tax cuts.
I wonder when they start introducing their own currencies like in the old mining towns.
Back to feudalism we go, election by election.
This title is misleading because the library is already owned by private equity.
>Providing for a community night not be profitable, but that doesn't make it wrong
>Efficiency shouldn't always be a goal
If you don't care about profit or efficiency then you are being wasteful and are not effectively delivering value.
Where did you get the idea it was already owned by private equity?
A public library delivers value to a community. Profit is not necessary for that, and can be argued to actually be harmful to delivering value to a community.
Efficiency might not deliver maximum value either when the community is the focus. Something taking a little more time or involving more human effort can actually be fulfilling for those doing and receiving. Firing the librarian that knows all the childrens' names so you can have a kiosk instead isn't delivering value.
> A public library delivers value to a community.
Well, a subset at best. I've moved to a new town where the sole library is available to normal 9-5 workers for three hours on a Saturday morning. I don't even know what it stocks because it just isn't open when most people would be able to use it.
Everyone benefits from a well-read community.
The library is owned by Samual Library Inc which is not the government or a public company.
Profit is not neccessary to deliver value, but it helps optimize it.
If someone knowing kids names is worth it people would be willing to pay more for the service. If people would rather pay less and use kiosks then that may be a better option.
You’re saying that nonprofits are the same as “private equity.” That’s an odd take.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/540...
It's a very common "gotcha" comment on HN unfortunately — latch on some specific definition of a term then dismiss anything that doesn't fit it. Not sure what we can do about it unfortunately
Samual Library Inc is a "not-for-profit nonstock corporation ... organized exclusively for charitable and educational purposes." Its bylaws prohibit distributing earnings to "directors, officers, or other private persons, except that the corporation shall be authorized and empowered to pay reasonable compensation for services and to make payments and distributions in furtherance of the purposes set forth in article 6 hereof." - https://samuelslibrary.net/images/about/policies-more/articl...
And you think that makes it a private equity company?
My LLC, which I ran my consulting business under, was neither a government nor a public company ... and neither was it a private equity company.
Would you consider Library Systems & Services, from the article, a private equity company?
You are the one strangely claiming a 401(3)(c) not-for-profit nonstock company is a private equity company.
I assume you have changed the topic because you know you are wrong.
As the article says, Library Systems & Services is 'private equity owned'. If you can't tell the difference being a private equity owned company and being a private equity company then you really don't understand this topic at all.
> Profit is not neccessary to deliver value, but it helps optimize it.
How?
You seem a bit confused. Samuels Library Inc is a tax-emempt 501(c)(3) non-profit, which is kind of the opposite of private equity.
The opposite of private equity would be public equity where the public has ownership of it.
A non-profit like this literally cannot be owned and thus no equity to be public or private. It is a legal entity controlled by its board and there are no ownership shares which can be bought, sold, or transfered.
Are you saying all public services need to turn a profit?
It should be a long term goal. At the very least the perspective of how it is being run needs to be thought of in terms of profit.
Do roads turn a direct profit? Water works? Canals? Flood Dams? Dikes? Are public parks profitable? Should schools be profitable? Is the police profitable? Does the fire department charge for every blaze they contain? Is the congress profitable? Are the courts? The president? The government as a whole?
Society funds a lot of public services because they cannot reasonably be billed to the individual, but enable the society to function and are the underpinning of economic activity. They are profitable because they allow society and the individuals to engage in economic activity which they otherwise could not.
We should strive to make public services efficient, but aiming for profit is against their very nature.
Or put another way:
Libraries, the fire department, the police department, congress, the courts, and the government are a "cost center". Their services are not directly charged for and on our balance sheet they cost money, however in general the benefit they provide allows all the other beneficial things we want to do to happen and support our "profit centers" like industry. We should work to ensure the money invested is used effectively, but a "cost center" will _never_ turn a profit and asking it to produce one does not make sense.
And for those not following... yes, this is exactly like the IT or legal department in a typical company. At Joe's Widgets the IT department does not charge the customers any money and therefore is a pure cost. But without IT keeping the machinery and networks online, they don't produce many widgets. They pay for their IT department because _overall_ the outcome is better versus going back to manually stamping widgets without computers or automation because "IT costs money". We want to make sure IT isn't spending wastefully, but we can't simply say "IT needs to turn a profit or else we're going to shut them down" otherwise overall things end up less efficient and more expensive and we go out of business.
(As an aside, it's really wild to me how many people in IT can hold the position that "things that don't directly turn a profit shouldn't exist!" while half of our industry is in positions that don't directly turn a profit.)
> The president?
The incumbent has certainly found many creative ways to make it extremely profitable for himself.
A library will not profit from its members being able to read books for free, but society as a whole will profit.
Demanding each individual component of society be profitable leads to the overall detriment of the whole. It leads to hospitals only treating the rich and only for money, it leads to no-one producing art, it leads to homeless shelters not existing. It leads to society becoming an inhumane machine to produce and consume money, and nothing more.
Humans are more important than money, society is more important than money.
It should be an anti-goal. If it can be provided adequately at a profit (that is, if the benefits of purchasing the service to direct purchasers are sufficient to warrant direct users paying a sufficient price to not only offset the costs of providing a service but also to provide a profit to the service provider), then there is probably no reason to have a public service.
The reason to have a public service is primariy that it is desirable but not profitable, probably because of externalized benefits, or because the utility provided is concentrated in a financially disadvantaged population, such that the amount that they are able to pay underrates the utility delivered (the use of money as a proxy for delivered utility is only at best a loose proxy when money itself is unequally distributed), or for some other reason.
If it should be a public service at all, then it should almost without exception be publicly subsidized in whole or in part. Profitability in a public service is a "code smell" that you have something that likely should be a private industry that has instead been unnecessarily monopolized by the state.
Public parks don't turn profits. Public roads don't turn a profit. Food stamp programs and housing assistance don't generate a profit.
Public goods can increase efficiency and well-being in a way that indirectly translates into increased economic efficiency, but no, profit is not a good direct long term goal of most public goods and services.
>Public parks don't turn profits.
If people don't care enough about a park to fund it, then that space may be of better use to something else.
>Public roads don't turn a profit.
They are a loss leader aimed to make more money elsewhere.
>Food stamp programs and housing assistance don't generate a profit.
If people don't want to fund such things people in those programs should make or buy their own food and housing.
>that indirectly translates into increased economic efficiency
Again the idea of things like loss leaders are not foriegn to entities that want to be profitable.
> If people don't want to fund such things people in those programs should make or buy their own food and housing.
The country of Ireland still hasn't recovered from the British government saying this kind of thing with different words 175 years ago. Today the Irish-descended population in the USA is higher than the population of Ireland because of all the people who left as a result of the same event.
> If people don't care enough about a park to fund it, then that space may be of better use to something else
Once the land is used for something else, it will never become a park again.
It is important for us to safeguard land for greenspace like parks and playgrounds and community gardens and stuff, because it is incredibly difficult to reclaim space to make those sorts of spaces once there is a building or different zoning on the land
Are you saying that people who use food stamps – because they cannot afford food – should instead buy food with the money they don’t have?
I am saying they should make money to use to buy food. Or they should make their own food if they do not have the means to pay someone else to do it for them.
>If people don't care enough about a park to fund it, then that space may be of better use to something else.
No, public parks are awesome. They should remain free.
>They are a loss leader aimed to make more money elsewhere.
You're starting to get it. We pay for public services with our taxes, and in exchange, we get free stuff back that benefits society.
>If people don't want to fund such things people in those programs should make or buy their own food ans housing.
Oh my fucking god. This is seriously the most asinine sentence I have ever read. Bar none. It's honestly difficult to respond to something like this. I'm at a loss for words.
I genuinely don't give a single fuck if you, or anyone else, don't want to fund food stamps. We absolutely should continue funding it. The entire point of those projects is that the recipients specifically CANNOT afford to do these things on their own. You're advocating for further oppression of the downtrodden; it's difficult to understand how one comes to this position.
>They should remain free.
The money for maintaining them has to come from somewhere. They already are not free.
I have corrected the typo in that sentence.
If that's how you see it, literally everything costs money at some point in the line. So I guess nothing is free. But we have a word for it, so let's give it an actual use.
You enter at no cost (with exceptions, of course). That's free. They should continue to be open and free; a world without parks, without use of public funds for public good, isn't a good one. Profits be damned, I want my parks.
If I hire a plumber, I hire them to fix my pipes. I don't hire them to generate a profit for me.
If me and my neighbors hire a library to lend us books, I don't expect them to generate a profit for me.
The beneficiary is the citizen receiving the service, not the government receiving a profit.
The idea of government profiting is like trying to make a profit from yourself.
>I don't hire them to generate a profit for me.
But the plumber will aim to make a profit. If the plumber charges $5 for jobs that cost $50 that person won't be able to sustain being a plumber.
>The beneficiary is the citizen receiving the service
And citizens want to get the best bang for their buck of tax money. Receiving more and better services is what people want.
>The idea of government profiting is like trying to make a profit from yourself.
The government isn't making a profit from itself. It's making it from its people and companies / organizations.
How far does this go? Should all public space be pay to use or privatised?
> It should be a long term goal
Why?
Imagine what would happen if Uber never ran at a loss. It wouldn't have been able to grow into what it is now. Losing money in the short term can bring long term wins.
But why should a library follow that model?
Way to completely dodge the question. The question was not "Why should we allow the public services to run at a loss in the short term?"
The question is: Why should public services aim to produce profit?
I interpreted your question to be why I thought they should focus on long term profit instead of short term profit. As to your question it is for efficiently allocating resources.
Did the food you eat today turn you a profit?
I made more money from the energy the food gave me than what the food cost. I made a profit.
What if i told you society makes more money from a better educated populace. Which is what libraries contribute
Public services serve the public good. Turning a profit for the government is proof of its inefficiency
You are everything that's wrong with the world right now.
You realize that’s impossible with certain public goods eg USPS? We can either have mail delivery to everyone in the country or we can make profit.
Think it is easier to just point at something like Defense. Without more active imperialism, I am not sure how the Army/Navy/Airforce is going to pay for all of that Freedom they protect.
You can still aim to make as much profit with the constraint that you must deliver to everyone.
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”
“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”
“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”
He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”
I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.
“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.
“Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”
It didn’t seem like they did.
“Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”
Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.
I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.
“Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.
Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.
“Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.
I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”
He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.
“All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”
“Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.
“Because I was afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”
I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.
“Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.”
He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me for arresting him.
What in the this-was-written-for-Leslie-Nielsen-s-ageless-noir-delivery...
Was writing this comment a way to drive profit and efficiency?