How did USA become such a messed up country?

[JinXy]

The wages for those teachers might very well go down some, but the tuition fees will always remain high, well beyond the reach of the middle class and below, partly because it's a part of their business idea and partly because there will always be people who have enough money to throw away that they don't really care about the actual price.

Not a problem. Other entrepreneurs will provide low-costs solutions.

Also they will always consider to draw the best teachers because it will always be less work for more pay, that will never change. And it will create a sort of caste system where only the rich has access to the best teachers, sure more teachers is good because then there will be more average and good teachers and less bad teachers. But that is not the issue here, it's that access to better education depends on how rich you are which is something I think is fundamentally wrong, education should be equally available to all which means that tuition fees shouldn't be allowed or their level should be mandated by government to a level where everybody can reasonably afford it. This is system that is juster and makes quality education more accessible to the general public which means that it's better for society as a whole albeit it might be worse for a select few individuals that is already drowning in wealth so that's hardly a problem.

When teachers are highly valued this way, more people will train to become teachers. It's supply and demand. Society as a whole will then have more quality teachers.

This is exactly the problem as I see, neither education nor healthcare should be about profit, it should be about spreading knowledge and healing people. My issue with allowing profit into these sectors is as I've said before that it essentially creates a caste system where those with more money get access to better treatment and better education while those with little to no money are left with either substandard care/education or none at all.

It won't be as bad as you think. This wasn't a problem in the past before government got involved. It will be way better than today's situation. Are people better off today when healthcare and education costs are run up so high by government programs/regulations? If education and healthcare is open to competition, and if it is so lucrative, again, this will create more competition. The best cure for high prices is still high prices itself. In the food industry, we have fine dining and the normal food. We don't feel that there's a caste system there do we.

If you get the best teachers and provide the best education then the rich will naturally migrate towards your school and then you'll raise the fees because the customers can afford it and will be willing to pay these fees, and thus you maximize profit.

If that's my business model for my school, then so be it :D I didn't force customers to pay me.

Well you said that government is irrevocably bad at business, I simply showed you an example where this clearly was not the case.

They are.. maybe i should have used the word "inefficient".

Roughly 85% of desktop and laptop computers still run a variety of Microsoft windows so yes they are definitely a monopoly.
Google globally has roughly a 70% market share, the runner up is Baidu which is pretty much exclusive to china at 16%, the next on the list is Yahoo with a 6%, and then Bing, also with roughly 6% of the market. So yes Google is most definitely also a monopoly.

In a monopoly you will have close to all the market shares and you will not have many competitors. I guess we define monopoly differently (mine is similar to wiki's definition).

Wrong, you don't necessarily need to control the resources, it surely helps but you can also create a monopoly by controlling the outlet of those resources because if you do that then controlling the resource itself is irrelevant as they have no option but selling to you and because you're the sole customer or at the very least the major customer you can essentially dictate the prices.

Maybe, but this is not possible too.

Every business worth mentioning has allies in government because that's what you promote when you make bribes legal, the corporations simply buys the laws they want whether they're just or not, the DMCA is an excellent example of this.

Agreed.. so the problem is in politicians having too much power to dole out deals.

No, there are high entrance cost because laying down fiber lines across the entire country to major hubs are incredibly expensive and time consuming, as is the case regarding most most infrastructure.
Government regulation has very little to do with the costs.
This is why I think it'd be better if the government laid down the fiber lines and rented access to any company at cost, thus if municipalities didn't like the major ISPs offer they could rent the fiber from the government and buy the equipment which would cost a fraction of the actual cost of laying down all the fiber they needed to reach their little municipality.

Even if you in theory don't need to lay down fiber all the way the difference is minor, if you're a small competitor and forced to buy access from one of the big corporations they can at any time force you out of business by raising peering rates to ludicrous levels

The private sector built water canals that criss-crossed USA when steamships were created. When there is profit to be made, people will do it. Going to outer space is incredibly expensive too but that has not stopped many entrepreneurs from attempting to do it.

[JinXy]

Not really, you can settle for projecting the image that you're doing what's in the interest of your customers. This is especially true i markets where results takes a relatively long time to show, such as education for example. That is unless of course you separate teachers from grading and make the grade solely dependent on a standardized national test of course, but that has it's drawbacks as well.
Even if you provide bad education you can cover this up by making your teachers give students grades that they don't deserve. And on the surface it will look like all is fine until those students get into university, and then it will take several years do uncover that it's just not a random variation and that in fact that particular school provides grades that doesn't respond to reality.

And when that happens you have a whole lot of students who essentially spent years in education for nothing because what they got is worthless and now they have to spend several more years to recover what they lost. And because that school will no doubt be a shell corporation you will have no way of getting at the people responsible because they will just put the daughter company into bankruptcy and then move on.

I think education and healthcare is badly suited for the public sector because they are markets where the results only show after a relatively long time but there are easy ways for short term profit that you can hide long enough that you can make a huge profit and then cut and run before the results become evident. And the public sector inherently encourages short term profit over longterm viability because you can just cut and run and then start up anew somewhere else.

Of course there are rogue companies in every sector. Bad companies always get exposed in the end. There's nothing new about that.
But for most other entrepreneurs, they want to be a viable, long-term business. So they get their acts right.
Besides, customers are not stupid. You may take their money and run but if you don't give them something equal in return (in the form of education),they will kill u.

You know what I will offer for those poor students who got conned? I will offer them to sit for exams and get certificates from my reputable school.
There are many ways around this.

[JinXy]

Besides, america became the wealthiest nation without all these govt programs in the past.

[Elldallan]

Not a problem. Other entrepreneurs will provide low-costs solutions.

Those low cost solutions are typically low cost solutions because they cut away "unneccessary" things such as school psychiatrists, nurses, increase class sizes, weed out "undesireable" students that require more time and effort. so no, not a good option.
Another option is that they're run with another goal than profit in mind such as indoctrinating the students into joining their sect or whatever other organization they run. Because if you allow for profit organizations to run schools it means you're also allowing extremist religious sects and other lunatics to run them aswell.

When teachers are highly valued this way, more people will train to become teachers. It's supply and demand. Society as a whole will then have more quality teachers.

Not neccessarily because there is a cost factor here, even if you graduate with good grades you probably wouldn't take a teaching position and the downtown high school even if it was the only teaching position availible, you'd simply look for a job in another market.

And if that were absolutely true then how come that the students in the US system which essentially is this has lower knowledge in key systems than the average student in Finland?

I think it's better if the government runs the education as a whole instead, because then the government could create an inverse salary tier, with salary and other perks to incite the good teachers to take jobs where they're needed the most. They could also transfer resources to the schools that need it more so that the schools with troubles could have a higher teacher to student ratio than the schools in the suburbs. But this all hinges on the government controlling the system as a whole rather than just the worst schools.

It won't be as bad as you think. This wasn't a problem in the past before government got involved. It will be way better than today's situation. Are people better off today when healthcare and education costs are run up so high by government programs/regulations? If education and healthcare is open to competition, and if it is so lucrative, again, this will create more competition.

The best cure for high prices is still high prices itself. In the food industry, we have fine dining and the normal food. We don't feel that there's a caste system there do we.

What you need to do is make it a government controlled system from the bottom up and then maybe, maybe allow som free competition on top of that. It's better to build a castle on a solid rock foundation and pour some sand on it that it is to build a castle on a sandy beach and drop a mountain on it.

Before the government got involved proper education and healthcare was usually limited to the rich and/or powerful so yes I'm pretty sure it will be just as bad as I think or worse, that is if we allow it to happen.
Costs run high because the implementation is retarded. You put a government patch on a free market system, that always means that the free market system will scam the government. And if you suggest that the US system with health insurances is better, if happen to be unfortunate enough to contract some disease or ailment or accident that will have a high projected cost then the insurance company will do everything they can to try to find some way to invalidate your insurance and find a way to annul your insurance.

You are comparing apples and oranges here, fine dining isn't a life neccessity, if you can't afford fine dining you'll survive but if the doctor tells you that you can't afford cancer medicine X then you'll die, and therin lies the fundamental problem which is why I think education and healthcare is ill suited for free market competition.

If that's my business model for my school, then so be it :D I didn't force customers to pay me.

Indeed, I have no problem with market forces in general. I just think that they should be kept out of education and healthcare because it's better for society that way.

They are.. maybe i should have used the word "inefficient".

Can't be too inefficient if you manage to become a globally renowned brand and have a tidy profit year after year, the Swedish government made a lot of money off Absolut.

In a monopoly you will have close to all the market shares and you will not have many competitors. I guess we define monopoly differently (mine is similar to wiki's definition).

Yes I admittedly use the wrong word, and intentionally so.
What I mean is when a single entity has the power to corner or control a market to a significant degree, that is not exactly the same thing as a monopoly. I typically use monopoly because it cuts down on unneccessary explanations. Sure it's a bit imprecise but it gets my meaning across :)

Maybe, but this is not possible too.

Sure it is, just look at Microsoft Windows, there are other competing operating systems but they're largely irrelevant because it's too expensive to write your code so that it works over a multitude of different operating systems so you select one which will be the biggest one, and because almost nothing works with these other operating systems there will be no statistically significant migration to them, thus we have a system that inherently works to keep the monopolist in power.
In practice this would allow Microsoft to prevent X to be released for their operating system or ban Y because Microsoft finds them annoying, the only thing that prevents Microsoft from doing this is Government involvment.
If you're interested in the subject read up on how Microsoft forbade computer shops from running dual boot systems because if they did they'd loose their "rebate"(a so called rebate which everybody got and that was always around, so it's only a rebate in name)

Now admittedly it is much harder to accomplish any of this on a market with an actual physical product.

Agreed.. so the problem is in politicians having too much power to dole out deals.

The problem lies in that its the politicians who write the laws, which is incidentally their job but they're supposed to be impartial and do it for the best of society, not for their corporate sponsor. So stop all this legal bribery, aka campaign funding and you'll at least cut down on the problem and make it harder to accomplish, at least within the law, and if they go outside the law you can smack em hard.

The private sector built water canals that criss-crossed USA when steamships were created. When there is profit to be made, people will do it. Going to outer space is incredibly expensive too but that has not stopped many entrepreneurs from attempting to do it.

Yes if there is profit to be made people will do it. But just like we usually don't allow corporations to run competing sewer systems within a city we shouldn't let corporations run other infrastructures either, not because it can't be done but because it creates a huge mess and because the initial investment is so huge it'll make sure that there is little to no competition, and therefore no working market which means that in the end there will be price gouging and substandard service.

[Elldallan]

Of course there are rogue companies in every sector. Bad companies always get exposed in the end. There's nothing new about that.
But for most other entrepreneurs, they want to be a viable, long-term business. So they get their acts right.
Besides, customers are not stupid. You may take their money and run but if you don't give them something equal in return (in the form of education),they will kill u.

Yes but because of the turnaround time of this particular market is quite long it means that it'll take a long time for bad companies to get exposed which means that the market also is especially inviting for these types of bad companies, considering how important education and healthcare is to society thats a very bad combination in my opinion and precisely why companies should be explicitly kept out of those markets.

Some entrepeneurs will be honourable yes but there will always be those that are willing to sell their honor for a quick buck, probably because they never had any in the first palce. And the problem is that the free market system encourages and promotes this sort of behaviour.

You know what I will offer for those poor students who got conned? I will offer them to sit for exams and get certificates from my reputable school.
There are many ways around this.

No, after the fact there is no way around it, because they can't just take exams at a reputable school since they never got the required knowledge in the first place. They will just have to retake a significant part of their courses all over again and spend more of their time doing it all over again.

Sure it might work out if the punishment for doing something like that was so draconic to everybody involved all the way from teachers up to CEO's, boardmembers and even shareholders that nobody would ever want to risk being even remotely associated with something like that again. Sort of how the atomic bomb worked out. But that would not be a just system or one fitting for a democracy and hence not an acceptable solution.

Besides, america became the wealthiest nation without all these govt programs in the past.

The wealthiest yes, but that's more a factor of coming out of WWII relatively unscathed and with your industrial base completely intact, while the majority of the rest of their world had theirs bombed into rubble. Also, having domestic oil deposits, just look at that distribution, ANY nation with oil deposits is significantly wealthier than their neighbours.

In fact, government programs is a significant part of why the US is where it is today rather than the opposite, the "The New Deal" for example which helped the country to recover from the great depression better than many other nations which helped to make it ready for when war came knocking on the door, if the US industrial base had crumbled then there would have been no bomber wings and no legions of sherman tanks to win in europe, no carriers to win in the pacific, and probably no atomic bomb. And yes I just engaged in speculative history but rather that than invoking Godwin's law ;)

[JinXy]

Those low cost solutions are typically low cost solutions because they cut away "unneccessary" things such as school psychiatrists, nurses, increase class sizes, weed out "undesireable" students that require more time and effort. so no, not a good option.
Another option is that they're run with another goal than profit in mind such as indoctrinating the students into joining their sect or whatever other organization they run. Because if you allow for profit organizations to run schools it means you're also allowing extremist religious sects and other lunatics to run them aswell.

Too many assumptions my friend. On another note, of course you don't need all those "unnecessary" services in school. Why do you think so many schools nowadays have world class gyms, fields, swimming pools, etc? Because they get more and more free money from the government (taxpayers) every year. And also, customers are not stupid. They don't send their children to lunatic schools. Will you do that???

Not neccessarily because there is a cost factor here, even if you graduate with good grades you probably wouldn't take a teaching position and the downtown high school even if it was the only teaching position availible, you'd simply look for a job in another market.

So what? Someone's gonna end up training and then teaching, since you said the pay in those 'elite' schools are so good.

And if that were absolutely true then how come that the students in the US system which essentially is this has lower knowledge in key systems than the average student in Finland?

I think it's better if the government runs the education as a whole instead, because then the government could create an inverse salary tier, with salary and other perks to incite the good teachers to take jobs where they're needed the most. They could also transfer resources to the schools that need it more so that the schools with troubles could have a higher teacher to student ratio than the schools in the suburbs. But this all hinges on the government controlling the system as a whole rather than just the worst schools.

Lol. The government has been running the education. Look at the 'wonderful' results. Anyway, I don't understand why you are so afraid of competition.

What you need to do is make it a government controlled system from the bottom up and then maybe, maybe allow som free competition on top of that. It's better to build a castle on a solid rock foundation and pour some sand on it that it is to build a castle on a sandy beach and drop a mountain on it.

Free people can educate themselves and build solid foundations on their own.

Before the government got involved proper education and healthcare was usually limited to the rich and/or powerful so yes I'm pretty sure it will be just as bad as I think or worse, that is if we allow it to happen.

Not true. America doesn't become the wealthiest nation back then with a nation of uneducated people.

Costs run high because the implementation is retarded. You put a government patch on a free market system, that always means that the free market system will scam the government. And if you suggest that the US system with health insurances is better, if happen to be unfortunate enough to contract some disease or ailment or accident that will have a high projected cost then the insurance company will do everything they can to try to find some way to invalidate your insurance and find a way to annul your insurance.

Yeap, implementation is retarded, yet you still call for more government involvement.
And if an insurance company does that to you, warn people about it and don't patronise them in the future.

You are comparing apples and oranges here, fine dining isn't a life neccessity, if you can't afford fine dining you'll survive but if the doctor tells you that you can't afford cancer medicine X then you'll die, and therin lies the fundamental problem which is why I think education and healthcare is ill suited for free market competition.

Do you think all the mandates on education and healthcare is a life neccessity? come on now.

Indeed, I have no problem with market forces in general. I just think that they should be kept out of education and healthcare because it's better for society that way.

But why...?

Can't be too inefficient if you manage to become a globally renowned brand and have a tidy profit year after year, the Swedish government made a lot of money off Absolut.

If you pour me a couple of billion bucks for free. I start tons of projects and fail them, and then happen to have a successful one. Is that efficient? It's not my money, do you think I will be careful with it? Are you a better spender of your own money or the government?

Sure it is, just look at Microsoft Windows, there are other competing operating systems but they're largely irrelevant because it's too expensive to write your code so that it works over a multitude of different operating systems so you select one which will be the biggest one, and because almost nothing works with these other operating systems there will be no statistically significant migration to them, thus we have a system that inherently works to keep the monopolist in power.
In practice this would allow Microsoft to prevent X to be released for their operating system or ban Y because Microsoft finds them annoying, the only thing that prevents Microsoft from doing this is Government involvment.
If you're interested in the subject read up on how Microsoft forbade computer shops from running dual boot systems because if they did they'd loose their "rebate"(a so called rebate which everybody got and that was always around, so it's only a rebate in name)

There is nothing wrong with a company gaining a large market share. It just means they are doing the right thing, making use of society's resources in the most efficient way and providing the most value to customers. But Microsoft is not a monopoly. We just have different definitions.

The problem lies in that its the politicians who write the laws, which is incidentally their job but they're supposed to be impartial and do it for the best of society, not for their corporate sponsor. So stop all this legal bribery, aka campaign funding and you'll at least cut down on the problem and make it harder to accomplish, at least within the law, and if they go outside the law you can smack em hard.

Yep.. nothing much we can do about that

Yes if there is profit to be made people will do it. But just like we usually don't allow corporations to run competing sewer systems within a city we shouldn't let corporations run other infrastructures either, not because it can't be done but because it creates a huge mess and because the initial investment is so huge it'll make sure that there is little to no competition, and therefore no working market which means that in the end there will be price gouging and substandard service.

I have no opinion on the sewer system, but i've made my point. High costs is fine as long as it's not caused by government intervention. People will do it if it is profitable.

[JinXy]

Yes but because of the turnaround time of this particular market is quite long it means that it'll take a long time for bad companies to get exposed which means that the market also is especially inviting for these types of bad companies, considering how important education and healthcare is to society thats a very bad combination in my opinion and precisely why companies should be explicitly kept out of those markets.

If your worry is the long turnaround time, then I will set up a school which only focuses on, say, teaching 2 years' worth of syllabus. Once my school gains reputation, I will lengthen the courses and include more stuff. Come on, be creative! The market can surprise you and me in many different ways. That's what we have entrepreneurs for. They solve the problems in the market. Besides, if education is being free-ed up, I am sure there will be scores of cheaper online schools.

Some entrepeneurs will be honourable yes but there will always be those that are willing to sell their honor for a quick buck, probably because they never had any in the first palce. And the problem is that the free market system encourages and promotes this sort of behaviour.

That may be true. Give me some examples of companies that did what you said, and what happened to those companies thereafter. :)

No, after the fact there is no way around it, because they can't just take exams at a reputable school since they never got the required knowledge in the first place. They will just have to retake a significant part of their courses all over again and spend more of their time doing it all over again.

Sure it might work out if the punishment for doing something like that was so draconic to everybody involved all the way from teachers up to CEO's, boardmembers and even shareholders that nobody would ever want to risk being even remotely associated with something like that again. Sort of how the atomic bomb worked out. But that would not be a just system or one fitting for a democracy and hence not an acceptable solution.

This assumes that the turnaround time is long, and I've addressed this issue above in the same post.

The wealthiest yes, but that's more a factor of coming out of WWII relatively unscathed and with your industrial base completely intact, while the majority of the rest of their world had theirs bombed into rubble. Also, having domestic oil deposits, just look at that distribution, ANY nation with oil deposits is significantly wealthier than their neighbours.

That plays a part, but it's not the main reason. The main reason was that america was free. There were very low regulations, and NO income taxes. British people escaped from their lands and settled in america because of high regulations and taxation in their own country. People were free to create and pursue their dreams. You don't have to be born with a silverspoon. You can come from a humble background but can become anyone with hard work. That was the American Dream.

In fact, government programs is a significant part of why the US is where it is today rather than the opposite, the "The New Deal" for example which helped the country to recover from the great depression better than many other nations which helped to make it ready for when war came knocking on the door, if the US industrial base had crumbled then there would have been no bomber wings and no legions of sherman tanks to win in europe, no carriers to win in the pacific, and probably no atomic bomb. And yes I just engaged in speculative history but rather that than invoking Godwin's law ;)

1933 - President Theodore Roosevelt came into office. He had won his elections campaigning against the reckless spending and market interventions of the predecessor, Herbert Hoover. He promised change. But what did he do once in office? He took Hoover's exact same policies and expanded on it, calling it the New Deal. (G.W. Bush is the modern equivalent of Hoover and Barrack Obama is the modern equivalent of Roosevelt. Obama railed against the reckless policies of Bush, and promised change. But once in office, he took Bush's policies to unprecedented levels).

The New Deal is a big part of the problem. The interventionist policies of Hoover and Roosevelt turned the small recession in 1929 into the Great Depression. What happened from 1999 to 2013 is very, very similar.

The US only got out of Depression when WWII ended and government slashed spendings by 50%.

[JinXy]

Anyway i believe both of us have made our points sufficiently. You may reply to my latest comments but I guess I'll stop my argument here (well, maybe my fingers might just get a little itchy again to type out a reply).

There are better stuff for us both to do (like playing utopia :)). I thank you for the discussion. Not many people can discuss in a respectable way like you do. Most people just fly into a rage by their 2nd or 3rd comment lol.

[Crumbs]

The people in America are being brainwashed into believing that they are owed a living just because they exist. Socialism is destroying America, people are voting for someone to take care of them and they will wind up with a meager existence. Corruption in America's government has never been greater than it is right now. Obama is a disaster, he is a corrupt ego maniac and wants to be a dictator.

[Palem]

The people in America are being brainwashed

Obama is a disaster, he is a corrupt ego maniac and wants to be a dictator.

...
Well you got one thing right.

[octobrev]

[krizmn]

*Vomits* It's hard to live in America now a days.

[FromDownBelow]

The people in America are being brainwashed into believing that they are owed a living just because they exist. Socialism is destroying America, people are voting for someone to take care of them and they will wind up with a meager existence. Corruption in America's government has never been greater than it is right now. Obama is a disaster, he is a corrupt ego maniac and wants to be a dictator.

Socialism is killing America, but it's socialism towards the corporations, not people, that is killing America. Most of our tax money goes to corporations, not people. Yes, there are people on welfare/food stamps, but most of that goes to people who work **** jobs that don't pay anything. McDonalds and Walmart alone cost the American taxpayers around 7 billion a year in welfare in order for their employees to be able to live (google Walmart and McDonalds welfare, and just read a little). And these are two of the most profitable companies IN THE WORLD. So yes, corporate socialism is killing America and it's economy.

And yes, Obama is a disaster...one of the worst presidents in the history of the U.S. Here comes the end of the American empire; all empires have to end eventually...

[FromDownBelow]

And don't even get me started on all of the bank bailouts....capitalism at it's finest!

[Palem]

Socialism is killing America, but it's socialism towards the corporations, not people.

Hi, my name is FromDownBelow and I have no idea what Socialism is.