@jackofalltrades @tarmoamer @Nonya_Bidniss @MarkBrigham @breadandcircuses

My thought on this is that in markets you need a way to establish fair pricing.

Market capitalism presents the idea that a price is fair if two people who can freely walk away from a bad deal opt not to.

This, in turn, is supposed to cause a feedback into systems where they realize they could sell more by pricing better.

Sometimes this works, other times not.

I'm not an economist either, but my understanding from Wikipedia is that the notion of price elasticity of demand covers the issue of some markets basically not being adequately sensitive to price. This happens, for example, when the item is an essential thing people can't not get, like insulin. There the price doesn't come down (without outside help, as recently) but rather extortion occurs. People have to have it, so will pay whatever. Really a lot of healthcare is like that.

Socialism, or what I think of as socialized markets, like socialized health care often seems to help a lot in cases where markets are not ABLE to regulate prices. That's not because humans are necessarily better than markets in general, but because in situations where markets simply do not work at all, there is no other choice. It's a contest with only one valid entrant, capitalism having disqualified itself, though it often doesn't admit it.

Job markets are another. Through various means (that antitrust seeks to break), companies conspire to not hire above a certain wage, thus forcing people to either take a low price or go starving. So of course people take it. But that doesn't make it fair. There's a great Adam Smith quote in the Wikipedia entry for Inequality of Bargaining Power on this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inequality_of_bargaining_power#Historical_development

#capitalism #inequality #markets #socialism #employment #SocializedHealthcare #MedicareForAll #M4A

@nytimes No emergency trauma healthcare for suspected criminals as unspoken anti constitutional service and protection in America would seem to track under alternative fact Democracy, but shouldn’t police forces found guilty of wrongdoing also lose access to healthcare by not having public funding of their health management corporation insurance policies? #BothSides #SocializedHealthCare