Finally have some time to respond to some of these older threads, so...
Yodabunny wrote:
Education, health care, emergency services/justice system, military, and government should all be completely divorced from profit. They should be financed with public funds gathered through taxes and managed for quality over cost because they are essential to modern society.
The last three (four?) in your list? Correct. The first two? Incorrect. The latter things are actually things that government should provide to the people. The former are just not (one could even argue that emergency services may not need to be provided by government either, but that's an edge case IMO).
Quote:
Why are we paying a few company owners profits for something everyone needs? We're never not going to need these things so there's no reason to give someone more money than they cost.
We're never not going to need food, yet that's done via for-profit methods. Seems to work just fine. I think the key point you're missing here is that when something is for-profit, it means that every player in that market is in competition with every other player. Which, universally, tends to
lower prices for consumers while increasing quality. The point I was trying to make earlier about profit vs non-profit and how it applies to greed is that greed exists in either case. The only difference is how that greed manifests itself. Pretending that if you change the methods we use it'll magically change base human nature is silly in the extreme. People will still be greedy and greedy people will find a way to enrich themselves in any system we use.
In a for-profit environment, the way for the greedy to gain money is to provide the best product they can for the lowest price they can. That's a good thing. In a non-profit environment, the way for the greedy to gain money is to game the government policies that fund their operation so as to bloat their salaries as much as possible, provide as much benefits as possible, and otherwise milk the public funds to the greatest degree possible. When your funding is dependent on pleasing the government decision makers, you've created a massive opportunity for corruption and waste. And when those decision makers often measure success in these areas, not by the results, but purely by the
dollars spent, you get runaway inefficiency and waste.
At the end of the day, the question should not be "how much profit did they generate?", but "how much value did they provide for each dollar they charged?". And in many (most?) cases for-profit organizations do a better job in terms of "bang for buck" then non-profits, especially if the entire industry is for-profit, since that means they have to come up with better cost efficiencies in order to compete. A non-profit might not keep as much of the revenue as "profit", but that may not matter if the goods or services they are providing cost more per unit than they would otherwise.
It's a difficult thing for most people to see because if you just take a snapshot of the industry right now, it seems obvious that if you eliminated profits, that would reduce costs to the users of the good/services being provided. And you'd be correct. But once you do that, as time goes by, with little or no motivation to continue to maintain the cost/quality of those goods and services (or to improve them even!), the delta of what you get for any given cost grows in a non-profit industry versus what it would have been in a for-profit one. Imagine if, for example, the government had decided to make the entire Television industry non-profit. Maybe they decide that TV is so important for national communication that it comes under a "government service". Maybe they also decide to pay for every household in the US to have one of these essential devices. Can you imagine what your TV would look like today? You'd have one TV per home. It would be a huge tube TV. Probably still black and white (cause there's no "need" for color, right?). And it would be "free", except we'd probably be collectively paying the equivalent of several hundred dollars per TV per year in taxes for the necessity of government provided television.
Oh. And the content would suck too. We'd probably only have like one station in each area. No cable, of course.
The kind of system you're proposing is great at providing the current level and quality of something to the masses. It's absolutely terrible at innovating and improving the quality of that thing. Because without a profit motivation, there's no reason to make things better. That's just an additional cost, and when you have no profit to cover for it, that's always just a negative. It's just a really bad way to do things and should be limited to just those things which only government can do (like military, police, etc).