> Industry/capitalism/profit-seeking by definition makes it incredibly difficult to do things where there isn't a large expected monetary return. But profitability is a poor proxy for whether a thing is useful to do or not.
I don't think that's unique to capitalism. The Soviets were building spacecraft and nuclear weapons while people went without food.
Curing an extremely rare disease is valuable, we all value human life. But say there are tens of thousands of uncured diseases and more coming every year. Then let's say there is a finite number of people capable of working on them, how do you decide which cure we're going to target. The tradeoffs are a consequence of limited resources, not the system.
Market based health care does make me uncomfortable though, mainly because the incentives aren't in curing but in perpetual treatment to generate an income stream.
> Curing an extremely rare disease is valuable, we all value human life.
I think this is incorrect.
I think economic (and political) behaviour suggests rather strongly that we don't much value most other human life, nor value curing most extremely rare diseases.
> Then let's say there is a finite number of people capable of working on them, how do you decide which cure we're going to target. The tradeoffs are a consequence of limited resources, not the system.
That comes next, after there's a collective commitment to resource that finite number of people to work on uncured diseases of some kind.
At the moment, I think we're showing that the collective commitment is not in that direction.
We're doing other things instead, that you can certainly argue are of value, but given the large proportion of "earned income" most people and businesses have to spend on somebody else's "unearned income", I have to wonder if money flow is a good indicator of value.
I don't think that's unique to capitalism. The Soviets were building spacecraft and nuclear weapons while people went without food.
Curing an extremely rare disease is valuable, we all value human life. But say there are tens of thousands of uncured diseases and more coming every year. Then let's say there is a finite number of people capable of working on them, how do you decide which cure we're going to target. The tradeoffs are a consequence of limited resources, not the system.
Market based health care does make me uncomfortable though, mainly because the incentives aren't in curing but in perpetual treatment to generate an income stream.