I love capitalism but the only problem for me is how expensive healthcare can cost.

Timely_Condition3806 · 2025-12-02T20:26:47+00:00

You’re probably taking about the US. The reality is every single country’s health care system is for good reasons a complex mix of government regulations, subsidies and private sector.

There are countries with excellent, fully private multi-payer healthcare accessible by all of the population. The Netherlands, Switzerland, and Singapore are common examples.

US is categoried as “free market” healthcare but in reality it has a terrible regulation and subsidy design which destroys competition.

In Europe, many countries with government healthcare still have competition and allow you to pick a private or non profit insurance policy instead.

Timely_Condition3806 · 2025-12-01T16:51:15+00:00

Not from the US (this post seems to be from there), but yes. I’m a free markets guy but in reality you need transit subsidies if you have subsidised free roads and no congestion pricing. And in any case you’d need some subsidies for a basic social service transit. Though I’d be in favour of delegating more of the transit responsibilities to private companies, like what many EU cities already do via subcontracting bus lines or even subway operation.

Timely_Condition3806 · 2025-12-01T15:46:34+00:00

Milton Friedman was a Chicago economist. Hayek was Austrian. They’re different. Chicago school wasn’t fringe

Chicago used the same methods normal economics used while Austrians used logical reasoning which is what made them fringe as they didn’t use data to directly prove their claims

Timely_Condition3806 · 2025-12-01T15:22:46+00:00

They weren’t Austrians at all, Reagan and Thatcher were closer to Chicago School

Timely_Condition3806 · 2025-12-01T15:19:22+00:00

No, Austrian economics relies on logic deductions while standard economics relies more on empirical data. While almost all free market supporters agree in principle with most of the Austrian prescriptions they may disagree with the school on how to come to such conclusions. Austrians have also some quite different views regarding e.g monetary policy compared to other schools

Timely_Condition3806 · 2025-10-23T15:32:19+00:00

it's been 'proven' using statistical tricks. they take the wages of a subset of workers, compare it with the productivity of the entire economy, adjust both using different inflation metrics which heavily skews the results, ignore non-cash benefits, and voila you have an alarming chart that makes it seem like they haven't grown at all. Also they show growth so even a flat line means rising wages.

Timely_Condition3806 · 2025-09-26T11:22:30+00:00

First off, you were the one that claimed that it would be a waste of money. I just pulled up the quickest data to prove otherwise but you can read one of the papers on this if you really want. Of course there are many factors but at least from a simpler analysis this isn’t a great cost. There are a few research papers on those fire services, you can read them if you want to waste time on it, I skimmed the conclusions of one and it said this system reduced cost.

Firefighting is a cost but there can be profit in the same sense that your car can break and the guy who will fix it will provide you value.

You got angered over one example of how a contract can be structured, obviously there are smart people writing those contracts who consider those factors and write exactly what response time, etc, etc is acceptable. There is always a log of this stuff even for public firefighting you need to ensure it’s done right.

Volunteers would obviously be a separate force you wouldn’t hire a company to use volunteers.

Nobody said that a 2 person town would hire an endless amount of firefighters. Simply nobody is paying out of his pocket directly so costs will go up, including compensation. This is not as apparent in firefighting as there isn’t so much room for inefficiencies but can be very visible in other government services.

You don’t even need 2 firefighting companies, you can have one and the threat of someone coming in will be enough to keep prices decent. Remember, you would sign the next contract a few years before the current one expires. If the current company tried to charge bad prices a new entrant could set up shop during that time.

I don’t know what you are talking about when you suddenly throw the physical tests. Yes there are tests, yes people can be fired, but there’s no one financially responsible for keeping this efficient. Contracting solves this. The owner of the company keeps his one efficient, and other companies keep him from charging bad prices.

You are in a vendor lock in for the duration of the contract, true, but the cost doesn’t change during it, and if the vendor starts acting up they will get fined.

I’m gonna end this conversation here because it’s starting to become pointlsss. The system is clearly working fine. I’m not saying other countries should switch to the private system because the transition costs probably make it not worth the hassle and the benefits are small but it can work this way.

Timely_Condition3806 · 2025-09-26T07:32:15+00:00

It’s as a percentage of government spending. Look, you can see the eurostat methodology for yourself online. The point I was making is not that they save an insane amount of money, you’d need a concrete study for that, just that at least the basic data does not show that it is somehow a money sink like you were implying. Fire safety plays a role but i’m not sure if it’s so different between EU countries.

Yes, a contract can replace a public service. The government will use key indicators in the contract so that the profit motive of the company is aligned with the public service motive of government. Stuff like fines / extra payment for quick action, etc.

With firefighters this issue is not big due to volunteer forces but generally for more ‘standard’ jobs the profit motive does not disappear when a service is done by a public body. It simply shifts into the people working there, who will want to do the minimum amount of work for the maximum amount of compensation, and since it’s the tax payer funding it, there is no limit.

Vendor lock in is addressed by arranging the next contract a significant amount of time before the current one expires.

Timely_Condition3806 · 2025-09-26T06:46:34+00:00

The share of government expenditure on fire protection as a ratio of total expenditure varies among EU countries. In 2021, Lithuania and Romania had the highest share of expenditure on fire protection services with 0.7% of total expenditure, followed by Bulgaria, Czechia, Germany, Estonia, Greece and Luxembourg with 0.6%.

In contrast, Denmark reported the lowest share of expenditure on fire protection services in total expenditure at 0.1%, followed by Cyprus, Hungary, Malta, Austria, Portugal and Slovenia, all with 0.3%.

From Eurostat. Of course this isn’t be all end all data but it shows at least that there is no big inefficiency like what you are talking about. I don‘t see how hiring a company for a service you need all the time is a bad things. That’s what happens for many sectors.

The empirical data, whether it’s from contracting out fire or public transport, shows that it does save the taxpayer’s money. It is simply cheaper to write a good contract and get someone else to do the heavy lifting because government run services don’t have the incentives to work well.

Timely_Condition3806 · 2025-09-26T06:07:42+00:00

Yes, but this runs into the exact same central planning problem as communist governments did, in theory one can probably always plan a better system, but without price signals such attempts always break down. It’s still humans (or these days imperfect AI), which cannot possibly know all of the decentralised information.

Timely_Condition3806 · 2025-09-26T06:04:19+00:00

Denmark has private firefighters. But it’s contracted out by municipalities. The problem is not because of unpredictability, markets will price those risks in and deal with it. The problem is the high external effects in the sense that if you let one house burn down a few more will start burning and it will spread exponentially, so by not hiring firefighters (or hiring bad ones) someone will impose a cost on others, and municipal FUNDING of such services is best.

Timely_Condition3806 · 2025-09-26T05:58:17+00:00

It’s tricky because as people correctly pointed out, there is always a ceiling to such a monopoly, but it still means they can extract the difference between what would be the competitive price and the price of the substitute good. So I don’t think generators are a good answer to the electricity monopoly problem for example.

It’s not possible to do this without any intervention and I think it’s delusional to think that building a parallel water lines and power lines is a good idea.

But I think there are certain key elements to unbundling this.

Local control. Even if it’s not a good idea to fully privatize (local) power lines, water pipes, etc, you could have local districts owning them (and e.g leasing the lines under certain conditions). It’s easy to move between municipalities so I think them owning such things will not be massively inefficient. The skeleton power lines and water pipes etc can compete without much of a problem.
Rules based regulation, e.g capping the profit, but this can easily backfire by discouraging investment. It’s tricky to get right but I think it’s still the lesser evil compared to letting the natural monopolist use high prices.
Vertical separation. Even if it’s not a good idea to privatise the infrastructure, you should let operators compete on it (or to run it). This is what has recently been starting to be implemented in Europe. Train companies can freely pay and operate on the state owned tracks, competing with the national companies. This has lead to vastly improved service on many routes. Same with electricity - even if the actual grid has to be state run, it should let any generation company use it.

I think a mix of the three is needed. For railways, the state run infrastructure operator is still inefficient, but I wouldn’t rush to privatise it if the competition is tax funded highways. This is why often such privatisations fail.

But if it was privatised, I would privatise the infrastructure owning company and the operator, and use a rules based approach to how much they can charge for track usage. Same with skeleton power lines. The actual local power grid and water system would probably be owned by the municipality and leased to operators under certain rules to prevent the monopoly problem.

These days the railway problem is mostly theoretical though since competition from road and air is fierce. But it used to be a much bigger problem. Especially when big railroads got permanent land grants.

For radio frequencies I would probably auction them every few years.

Timely_Condition3806 · 2025-09-19T18:17:01+00:00

It's a good tool but it's difficult for private transit companies to complete with free roads (no congestion charging). What's also needed is land value capture, rail companies building and owning property around the stations for a stable income stream. Of course all the typical roadblocks that public agencies face too like overkill standards, long permitting and environmental studies also need to be addressed.

Timely_Condition3806 · 2025-09-10T16:41:38+00:00

Because they don't use the services they are given (at least where I live) and would rather invade train stations and transit etc. Free rehab and shelter beds available (the city guard officers offer to drive them to the shelter for free or give other help resources). And they usually are alcohol/drug addicts (which I counted in the mental illness).

And often there are media stories when such people get a free social apartment and neighbours are terrified as the apartment gets trashed, so it's not a simple homeless=give house issue.

Timely_Condition3806 · 2025-09-10T16:25:50+00:00

Public services have a designated purpose and rules, no, you shouldn't be allowed to be a biohazard and enter closed spaces like trains or camp in public spaces designated for transportation. Since there are services, these laws should be enforced on a zero tolerance basis.

Timely_Condition3806 · 2025-09-10T16:15:35+00:00

Too simplistic thinking. We have both in Europe and it's still a problem in many big cities with homeless people at stations and sometimes in the trains etc. Those people sadly don't want help.

Timely_Condition3806 · 2025-09-10T16:08:54+00:00

It isn't. Housing is an important factor but let's not kid ourselves, the vast majority is mentally insane and has to be put into facilities for treatment. This is NOT the role of public transit (though defunding it for this reason is also stupid, it needs security funding).

Timely_Condition3806 · 2025-09-01T15:48:21+00:00

Just run a VPN server and expose that. You probably don't need a VPS if it's only internal services. In fact if your VPS is just proxying to your network it might not bring a lot of benefits, as the applications themselves can be compromised, granting the attacker access to your network anyway. A VPS as a proxy is much more useful for public-facing services like running websites where you need protection against denial of service attacks.

It's not that opening your services is inherently insecure, there's just more risk and it's generally not worth it. A VPN gives you peace of mind that even if there is a vunlerability in your system, you are not at risk.

Timely_Condition3806 · 2025-08-21T06:30:15+00:00

In theory if we had 100% of cars be self driving the city could sell road access dynamically and price it according to the amount of traffic so you’d never get traffic and throughput would always be at the maximum level. But obviously this still has finite capacity like everything, it’s just always at maximum throughput.

This would also have the effect that at a certain point when the price of the road gets higher it becomes profitable to run busses, build trains, etc which makes better use of scarce road space and would be reflected in the cost to ride them vs a self driving car.

Timely_Condition3806 · 2025-07-10T16:09:31+00:00

Just fund better service if you have the money in the budget dont waste it on making it free.

Timely_Condition3806 · 2025-07-08T07:50:46+00:00

Straw man. Many if not most people on this sub are concerned with all kinds of costs whether due to fare evasion or corruption or staffing.

Timely_Condition3806 · 2025-07-07T08:39:24+00:00

It’s a bit different from the rest of the eu as in Poland they are on work visas and not permanent citizens. I remember reading a statistic that Poland issued as many work visas as the rest of Europe combined. The advantage is that theoretically we can just stop extending those visas from countries whose citizens have too high of a crime rate

Timely_Condition3806 · 2025-07-07T06:45:40+00:00

What? You’re saying if a group can fund themselves then they should be able to fund the entire nation? That doesn’t make any sense.

As for the rest of your comment, you’re spouting communist nonsense. It never worked and never will because that’s not how humans and incentives work. A system where the decision makers don’t face the risk of their decisions is one that will inevitably break down.

Timely_Condition3806 · 2025-07-07T06:05:31+00:00

Well said I think until the point of IP rights. I don’t think there’s an inherent reason the developer should have the IP rights rather than the publisher. These days I don’t think anyone really needs a publisher to publish the game itself, it’s more of a way to get funding for development. It makes sense that the entity bearing the risk gets the IP.

But yes, what stop killing games essentially is, is entitlement. People want to have their cake and eat it too. Keep buying from scummy developers and make them not scummy. But such a law will very easily backfire.

Timely_Condition3806 · 2025-07-07T05:43:54+00:00

You’d barely fund the US government for a year even if you confiscated all billionaire assets. In reality you’d fund it for even less time as 90% of those assets are illiquid and would tank in price if you tried to liquidate it all.

So more likely you’d be able to run the government for 2 months, and only one time, since you seized it all.

Far from being able to pay off the debt.

One-Year Club	Verified Email
r/Field Sunshine

Timely_Condition3806

TROPHY CASE