One thing that has been on the lips of proponents of the welfare system is that if we don’t have a welfare system, then society is a jungle, a jungle of the weak and the strong.
So let’s start with the jungle today. What is the jungle?
What is the jungle?
The jungle is indeed the jungle of the weak, also known as the zero-sum game, that is, you do not have me, I do not have you.
Everyone has seen the animal world, in the African jungle, at any Time there are fierce animals appear, the other side is not as good as his animals to eat, this is the strongest predator.
My gain comes from your loss, this is the basic definition of the jungle.
And isn’t the government government-run welfare system the jungle model?
In the case of fully subsidized welfare programs, such as free health care, where does the health care money used by the poor come from? Doesn’t it come from taxes from the rich?
Isn’t it the jungle that the gains of the poor come from the losses of the rich, using methods that are robbed through government violence? Isn’t that a zero-sum game?
In benefits partially subsidized by programs, such as college tuition subsidies, the middle class is often subsidized.
Doesn’t this subsidy come from the taxes paid by the rich and the poor? Doesn’t the middle class also seize property from the poor and the rich through violent government taxation?
Isn’t this the jungle?
People can see how hyenas in the animal world pull out the anus of a lion. A group of hyenas can play a lion several times its own body to death if there are enough of them.
Capitalists seem to be very powerful. Rockefeller seems powerful, but he had the misfortune to be born in the jungle, and countless people could easily divide up 70% of his estate simply by introducing an inheritance tax through a democratic system.
Isn’t this the hyena-emptying anus of the human world?
I know, this one will make me fall out of favor. Because democrats can’t accept this view.
But the fact is that the people elect politicians through the ballot box and then pass mandatory laws to loot the governments in the Western world, moving it more and more from a civilized society to a jungle society.
Otherwise you can’t explain that American workers in the early twentieth century were able to drive cars, live in HOUSES, and support their families, while a hundred years later, American workers are not much better off than they were.
What is the antonym of the jungle? That’s the market.
When you sell something to someone, are you robbing them of their property with violence?
If you have a bit of common sense economics, you can tell that the transaction makes both sides of the revenue increase, which is not a zero-sum game, but a win-win situation.
The comments section of the last two articles compelled me to put the most basic theory of economics, once again, simply listed below.
This paragraph is the most profound insight into the theory of economics, and you should read it a hundred times.
A voluntary exchange is never an equivalent exchange. If it were, the exchange would not have happened.
Both sides of the transaction cooperate with each other and both get the opportunity to gain greater value.
For both parties, this opportunity to benefit is an incentive.
In a freely arrived at exchange, both parties expect to gain something of greater value by giving up something of lesser value.
If you trade your phone to me for a painting, it means that you think the painting is worth more than the phone, and I think the phone is worth more than the painting.
We observe that people are voluntarily exchanging one thing they consider valuable for another thing he considers more valuable.
From either side, the exchange is not equal, because the two parties do not judge value the same way; otherwise, they would not have rearranged the property rights of the painting and the cell phone
And this is the root of the productive nature of trade. You have more wealth than before, and so do I. The exchange is productive because both parties have increased their wealth.
You say that the free market is a jungle society when it is clear that government welfare is robbery, a jungle, a means of violent aggression, and free trade is civilization, the light of humanity?
Have you never seen the animal world?
The reason why human beings came out of the jungle, is not to learn to trade and cooperate? That’s civilization.
The market is civilized, robbery is uncivilized. This is a simple truth.
What is the second market
The market is the place where people exchange, that is, people to meet their own purposes, to take peaceful means to achieve greater benefits.
This is the difference between humans and animals.
Most human beings tend to use trade to satisfy themselves in order to advance their interests, rather than to eat other animals like predators do.
You call the market a jungle? What capitalist in a free market has ever roasted a human leg to eat?
As you stroll through the supermarket, you realize that it takes billions of people working together to produce every raw material for the products in this supermarket, yet you can easily walk a few steps and bring them Home for a pittance.
Don’t they just produce the product and sell it to you? You don’t think the product is good, so why should you buy it? What kind of jungle is it to make you buy it voluntarily? Isn’t the jungle violent?
Every additional free-market entrepreneur means that the number of people supplying products to meet your needs by way of trade is increasing, and you should light a string of firecrackers to celebrate the fact that new options have been added to your future.
The free-market capitalist still needs to hire workers to produce his product in order to make money, and you have the opportunity to sell him labor.
Aren’t you a businessman too? Aren’t you also selling labor? Are you eating your boss’s flesh?
How come when your boss sells a product it’s called the jungle and when you sell labor it’s being squeezed? People who think that way are too double standard, right?
Why do I put a free market qualifier in front of capitalists?
Because I want to exclude the following types of people.
- Businesses that collude with power to profit with regulation are not free market entrepreneurs, they are participants in robbery; for example, businesses that demand dumping duties and tariffs from the U.S. government are just trying to profit by reducing competition through power, which is the jungle.
- Businesses that resort to fraud and other involuntary tactics to profit: these are not entrepreneurs, they are not businessmen, they are nothing but liars and robbers, because it is not a real voluntary transaction.
And real businesses will always succeed by creating value through cost savings for you and by making profits for the consumer.
Didn’t the presence of Jack Ma and Huang Zheng help you? Didn’t save you money?
E-commerce platform companies have saved Chinese consumers trillions of dollars, effectively offsetting the effects of Inflation. Without them, your current income might only sustain half of your current level of consumption.
But where an industry is expensive and inefficient, you can safely say it’s because it’s not marketed enough.
American health care is the most expensive in the world, and some say that’s the result of privatization. It’s all private enterprise, so the public is reduced to a capitalist rip-off.
I should write half a million words on this issue, because U.S. health care is the least free medical market with the most interference in the world.
Physician union restrictions on physician access, state restrictions on health insurance not being able to operate across state lines, US insurance companies’ gross margins are also regulated by the government, physicians cannot even operate across state lines, etc. ……..
The superficially private U.S. health care system, peeled back his insides to see the most restrictive health care market in the world, that’s why he is so expensive.
I’ve been preparing to write about the regulation of the U.S. healthcare market for over a month now, but I haven’t been able to start because the regulation is too much, too complex, too magical, and if I start writing, I won’t be able to finish without ten pieces of writing.
I recommend you read my other article, “Is the Texas Electricity Collapse the Fault of Capital? How much government control is behind what appears to be a private electricity market!
The US is a free market my ass, and the US health care market is ten times more regulated than the electricity market.
And the same medical care, only twenty or thirty years to engage in the Indian medical market reform, I also list a simple fact to prove the results of marketization.
The price of heart surgery at a leading private hospital in India is between $1,200 and $1,400 (which is one-third or less of the cost of such surgery at other hospitals in India and one-hundredth of the cost of such surgery in the United States). Even so, 80 percent of people cannot afford to pay this cost. Eleven years ago, the hospital launched a micro-insurance program, Yeshasvini Microhealth Insurance. 1.7 million farmers pay 11 cents a month for insurance. The program works with 400 hospitals, so farmers can go to any hospital and get surgery for free. They only have to pay 11 cents a month.
Many private hospitals in India are extremely cheap, but the quality of treatment and surgery for some diseases has met or exceeded that of the United States. The only proper learning target for China’s health care reform is to learn from India.
This is the power of the market.
I am going to start a long story on the medical market in the world, and the success of private healthcare in India is one that cannot be bypassed.
Let me ask you, why are cell phones getting cheaper and cheaper?
When you take the phone apart, isn’t the phone just a bunch of stones, iron, copper and other metal arrangements?
If the market remains highly free, the price of cell phones can be infinitely close to the cost of mining these minerals.
Even if one day, a dollar a cell phone, you should not be surprised.
There are countless production steps between minerals and cell phones, how to make the increased cost of each step infinitely tends to zero?
That is to allow the emergence of super giants in each link, they upgrade equipment, upgrade management, upgrade efficiency, and constantly reduce the cost of the link process in order to increase sales volume and obtain higher profits.
As long as the supply is large and the quantity is large enough, he may also gain enough by adding 1% in the link, that can reduce the cost infinitely.
Yes, this is how the market benefits everyone.
Even if capitalists don’t use a dime for charity, they allow the poor to improve their lives because they have more things to buy with their limited income.
And the industries and products that you see getting more expensive and less quality are, without exception, the result of government intervention in the market.
Finally, then, it’s time to talk about how we should deal with the risks of unemployment, disease, and old age.
The ultimate solution to the three welfare problems
Welfare is not not needed, but not to engage in mandatory welfare.
There are many marketists who advocate that government charity is not needed, and that private charity can solve the problems of the poor.
This does not solve the problem of the opponents, who ask, where is there so much private charity, in case there is no private charity?
What if there are many poor people and few rich people?
What about the rich people who don’t do charity?
How can you pin so many problems on the goodness of the rich?
Their objections are justified.
Because charity has never been the primary means by which human society copes with hardship, I would even argue that the push for charity is somehow demeaning to the power of the market.
In fact, throughout history, people in trouble have always received all kinds of help, not from private charity, but from something else called mutual aid organizations.
You’ve been to Chinese weddings and funerals, right? Paying your share is something that every Chinese person has experienced.
This is a form of private mutual aid. When my Family is in trouble, the whole village comes together to help me out, is this charity?
It’s not. It’s a form of mutual aid because when another family is in trouble, you also need to contribute so that you can get help from an organization in times of trouble.
It’s a market-based way of helping each other.
And when European business society was just developing, mutual aid organizations were the main form of protection for civil society.
Unlike charity, which was autonomous and mutually beneficial, designed to provide for occasional needs, mutual aid organizations were not a group of people paying to help another group of people, but a model of mutual cooperation among a constituent society of equals.
In the nineteenth century, workers who entered the cities of England developed national mutual aid organizations with hundreds of thousands of members, and the organizers also invested the mutual aid money in operating industries with considerable returns.
What did such mutual aid organizations mainly undertake?
Sick pay and retirement pay for workers who are unable to work due to illness, accidents, or old age, medical insurance for the organization’s members, and even decent funerals for the dead, and financial and living assistance for widows and orphans who have lost their families.
Do you see if this is welfare? Isn’t it a lot like the People’s Commune’s sixteen packets.
But what is the fundamental difference between him and the people’s commune welfare and the present welfare system in Europe and America?
One is compulsory and the other is voluntary.
In 1801, Federico published a survey showing that 7,200 mutual aid organizations existed in Britain at that time, with as many as 640,000 members, while the total population of Britain at that time was only nine million.
And in 1911, when the British government began to introduce compulsory government insurance, there were already nine million citizens who were members of registered and informal voluntary insurance societies.
That is, just as mutual insurance began to spread on a large scale, compulsory state insurance began.
And although mutual organizations had not been operating from spontaneity for long, they had already begun to adopt many advanced operating concepts.
For example, the mutual will be divided into different levels according to the size of the region, different risks to take the size of the region to share.
Those with small risks are included in the national membership sharing, while those with large risks are shared among regions to ensure as much fairness as possible. It also establishes a modern system of financial control and supervision of the enterprise.
And such an organization pays special attention to efficiency and fairness together, fixing problems as soon as they arise. Each mutual usually has a detailed rulebook and is constantly incorporating new ideas, amending them, and changing them as circumstances change.
And in 1920, the largest mutual aid organization in the United States, the Fraternal Order, also had 8 million members, accounting for 30 percent of U.S. adults over the age of 20.
And at the same time, there were numerous private self-help welfare organizations in the United States, from churches down to clans and neighborhoods, organizing countless mutual aid organizations to deal with special situations.
The Masonic Lodge, as the Chinese are familiar with, is actually a mutual aid organization, and in 1930, Masonic membership accounted for 12 percent of adult white American males. It had a strong welfare protection function by organizing funerals, paying for burial expenses, paying for sickness, etc.
In 1929, Masons also provided residences for elderly members of more than ninety jurisdictions, and you see if the welfare is good, even the residence is covered.
In 1914, the Masonic housing program gave each member an average subsidy of more than $1,800, when the dollar was dozens of times the value of the current dollar.
In 1917, 45 of the 59 fraternities in California offered sickness and accident insurance. Before the Great Depression, fraternities had complete control of the Life insurance market, leaving other rivals far behind.
So how did the mutuals help their members with their medical problems?
They went to doctors and clinics and negotiated that if you offered low prices for your services, then all of our members, they would come to you for medical care.
And the doctor is tempted by profit and the market to discount the price of his services so dramatically that the mutuals hire far busier doctors than other doctors, because the volume of clients is high but the unit price is low, and the doctors have to try to serve more clients for a higher income.
Mutuals’ demands on physicians have even led to dissatisfaction from physician unions.
The California State Medical Society of Shasta County warned mutual aid organizations to stop expanding or “our services will be devalued as much as the shoe shine children and snack vendors.”
The California Medical Association’s House of Delegates even threatened to fire physicians who were undercutting the practice of Medicine, and the New York Medical Association called for extraordinary measures to be taken against those physicians who did not change their ways.
This shows how successful the low cost strategy of mutual aid organizations was at the time.
Modern European and American doctors, on the other hand, can easily get super high income by seeing only a few patients a day because they have regulated the market through their power.
Mutual aid organizations are in competition with each other and can quit at any time. Each mutual organization offers as low cost insurance products as possible to keep members, because only by scaling up can they reduce costs more.
And people who are lazy and only want what others give to them will not survive in mutuals in the long run.
What I am trying to say is that even without charity, private mutuals can be very good at providing the means of welfare and getting the best welfare conditions at the lowest cost.
It is just a pity that private mutual insurance has just started to develop, and then it was completely wiped out by the government-run compulsory insurance, which is the most miserable reality of human beings in the twentieth century.
So much so that after a hundred years, contemporary mankind can no longer think of any means by which we can solve these problems on our own, other than government provision of mandatory-based health care, retirement, and Education services.
It’s fucking pathetic.
Voluntary transactions, spontaneous cooperation, is what civilizes humanity and is the fundamental way to solve problems.
Humans who think of any problem and ask to solve it through government coercion are approaching humanoid beasts.
To build a road, there are houses in the way, the deal can not be made, then the forced demolition.
There are poor people who can not afford to see a doctor, then ask the government to impose high taxes on the rich to rob him of his money.
People who hold such claims day in and day out are the monsters of human society, the originators of bringing humanity from civilization into the jungle.
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