[duckingtest]

American medical system is not capitalist but mercantilist. It's illegal to offer services without explicit permission of the medical guild. It has the exact same effect all historical guild systems had: price gouging and reduced supply. Taxi licenses are another good example.

Capitalist medical system would mean the value of a particular medical certification would be set by the market, ie. everyone would be able to sell medical services. Historically free market has always resulted in a much better quality in addition to lower prices.

[etplayer]

>American medical system is not capitalist but mercantilist.

This distinction is made on the fallacious idea that "capitalism" is equal to a totally free market. This is a common confusion but false nevertheless. There is no reason I see why a capitalist system cannot include intervention by the government, and indeed it must deal with this to uphold property rights as even libertarian authors tell us.

Capitalism is the predominant employment of wage-labour, the private ownership of social means of production and the goal of accumulation of capital.

>Historically free market has always resulted in a much better quality in addition to lower prices.

It has also resulted in much higher rates of exploitation, as the workers of countries with more lax or unenforced labour laws suffer greatly for it.

[duckingtest]

>There is no reason I see why a capitalist system cannot include intervention by the government

You're attempting to redefine the meaning of words to create a strawman where 'capitalism' can have any property you want, which then allows you to misrepresent an attack on a $random_negative_thing as an attack on 'capitalism'.

A system with state intervening in the market is called a mixed economy.

>It has also resulted in much higher rates of exploitation, as the workers of countries with more lax or unenforced labour laws suffer greatly for it.

The more protected against 'exploitation' people in a particular country are, the more likely they are to risk their lives trying to escape their socialist utopias.

If you weren't a hypocrite you would renounce your citizenship and relocate to a 'better' place, like Cuba or Venezuela.

[dang]

> If you weren't a hypocrite you would renounce your citizenship and relocate to a 'better' place, like Cuba or Venezuela.

This trope is doubly lame on Hacker News: both a personal swipe and a heat-dead cliché. Please don't comment like this here.

Civil and substantive comments are the kind we want on Hacker News. This was neither. Please read and follow https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

[etplayer]

>You're attempting to redefine the meaning of words to create a strawman

Isn't this exactly what post-Marxian authors did? By the time Marx was writing, it was clear what capitalism was - the predominant employment of wage labour, private ownership of social means of production, and accumulation of capital. The idea that a state which owns all or most of the productive capacity of society cannot be "capitalist" for some reason is outstandingly silly.

>The more protected against 'exploitation' people in a particular country are, the more likely they are to risk their lives trying to escape their socialist utopias.

This is a very ignorant statement; there exist heavy protections against high exploitation in the EU, but the EU is not a Socialist organisation nor are many people trying to escape it for its labour laws. There has not existed a Socialist society as of yet aside from the Paris Commune and Catalonia (which I must note, very few people tried to escape); before you reply that this is an NTS fallacy, I must say that the Socialist mode of production rests upon the abolition of the law of value (i.e commodities are not produced) and the working class as a whole hold ownership of the social means of production, and the functions of private property have been done away with. This was not observed in the regimes of the USSR, Soviet satellite states, Cuba or Venezuela.

>If you weren't a hypocrite you would renounce your citizenship and relocate to a 'better' place, like Cuba or Venezuela.

No. Cuba and Venezuela both operate the capitalist mode of production, and in fact Cuba is in very direct violation of the principles of non-alienated labour. How can a Socialist country be opposed to fair working conditions? This suggests to me that it is not Socialist at all. You must also note that I have not shown any appreciation for the economic models of either Cuba or Venezuela. The idea that I must support any country which calls itself "Socialist" is as absurd as saying that as a democrat I must support any country which calls itself "democratic", including the DPRK.