Comment by dontoni

The hyperinflation that caused turbulences in Germany as well as previous wars aren’t either of them capitalism-like.

Hyperinflation countries suffer it because the government steps in and manipulates the currency. We have the examples of Venezuela and Argentina as the most recent. Germany had the same destiny, although more caused by the constrictions placed on them by the States that won World War I.

Kids blowing glass is caused by poorness rather than capitalism. Precisely now that our capitalists societies created wealth is that we now don’t need to send our children to factories. It’s precisely poor countries the ones that gotta send their children to factories, like certain populations in China. Even before capitalism, children did still worked, yet on farms rather than factories. And their conditions weren’t greater at all either.

Marx wasn’t actually against child labour and he favoured it: he just wanted them to work under socialism and not under capitalists. He actually said that work was essential for the development of those children, but they shouldn’t do it under very poor health conditions. But again, that’s caused by poverty, not capitalism. In the Soviet Union children still worked in practice and conditions weren’t great either.

Regarding health and education, the US is weird because such a system has the absolute worse of markets (having to pay) and socialism (being hyper regulated). Nonetheless, it’s as easy as to fix one or the other. In Switzerland the system is essentially private and doesn’t suck so much. In fact, quite the opposite: it’s much better than most other systems like British or Spanish ones. Here in Spain you can wait 3-4 years for just a diagnosis for a colon cancer. 3-4 years. For the diagnosis only.

In Switzerland you don’t have such long waiting lists and costs are much manageable relative to their living costs.

Most of the US education and health system problems are outrageously caused by the State. As Mises said, every government regulation requires more government regulation, since politicians need to try and palliate the inefficiencies created by them with more regulatory patches.

Even so, how do you define a socialist healthcare system? In Spain or the UK there are private providers of healthcare and actually most of the public administration in Spain (at least the top ranks) are paying one. You could say that if the majority of spending is made by the government it’s socialist-like, and if not it’s capitalist-like. But in the US most of healthcare expenditure is government made, by a small margin. Such a system can’t be considered capitalist, and maybe trying to emulate a more friendly framework like the Swiss could be more beneficial that trying to stack more regulations on top of what the US already suffers.

So either you end hyper regulation and let markets lower prices or you go all in and go with full regulation and no market prices (think of British healthcare), at the expense of lousy quality in terms of speed and procedures.