From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@rawbw.com)
Date: Sun Apr 20 2008 - 23:43:15 MDT
Stathis writes
> What I meant was, if you assume that
> the main reason governments provide services is so that they can
> collect money and spawn large bureaucracies as ends in themselves,
> then there isn't a better reason to do this with hospitals than there
> is to do it with manufactured goods, for example.
Well, it's *one* of the main reasons, or rather, we should say,
explanations of their behavior. I'm not saying that there is no
idealism involved.
> But even communist governments have learned that for the
> most part it is better to leave manufacturing to the free market,
> while even governments ideologically committed to free
> markets in just about every other respect run public
> health systems. This requires some sort of explanation.
Robin Hanson has opined weightily on why health seems
different:
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/05/hanson_on_healt.html
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/09/10/robin-hanson/cut-medicine-in-half/
To continue this off-topic thread we must see how it applies to
the situations regarding distributed intelligences in at least the
entire solar system, perhaps 500 or 1000 years from now.
So first we need an analog of what government would be needed
for in possible far-future scenarios, as I asked for in a previous post.
Lee
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