Socialism and Capitalism

This is meant to contribute to someone's Facebook post. I just didn't want to hijack the post with all this text.
 
I understand that Socialism and Capitalism, etc., are meaningful historical labels and categories. But I don't think they are useful in making headway in, what I see as, a never-ending debate. I think it is more useful to think of competition vs cooperation or groups vs individuals. There is both, in the natural world. Bee hives. Predator-prey dynamics, etc., etc. Even our man-made games have both. Football teams work together to compete with each other. Within a team, players compete for positions. But they also don't do it to the extent that they sabotage the success of the team. Sacrifices are made for the team effort. There are always trade-offs. There are things which can be better (e.g. "The whole is greater than the sum of parts.") when working as a group. But individuals in the group will lose certain valued freedoms. And the people in the group will not equally benefit. That is, it will end up being unfair to some, in some aspect/way. We can see that competition is like empirical experimentation: We only find out what is the best, by testing things head to head in a "market" (competition). Although, I'd like to see more of a competition for ideas, than an attempt to drive the "losers" into the loss of their basic livelihood.  Any government, as an organization/coordination is "socialistic" to the extent that is is a government. It is group of people, e.g. a "social" group, pool or work together. If humans weren't "socialistic", we wouldn't even be around to be having this debate. It is a key to our success as a species. I realize people will say that "social" doesn't mean "socialism". But if you follow the real, concrete differences to their natural depths, you will see that the defined differences are a bit trivial and not usefully actionable. I think people make the mistake in not seeing the way our Capitalist "free market" is "socialistic". A business company is a group of people (a social group) who work together on/for a good or service. The bigger they get, the more they can stifle free-market competition (in ways completely unrelated to making products better or more efficiently). The more they become like a monopoly, the more they look like a communist regime. So we can have can have other arguments, like how to most effectively and efficiently run an organization of people, say the U.S. Government (i.e. us). But we will never be able to resolve these debates by means of arguing "This is not fair to me, if I work harder and someone else gets the benefit." or "We should all value basic human health and thus be compelled to contribute health care system." Of course any group coordination will mean sacrifices for some. But, also, a good group coordination will benefit everyone, overall, in other ways. Of course there is no natural law that dictates you must contribute to someone else's basic health, even if you've taken better personal responsibility for you own. It is just the smart thing to choose to contribute to the group, because it ends up paying off. I think we just need to be smarter about the form and functioning of our groups. I think transparency (as, I think, Sara mentioned) and directness are key. I have very specific ideas about what that could look like in a government system. A health cooperative (like my HMO, when at UW-Madison) is more in that direction (a more direct market interaction between providers and customers), while an insurance company is in the opposite direction. An insurance company does get in the middle and administer the resource pool which enables the risk-spreading function we want. But it indirectly gets filtered through the stockholders/owners of the company. They are a third party which, by design, introduces a conflict on interest. This makes the interaction less direct (and less transparent). They have an interest in skimming as much as possible from the customer - healthcare provider transactions, completely in addition to how much doctors get paid, or the quality of care patients get. It's better for the stockholders if it becomes harder for members to figure out or prove that they didn't rightfully get their benefits, because transparency is noised up by unnecessarily long legalese, or obfuscated by insurance "coding". With a health cooperative, you are able to vote on which doctors can have access to your customer pool, based on their quality and cost of services. Doctors can be more competitive to the patients' needs, vs what they need to show in terms of how much money they will end up making for the insurance company investors, so they will be allowed in it's network.

Ugh. This feels so long-winded, and rambling. -probably unclear. I just want to get it off my chest. Think of it as a draft.