>>And the USSR rationed by queue, we by price. The 40m without health
>>insurance are experiencing a shortage. The thousands sleeping on the
>>sidewalk in NYC tonight are experiencing a shortage. There's plenty
>>to criticize about Soviet planning, but let's not overlook our own
>>problems in the process.
>>
>
>I'm disappointed in you, Doug. When have I ever? And you know I
>think that health care is a public good not to be dealt with by
>markets, but by a planned national health system, or at least
>national health insurance.
I know where you're coming from, but still, when you go on about how planning sucks and "markets do it better" you somehow overlook how markets do some things very very badly. The Hayekian signalling view of prices effaces all the power relations behind the superficial appearance of neutral provision of information. And that, for all its flaws, the Soviet planning system did, for a while, manage to narrow the income gap with the West, for the only time in Russian history.
I still think this whole markets-vs-plan debate is kind of abstract and silly. The likelihood of any society adopting a Gosplan-style model today is indistinguishable from 0, and for people in the rich countries, completely irrelevant. We've got markets up the wazzoo, and the point is to figure out what to do about them. Inventing some system on your laptop isn't theoretically or practically very helpful.
Doug