Unlike the serf, I can go find another Lord. I can pit the lords against each other for a better deal. I can try and become my own lord. HR has a lot fewer tools than the inquisition. Fear of lawsuits reduces their toolkit even further.
Very true. Unless you have a sick family member. Until the ACA, you were 100% trapped. Now, you’re not officially trapped, only trapped in practice, because when you switch health plans, the providers who have been working with your kid for the last few years are no longer in your network, and... you get the picture.
Yes exactly. In my country (Australia), the majority of employers don't pay for health insurance. Either you rely on the public health system, or you pay for private health cover yourself. So, losing my job, or changing jobs, has no direct impact on my health insurance (beyond the impact on my ability to afford private health cover if there is any reduction of income)
In the 1950s, employee benefits became non-taxable. Prior to that, employees would get health insurance as individuals and their plans would never be tied to a particular employer, kinda like how it currently works in Switzerland. So that one law drove our entire health insurance system to where it is now.
> Once America became embroiled in World War II, there was great concern that rampant inflation would threaten America's military effort and undermine its domestic economy. The concern was valid, as Americans had witnessed what inflation had done to war-torn Germany, devastating its economy and giving rise to Hitler's regime.
> To combat inflation, the 1942 Stabilization Act was passed. Designed to limit employers' freedom to raise wages and thus to compete on the basis of pay for scarce workers, the actual result of the act was that employers began to offer health benefits as incentives instead.
> Suddenly, employers were in the health insurance business. Because health benefits could be considered part of compensation but did not count as income, workers did not have to pay income tax or payroll taxes on those benefits. [0]
You can also read about this in a 2017 NY Times article [1]
You were not 100% trapped, by collapsing the propositions of an argument you destroy a meaningful distinction. It is very different to be a serf in fact and a serf in practice. Serf's were legally defined as property and could be bought and sold with land and killed if they failed to work according to the Lords liking. No company can compel you to work on threat of death. Does employer linked insurance suck and have negative, unintended consequences, yes, but you can quit with two weeks notice and find another job with health insurance. The distinction does matter.
That's not entirely true. If you had a "gap in coverage" e.g. you were without insurance for too long (about 30 days?) then limits on pre-existing conditions, etc. might be an issue when you get insurance again. But if you were just changing jobs, going from one employer plan to another, it wasn't an issue (at least it wasn't for me, and I changed jobs many times before ACA, including going back and forth between employer and individual plans). And if for some reason there was going to be a gap between jobs, you could pay for gap coverage under COBRA, or get a short-term individual plan.
Haha... indeed. I meant specifically from the perspective that you were in a situation where leaving your job meant you were now uninsurable (in many states, at least). I have an entirely separate rant on how the ACA stuck people with higher deductible health plans outside of employers (like me and my family) with virtually all of the risk of the formerly uninsurable. It was more politically expedient for the Democratic Congress of ‘09 to not really try to fix the problem.
I mean... it was an improvement, and certainly did enable coverage for a lot of people who otherwise would have gone without. But it was such a lost opportunity, and I wish the Dems could just own up to that and push for something more. The problem is that both sides are so deep in the industry’s pockets, that I don’t think real reform is even possible.
> it was an improvement and ... enabled coverage for a lot of people
This is kind of my point. The ACA was designed to benefit the middle class and non-vulnerable. At which point the middle class and non-vulnerable (and the press) stopped caring about who had healthcare.
To drive home that point: A few years ago I ran ACA quotes for typical income levels (typical for non-wealthy regions, 12k-32k) and found that premium cost steeply dropped for each 10k rise in income.
My primary issue isn't that this happened, it's that we weren't told. It's that ACA supporters + the entirety of press compulsively gloss over ACA realities.
> I wish the Dems could just own up to that and push for something more.
I suggest that uncovered Americans don't need something more. They need something.
> The problem is that both sides are so deep in the industry’s pockets, that I don’t think real reform is even possible.
Pols trading law/power for campaign cash is the other thing that news orgs have ~0 interest in.
My family migrated to different employer healthcare with zero changes on the provider side other than premium cost.
Perhaps we’re lucky or the system is already monopsonized in our area. However, sometimes you can also get the same network at your new employer (e.g. Kaiser or other HMOs).
That said it’d be a lot better with single payer and the largest risk-pool of an entire country.
> Unlike the serf, I can go find another Lord. I can pit the lords against each other for a better deal.
For many people that isn't really true. And even if you are in a high-demand profession, and have the necessary negotiations skills, moving between jobs has a pretty high transaction cost.
Then keep working until you are in that position. When you are 1 years old you can't walk, you keep working, when you are 12 you can't drive, you keep working, when you are 22 you probably can't retire of self earned assets, you keep working. Set a goal and work until you get there.
Any different group with a semi-competent lord will absolutely destroy you and take your resources. You'll soon send around resumes begging for a lord to take you.
>> What if we tried to make it so there were no lords? Just a thought.
> Any different group with a semi-competent lord will absolutely destroy you and take your resources. You'll soon send around resumes begging for a lord to take you.
Not really. IIRC, in the French Revolutionary Wars, French troops were more effective because they were better motivated than those who were fighting for some lord.
It's probably necessary to have leaders, but that doesn't mean lords are necessary.
Clearly it's a nice analogy. So there is a need for leadership. There are good leaders and bad (call em leaders or lords) but there is always a hierarchy. Let say there where no hierarchy by rank, there would still be a hierarchy in competence. It may shift as situations shift. Given that. But if someone is a competent leader he will succeed dominating evey hierarchy. That's what leadership leads up to: being a efficient and hopeful a competent leader.
So even if you are in a group of mercenaries you will and want to have a leader who makes a call in critical moments. Even if you vote who the leader might be you will choose the one who makes the best decision (could be yourself) or even persuades you into believing that the decisions he made are good.
On this grounding all the other systems emerge like nepotism, bad leadership, fall guys... and HR
Yes, the social democracies of Europe where governement restrict the rights of corporations for the benefits of people are just a fantasy invented by left-wing media, in reality people living there are all suffering. /s
Honestly, it is still jarring to see people in the US actually believe the system they are living in is some sort of "lessest evil system", not realizing how much easier they would have it in Scandinavia/Germany/France/Switzerland/Netherlands/Belgium/etc. And this is a region with comparable population and resources to the US.
I mean, just think about implementing socialized healthcare, a proper tax system which is short and understandable with few loopholes, a reasonable minimum wage and parental leave for all paid by the federal government. Those are a handful of measures that would significantly improve life for 99.5% of everyone in the US. And there is no plausible mechanism where these measures take away all your freedoms.
Sure you can argue that it's impossible to get American politicians to enact these. But that is just another point of failure of the free market democracy, that elected politicians are most interested in the outcomes for people and organizations who pay them money (literally or indirectly), and not in the people they are elected to represent.
Is someone really your "lord" if you can just choose for them not to be your "lord" and freely choose for them to be your "lord" if they compensate you well enough for your liking? I'd suggest we already don't have lords and the analogy doesn't really hold.
This is always a matter of degrees, and most jobholders have much less freedom to choose than your line of questioning assumes. In general, and especially for those people, maybe this is a good mental model for how to operate in a workplace. Power imbalances may actually be so unequal.
You get that from proper incentives. Capitalism is mostly about creating an environment where people can leverage those incentives as easily as possible.
There's a deep irony that the system set up based on incentivizing and rewarding growth (and occasionally greed) has helped raise millions out of poverty while the systems based on altruism have led to the deaths of millions and massive amounts of suffering.
Where do you think that comes from? The modern CCP leverages market economies to build that wealth. That success is because Xi recognizes the power for capitalism and growth to create wealth. They then try to control that though and the recent disappearance of Jack Ma and the government block of that IPO is more what I'm talking about.
The cultural revolution, hundred flowers campaign, and current Uyghur genocide are some of the classic negative aspects of CCP control. Those aspects are more the standard fare communist policy.
The good that's there comes from their embrace of capitalism and market incentives. The bad comes from the standard communist one party control, it's also what eventually leads to problems.
I thought Deng's principles were the foundation for modern China's economic policy? Is this not true?
"After Chairman Mao Zedong's death in 1976, Deng gradually rose to power and led China through a series of far-reaching market-economy reforms, which earned him the reputation as the "Architect of Modern China"." [0]
Attributing reduction in poverty rates primarily to Xi doesn't make much sense given the historical trends. See the world bank info[1] for a sense of the long term decline(1990-2016).
That may be for Capitalism, but that's not what we have today. We have Corporate Feudalism. Capitalism makes a bunch of assumptions about the freedom of the market, freedom of information, freedom of capital and labor and so on - most of which Corporate Feudalism has undermined.
Capitalism and Communism has suffered the same fate from the same source, and this will remain true until we move into the age of plenty from the age of want, and probably beyond.
I'm being heavily downvoted in my other comments, but I don't agree.
Today we have more people starting more billion dollar companies more easily than any other time in human history. We have more freedom of movement, more wealth, etc.
There's a staggering amount of growth, a staggering amount of capital investment.
No system is its perfect ideal (and there are obvious issues today), but things are a lot better than they were in the age of a handful of national companies.
Sure, but that growth and investment did not and will not benefit you, or most anyone else. That 'value' gets aggregated into a vanishingly small group of hyper valuable individuals. In fact, at this stage the meaning of GDP for example is fundamentally decoupled from the actual wealth of the people.
I encourage you to research Mark Blyth's work on generational wealth and check out 'Angrynomics'
Growth (when constrained for human rights and environmental protection) is the best way to help the most the fastest.
You see it everywhere, massive reduction of global poverty, infant mortality, etc. Even just things like the ability for almost anyone to have an iPhone and use of Amazon/two day shipping are examples. Inexpensive food is another.
While gp is using slightly emotive language, they didn't at any point say that the feudal structure was bad. A feudal structure is pretty effective in a localised setting where most people know most other people and everyone is happy-enough with the person at the pinacle of the status tree.
The major downsides of old-school feudalism were (1) Doesn't really scale to populations of 200k+ and (2) the We Cannot Get Out problem.
Corporate structure solves both those problems pretty neatly.
A corporation is not a democracy though, and no one is calling it that. Everyone knows this acutely because they know they have a boss to appease. In contrast, in a government, there's really no "boss" to appease, we choose the leaders.
Really the only difference between feudalism and capitalism is the latter’s ability/freedom to fail. Shitty hierarchical structures are replaced by newly emerging better hierarchical structures. Serfs migrate easily.
All this is basically a consequence of companies & people not being defined by / tied to land (as serfdoms were - basically farms). Rising from agrarian to industrial society is what enabled this.
Indeed. I would say though that while you are contrasting, the parent was comparing. It's a very good analogy for the political dynamic within a company.
I'll agree that edge cases can prevent anything from being reasonable or fair, but we can't let perfect be the enemy of good here. I think we're making progress every day towards enabling everyone to have more choice (on average, obviously some days have major setbacks for humanity).
