Yet there’s a logic — however absurd — to it. It’s a case of income maximization gone extreme. Repealing healthcare will maximize incomes for healthcare providers, Congressmen, lobbyists, pharmaceutical companies. And repealing healthcare will maximize incomes for households, by lowering taxes. Never mind that it shrinks life expectancy, which is to say: never mind the long-term benefits of such investments — in this paradigm, all that matters is income, right now.
Thus, the overarching paradigmatic goal — increasing GDP , which is the underlying and understated assumption of all the above — will be accomplished. GDP doesn’t care if you don’t have healthcare — in fact, the more you pay for healthcare, the higher GDP rises. If we all break each other’s legs, GDP rises, because now we have to pay for healthcare — and if there’s only one doctor in town, who charges us a fortune, so much the better, because we’ll have to pay more. (And if you want to get political, of course we can trace slavery and segregation back to the idea of maximizing income at the expense of life, too).
If all that sounds bananas, that’s because it is. It’s all a tiny case study in just how broken the old paradigm of human organization is, which suggests the sole purpose of all life on the planet is maximizing the income we can wring out of it this nanosecond. Now let’s ask: what happens when a society obeys that paradigm in every sphere of life?
Well, you get the thoroughly weird and tragic situation America’s in today: its economics appear to be grossly fine— but its eudaimonics are dismal, declining, and failing. By “eudaimonics”, I mean whether lives are flourishing or not.
The is the problem with equating value with price and measuring utility (satisfaction) based on prices as an reliable indicator of preferences.
This is amplified by assuming macro to be scaled up micro and viewing macro in terms of aggregates rather than in terms of systems and networks.
The result is economics as fantasy intellectually, and, worse, the result is a horror show in actuality.
If there’s a recipe for how not to create eudaimonia, this old, busted paradigm — maximize income at the expense of life itself — is it.
Like I keep saying, capitalism is about putting ownership first and socialism is about putting society, you know, all the people, first. Capitalism is naturally suited to oligarchy of the plutocratic sort. Socialism in naturally fitted to democracy as government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
It's matter of getting priorities straight. Letting economic liberalism dictate social and political liberalism is a fool's errand.
Incidentally, viewing "capitalism versus socialism" as being black and white falls into the fallacy of the excluded middle. There are many forms of capitalism and socialism along the range between the extremes. However, much of the discussion assumes an excluded middle. This is unsound reasoning, usually for persuasion rather than being based on inquiry using methods of creative and critical thinking.
Designing Eudaimonia —The Art of Creating Better Lives
Umar Haque
