The New York Times had an article on a small group of business in Toledo that thought less regulation would help their businesses.
See “The President Changed. So Has Small Businesses’ Confidence”, Landon Thomas Jr, 2107-03-12
2017-03-14'
Many people fail to realize that government makes businesses run more smoothly because it levels the playing field by keeping other businesses honest. Government is the force that reduces externalities.
Does a quality restaurant want to compete with a sloppy restaurant that has unsanitary conditions, pays extremely low wages, and just dumps its garbage anywhere. Food inspections have saved lots of lives and protected other restaurants from unfair competition.
Does a trucking company that follows safety laws want to compete with a company that overworks its drivers who are encouraged to speed.
Does a quality manufacturer want to compete with a manufacturer who cuts costs by avoiding a lot of safety practices?
Does a food processor want to face a law suit from a person who has a really bad reaction because the company didn’t follow government labelling regulation?
Does any company want to do business with a bank that doesn’t keep a government-mandated reserves? It has happened over and over again that people and companies have lost a great deal of money when a bank went belly-up. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) has certainly reduced the losses of many a company.
If a government didn’t enforce certain standards of safety and fiduciary responsibility, would more businesses be looking at costly law suits? By showing that they were making every effort to follow the regulations, wouldn’t they blunt these suits, especially if they kept good compliance records.
And well-run companies will also pay less insurance than their slap-dash competitors.
Oh, yes, I almost forgot patents and copyrights. Boy, lots of companies would be screaming bloody murder if their intellectual property wasn’t protected by government registration.
Showing posts with label health. Show all posts
Showing posts with label health. Show all posts
Thursday, March 16, 2017
Wednesday, October 26, 2016
A rebuttal of the Star Tribune misuse of the term “free market”
I submitted the following commentary to the Star Tribune a day or two after D.J. Tice’s column which I considered another misuse of the term “free market”. I have not seen it published yet. Could it be that “free marketers” don’t like reminders of true free markets?
D.J. Tice’s column “ A foolish system and your money …” leads me to believe he is one of those who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. I wonder if he has considered the number of times in a day that he has benefitted from public goods.
Did he drive on a freeway to work? Did he pay the full cost of his share of the road, the full cost of the pollution from his car, and the cost of the loss of tax revenues from the houses that once were above the trenches that divide up our cities?
Did he take a bus to work? His fare would have only paid part of the cost. But the bus is a public good in that it reduces the number of cars on the road. If he had to pay the full cost of his bus ride, he probably wouldn’t take the bus.
Did he walk to work? Did he pay a toll for the sidewalk he used? Did he put a coin in the traffic lights so that he could cross the street?
Let’s hope that his house never catches fire. He would not be happy paying the full cost of the fire department response. If his neighbor had the misfortune of a fire, would he help pay the cost of the fire department whose response kept the fire from spreading to his house?
I am a graduate of the Cleveland Public School System. I doubt that my mother could have afforded the full cost of the schooling that qualified me to attend college. Many other people, some childless, helped pay the cost of my education.
I could not have afforded the tuition at Case Institute of Technology. A foundation paid full tuition the first year. I flunked out of Case but the foundation kept paying a fraction of my tuition at Ohio Wesleyan University. At both schools, many donors provided money to keep the tuition down somewhat. Three-percent federal loans also helped. I managed to get back to Case for graduate school with a graduate assistant position. I doubt any of the work we did paid in full for our jobs and tuition.
Companies are demanding more and more highly specialized “skills”, but they are not willing to train people. They expect the public schools and the colleges and universities to train these employees. But they don’t want to pay the taxes for the public schools and colleges, institutions that would help those who can’t afford the elite institutions. The smaller the pool of potential employees, the harder it is to find “qualified” employees.
Could he pay out of pocket for each and every medical visit he needed: office or hospital? For those of us with well-paying jobs, health insurance pays for a chunk of the care, if not all. But what about people who have jobs with no health insurance? Has he considered that their lack of health insurance benefits him with lower prices? (Or the owners with much higher profits.)
What if there were a deadly epidemic that had no respect for wealth? How might such an epidemic start? Maybe those who first became ill could not afford the health care, health care that would have reduced their chances of spreading their disease.
Modern economies run a large array of public goods: roads, schools, police, fire, and regulatory inspections. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes supposedly said, “I like taxes; they buy me civilization.”
D.J. Tice’s column “ A foolish system and your money …” leads me to believe he is one of those who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. I wonder if he has considered the number of times in a day that he has benefitted from public goods.
Did he drive on a freeway to work? Did he pay the full cost of his share of the road, the full cost of the pollution from his car, and the cost of the loss of tax revenues from the houses that once were above the trenches that divide up our cities?
Did he take a bus to work? His fare would have only paid part of the cost. But the bus is a public good in that it reduces the number of cars on the road. If he had to pay the full cost of his bus ride, he probably wouldn’t take the bus.
Did he walk to work? Did he pay a toll for the sidewalk he used? Did he put a coin in the traffic lights so that he could cross the street?
Let’s hope that his house never catches fire. He would not be happy paying the full cost of the fire department response. If his neighbor had the misfortune of a fire, would he help pay the cost of the fire department whose response kept the fire from spreading to his house?
I am a graduate of the Cleveland Public School System. I doubt that my mother could have afforded the full cost of the schooling that qualified me to attend college. Many other people, some childless, helped pay the cost of my education.
I could not have afforded the tuition at Case Institute of Technology. A foundation paid full tuition the first year. I flunked out of Case but the foundation kept paying a fraction of my tuition at Ohio Wesleyan University. At both schools, many donors provided money to keep the tuition down somewhat. Three-percent federal loans also helped. I managed to get back to Case for graduate school with a graduate assistant position. I doubt any of the work we did paid in full for our jobs and tuition.
Companies are demanding more and more highly specialized “skills”, but they are not willing to train people. They expect the public schools and the colleges and universities to train these employees. But they don’t want to pay the taxes for the public schools and colleges, institutions that would help those who can’t afford the elite institutions. The smaller the pool of potential employees, the harder it is to find “qualified” employees.
Could he pay out of pocket for each and every medical visit he needed: office or hospital? For those of us with well-paying jobs, health insurance pays for a chunk of the care, if not all. But what about people who have jobs with no health insurance? Has he considered that their lack of health insurance benefits him with lower prices? (Or the owners with much higher profits.)
What if there were a deadly epidemic that had no respect for wealth? How might such an epidemic start? Maybe those who first became ill could not afford the health care, health care that would have reduced their chances of spreading their disease.
Modern economies run a large array of public goods: roads, schools, police, fire, and regulatory inspections. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes supposedly said, “I like taxes; they buy me civilization.”
Thursday, June 13, 2013
World Getting Better? Depends
I finally finished Charles Kenny's "Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding – And How We Can Improve the World Even More". We bought the book when he spoke at the "Confronting Global Poverty" lecture Series of the Alworth Center for Peace and Justice at St. Scholastica in Duluth on Nov. 13, 2012. You can watch his lecture here.
Many were disappointed in his talk and book because they thought he was painting a rosier picture than reality. Kenny's thesis is that we should concern ourselves less with increasing GDP and look more at quality of life measures.
These include health, longevity, education, child mortality, and family size. He claims that throughout the world with a couple of notorious exceptions, the first four measures are getting greater and the last less. Rather than look at the number of roads and dams, we should look at how people are living day-to-day and what they and we can do to improve daily life.
For an example of a low-tech solution that improved the lives of trash pickers in India, see "Out of India's Trash Heaps, More Than a Shred of Dignity", Sarika Bansal, New York Times, 2013-06-12 . Do read some of the comments.
Many were disappointed in his talk and book because they thought he was painting a rosier picture than reality. Kenny's thesis is that we should concern ourselves less with increasing GDP and look more at quality of life measures.
These include health, longevity, education, child mortality, and family size. He claims that throughout the world with a couple of notorious exceptions, the first four measures are getting greater and the last less. Rather than look at the number of roads and dams, we should look at how people are living day-to-day and what they and we can do to improve daily life.
For an example of a low-tech solution that improved the lives of trash pickers in India, see "Out of India's Trash Heaps, More Than a Shred of Dignity", Sarika Bansal, New York Times, 2013-06-12 . Do read some of the comments.
Friday, November 11, 2011
The Magree Inexpensive Heart Stress Test
For the last two years, my doctor has not liked the sound of my heart and has had me visit a cardiologist for an EKG. There is a bit of hardening of an artery, but otherwise the result is negative. The cost - over $2,000!!! Sure, insurance pays for it, but who pays the insurance premiums (or the taxes).
I've had a leaky valve for over thirty years and have had no ill effects from it. I've stressed my abdomen a few times with repetitive activity, had nausea, sweating, and heavy breathing, but the tests for heart problems were negative.
Given the range of physical activity I do, I have come up with a simple, inexpensive heart stress test that can be done by a doctor's assistant in about twenty minutes.
Take the patient's pulse and blood pressure. Have the patient do push-ups. The push-ups can be the traditional, from the knees, or against the wall. Take the patient's pulse and blood pressure. Wait five or ten minutes and take the patient's pulse and blood pressure.
For the dividend create some formula consisting of the pulse and blood pressure measurements and the expected norms for these.
For the divisor use the number of pushups multiplied by a percentage relative to the effort of the pushup style. The percentage for standard pushups would be 100%; smaller percentages for the other two.
The resulting quotient should give an indication of heart health, the smaller the number, the better the heart health. My wife suggested multiplying the result by age or an age range.
An even more accurate test might include respiratory rate and maybe oxygen/carbon dioxide exchange.
I'll leave the details to those who know much more about physiology than I do.
OK, Mel, how many push-ups can you do? Well, I don't want to brag with an exact number, but let me say that I can do about the same number as my 19-year-old grandson can do.
Oh, and another wild-eyed hypotheses: barring accident one should be able to live for as many more years as one can do push-ups.
I've had a leaky valve for over thirty years and have had no ill effects from it. I've stressed my abdomen a few times with repetitive activity, had nausea, sweating, and heavy breathing, but the tests for heart problems were negative.
Given the range of physical activity I do, I have come up with a simple, inexpensive heart stress test that can be done by a doctor's assistant in about twenty minutes.
Take the patient's pulse and blood pressure. Have the patient do push-ups. The push-ups can be the traditional, from the knees, or against the wall. Take the patient's pulse and blood pressure. Wait five or ten minutes and take the patient's pulse and blood pressure.
For the dividend create some formula consisting of the pulse and blood pressure measurements and the expected norms for these.
For the divisor use the number of pushups multiplied by a percentage relative to the effort of the pushup style. The percentage for standard pushups would be 100%; smaller percentages for the other two.
The resulting quotient should give an indication of heart health, the smaller the number, the better the heart health. My wife suggested multiplying the result by age or an age range.
An even more accurate test might include respiratory rate and maybe oxygen/carbon dioxide exchange.
I'll leave the details to those who know much more about physiology than I do.
OK, Mel, how many push-ups can you do? Well, I don't want to brag with an exact number, but let me say that I can do about the same number as my 19-year-old grandson can do.
Oh, and another wild-eyed hypotheses: barring accident one should be able to live for as many more years as one can do push-ups.
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