If you have two fish tanks: in one of them, there is a hierarchy among the fish, but they get on reasonably well, and the top fish don't exploit the bottom fish too much. In the other fish tank, the top fish are much more predatory, and have a far more ambivalent attitude to the welfare of the bottom fish. I'm guessing that the long term prospects for the community of fish in the first fish tank are healthier.
But anglo-american government policy over the last thirty years or so, including that of the World Bank and the IMF, seems to have created a great big fish tank number two. I think Joe Stiglitz would concur, so I don't think I'm crazy.
A whole lot of us should probably be a whole lot angrier about this than we are. To top things off, the UK govt are peddling policies that they claim will address the problems created, but will actually make them worse. It's policy to fit an ideological agenda that really has no evidential foundation.
We can leave supermarkets to the private sector because food is relatively cheap, and the want of it is predictable. In developed countries, we don't now have to worry, yet, that all pretty much all people can't afford an abundance of food pretty much all the time. Health can be cripplingly expensive, however, and the need for it is unpredictable, and often most heavily evident among poor populations. If we want everyone to have access to good health care, the public sector has to step in, and if we want access to be equitable, it has to step in a lot. This might be an essay question that I would set an undergraduate, Max.
As to the pharma industry and the banks, it may well be efficient and harm reducing to nationalise them. It's well proven that a monkey with a stick can perform as well on the markets as an 'expert', besides all the negative consequences and totally needless jobs these industries create. The outgoing chief exec of Barclays has been paid something like £120million over the last five years - think about what has happened in British banking over that time. It's a disgrace. But nationalisation is of course off the agenda, partly because people are brainwashed, partly because those who decide are benefited by current arrangements, partly because you cannot really trust those with public sector jobs to always serve the public good, partly because most of us can't imagine the challenges that the bottom fish face, and partly for many other reasons.
There is a failure of leadership everywhere you look.
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