Capitalism Doesn’t Work?

From the articles I have read before I thought his running theme is that American style capitalism doesn’t work, and needs to be replaced with something more akin to Social Democracy.

I think this is just him hammering down that point one more time. I cannot exactly disagree. While things are not great here in Norway either, I must say the way things are unfolding in the US based on my reading from across the pond looks like an absolute disaster in the making.

All economies will be hurt by this, but the US seems get a domino of bad effects: People losing jobs without any pay. Loosing job means not health care. No health care means cannot afford treatment or test for COVID19 which means contributing to more spread and more death. More people loosing health care means hospitals are loosing money and going bankrupt in the US in the middle of an epic crisis.

I mean seriously, how could a society have organized itself in any worse way? It is setup so that when one thing fails everything else start failing. Where is the fault tolerance?

In most of the rest of the world employment and health care is decoupled. And in many countries hospital budgets are not tied to the performance of the rest of the economy. At least here in Norway where hospitals are government owned I imagine funding will increase, not decrease.

Or at least one could have done like Ireland which promptly nationalized all their private hospitals and put them under government control. Sadly I think the American aversion to anything that even hints at socialism is so strong that they will avoid the most effective and obvious countermeasures.

In an epic disaster capitalism doesn’t work anymore. Imagine doing supply and demand pricing of bullets on the battle front or something. It doesn’t work. In crisis you need a command economy.