Common criminals accosting people on the street sometimes give an ultimatum:
“Your money or your life.”
And that means that they are signalling that they will be willing to take your life if you do not hand over all of your money. But that’s individual crime. A way of institutionalizing crime is to adopt fascism, where there is a public-private partnership and people are forced by their government to deal with corporations.
Fascism is something which offers a different statement:
“Your money and your life.”
And nowhere is this more clear than when, under NAZI brutality, gold was extracted from the teeth of Jews who had just been shot or gassed to death. Fascist systems come after both your money and your life. This makes it dangerous to adopt fascism (public-private partnerships) even if “nice” language is used in order to name it:
“Stakeholder Capitalism”
The nice language does not prevent the future atrocity which will be committed against the people in the name of private corporations who have gotten into bed with the government. In the USA, besides defense contractors, the most cozy relationship — at least since the Affordable Care Act — is the relation of healthcare to government.
But when government forces people to purchase or use a medical product, then much harm can ensue. Check out the life expectancy in the USA ever since the first full year of the Affordable Care Act (2014):
Since implementing the Affordable Care Act, health care expenditure has risen by almost 50% but life expectancy has falled from 78.88 years to 77.98 years. This shows you what happens when there are public-private partnerships creating a government-enforced monolopy or oligopoly. Key firms acquire an unearned “captive audience.”
Regulatory capture of government by Big Food and Big Pharma has now led to the appalling situation where more healthy life years are lost in the USA than those found out in the world at large:
The USA is now approaching the situation where there are 40 lost years of healthy life for every 100 persons — the worst burden of disease ever recorded in the USA. Most alarming is the harm to kids:
You can see that child mortality in the USA has become decoupled from heathcare spending — so the reason that child mortality is high in the USA is not because we do not spend enough on healthcare. In fact, you might say it is the opposite: people are forced by government-sanctioned monopolies and oligopolies to use harmful products.
For example, a greater proportion of US infants are vaccinated than in the world at large:
USA
USA percentages are:
IPV1 = 98.7%; DTP3 = 95.5%; Pol3 = 94.5%; Hib3 = 92.6%; HepB3 = 92.6%; MCV1 = 91.6%; RCV1 = 91.6%; and RotaC = 75.2%
Key:
IPV1 = 1st dose of inactivated polio vaccine; DTP3 = 3 doses of diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis vaccine; Pol3 = 3rd dose of polio vaccine; Hib3 = 3 doses of Haemophilus influenza B vaccine; HepB3 = 3 doses of hepatitis B vaccine; MCV1 = 1st dose of measles vaccine; RCV1 = 1 dose of rubella vaccine; and RotaC = final dose (completion) of the rotavirus vaccine
World
World percentages are:
IPV1 = 83.7%; DTP3 = 86.8%; Pol3 = 86.8%; Hib3 = 74.7%; HepB3 = 74.7%; MCV1 = 86.8%; RCV1 = 69.6%; and RotaC = 40.4% — all lower than what is given out in the USA. And the government spending on healthcare in the USA, as a percentage of GDP, is far beyond the spending of other places with less medical corruption:
Besides making us pay more for an “inferior product” (healthcare which does not keep us alive, based on life expectancy numbers), another way to impoverish most of a nation is to over-develop the finance sector, again with the “help” of government:
The regular economy deals with “things” but the financial sector deals with “money.” Another way to put this — admittedly-too-harsh — is that the real economy produces value for human beings, while the financial sector “moves money around.” And assets of the financial sector have grown from less than twice the GDP to 5x the GDP.
More of the potentially-productive time and energy is being put into “moving money around” and less of it is being put into improving the lives of others by offering them useful products and services at good prices. Here is a quote revealing how “over-financialization” ends up coming after your money, if not your life:
“… we are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity.”
James Tobin (1984)
Special Perspective: Notice how this Yale economist (Tobin) sounded the alarm back when financial assets had only first crossed the Rubicon of being 2x GDP — and things got more than twice as bad after that (5x GDP by 2007).
The evidence suggests that incentives are perverse enough where there is at least a small cabal of shadowy power-brokers who are not only coming after our money, but coming after our very lives. To prevent them from taking both, we can have our government divest itself from the public-private partnerships which have arisen.
Reference
[US healthcare is broken, and it even looks deliberate (perverse incentives)] — https://ourworldindata.org/financing-healthcare
[US finance is broken, and it even looks deliberate (perverse incentives)] — https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2012/wp12161.pdf
[financial assets] — Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (US), Domestic Financial Sectors; Total Financial Assets, Level [FBTFASQ027S], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FBTFASQ027S,
[GDP] — U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Gross Domestic Product [GDP], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP,