How so? Last I checked there are massive laws about who can open a hospital, who can operate as a doctor, who can sell what kinds of insurance, who can sell drugs, and what can be sold as a drug. This is government granted oligopoly.
Edit: Technically oligopoly, not monopoly, though it may tend towards one.
The logical conclusion to private markets + unrestricted lobbying + Citizens United. They literally made the laws that restrict competition. They were only capable of this because of the insane amounts of profit they extracted from an otherwise public service, which they spend on schmoozing lawmakers.
Two questions. First, Citizens United is a case about spending money on political advertisements, not lobbyists. Are there political advertisements involved in this rent-seeking process?
Second, what exactly do you mean by "an otherwise public service?" Are you simply saying, in the absence of private medical care, that "medical care" would be purely owned by the government? This seems uninformatively tautological and I get the feeling some other meaning or implication is meant to be attached but I cannot pin it down.
>Two questions. First, Citizens United is a case about spending money on political advertisements, not lobbyists
Those 2 are conflated because Citizens United permits lobbyists to sidestep campaign donation limits by allowing industry groups to effectively spend unlimited amounts of money on behalf of or in opposition to candidates.
I think one needs to blame the First Amendment for this, not lobbyist. If I want to put up billboards advocating for a given politician, that is fully in my right. That I rent the space on the billboards to others and they use it to advocate for a politician isn't a significant difference. Even if we were to say that speech cannot be sold, then all that does is force the contract to become a bit different (instead of me renting the space, I sell it to the one putting up the adds with a promise to sell back or a certain fiscal penalty if I don't).
At the core of this problem is that speech can be amplified with money. Even if we ban selling of speech to others, organizations can still spend the money to host/print/post/billboard/telecast their own messages. Those with money will out message those without.
Is there a way to fix this that doesn't result in government control of political speech?
>I think one needs to blame the First Amendment for this, not lobbyist.
The first amendment has only been loosely upheld throughout our history. There are many types of speech that are regulated in spite of it.
>Is there a way to fix this that doesn't result in government control of political speech?
We had a system in place prior to Citizens United that didn't turn into government control of political speech. Many other developed countries have limitations on spending money on political speech that don't turn into complete government control of political speech.
There's no reason to assume that a few men in the 1780s got everything right. And a slippery slope argument is no reason to throw up our hands and stop trying to advance egalitarianism.
I'm saying that it's good for a citizenry to be healthy. When a government is encouraging its citizens to stay away from treatment because of prohibitively high costs to access it, that is not good. It is a public service since it serves the public to keep everyone healthy.
It also requires removal of limits on what laws the government can pass. If governments were limited to what laws they can pass when it involves consenting individuals, this would also not occur.
Limited by what? A constitution? Like the one we already have that taken literally grants far fewer powers to the federal government than they routinely exercise.
Interesting. Are you suggesting that in cases where all parties must consent, the law may not be passed until those parties explicitly provide consent?
I meant more that the government has no place legislating the behavior. I take the idea that what two consenting adults do in their own bedroom is their own business and not the government's and apply it even if they are, for example, trading or doing drugs in their bedroom.
Granted, all of this is pretty much meaningless when you have a government overstepping its bounds and doing what it wants. In that case, it seems the blame of the corrupted system would fall on those corrupting it (the corrupt government allowing itself to be bribed in exchange for monopolies).
Absolutely untrue as the only markets we see this in are ones which are heavily regulated. And we're not talking safety regulations, but regulations to shape the market, which is likely impossible to keep from being corrupt (easy to believe if you've ever met an actual human being). I'd bet 50% of states have explicit laws limiting the number of hospitals in areas to protect county/state hospitals from competition, leaving many urban areas without high quality care, and yet somehow, through some chain of conspiracy theories, capitalism is to blame.
Edit: Technically oligopoly, not monopoly, though it may tend towards one.