Thoughts

mental health break ,./'"**^^$_---
Not to be a drooling capitalist, but it seems very unsatisfying to me that there's not an economic incentive to preserve human life or
community wellbeing under capitalism. Because the anti-capitalist argument, that viewing people from an economic standpoint is fundamentally inadequate, isn't the cause. That is to say, if you value human life purely in its ability to generate money, it still makes sense to invest a pretty significant amount of money into keeping people alive. Because someone being alive has a lot of economic potential. So to some degree it's civil case court cases. I think you could have a decently functioning society with no criminal laws, except required insurance, and civil court cases. That's how amusement parks in the US operate today. There's a requirement for them to have insurance, and upon loss of life, the family can sue in civil court. Obviously the threat of civil court isn't a preventative measure, but insurance should (in theory) increase costs for unsafe attractions in-line with the risk of a civil court payout, leading to the desired effect: the free market determines how to amortize the risk of losing a human life over the relevant time periods. Obviously lots of problems with that in practice, but the one that I want to talk about is that there's not an incentive to solve problems. You can sue the roller coaster operator if you get hurt on their roller coaster. But if you get hurt for some other reason, let's say you catch a disease like tuberculosis, there's no one for you to sue. I guess the capitalistic answer there is that an investor decides to invest in TB treatment, invents a cure, and then charges a lot of money for it. And to solve the problem of the person being sick with TB not having money to pay for it, you allow indentured servitude. (And of course you don't have patents in this libertarian fantasy world, so cheap alternatives pop up very quickly.)
Link 7:03 p.m. May 16, 2025 UTC-4