This topic contains 4 replies, has 1 voice, and was last updated by 
josh April 1, 2018 at 12:55 am.
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josh“Government auction of clinical trial participation through private equity” – that is a name for a new idea I came up with today that sounds totally daft and messed up on the surface, but actually makes sense in context. I explain below.
In the future, robots/AI/software will take over an ever higher share of economic labor. They will eventually become better and cheaper than human labor for doing most tasks that the economy demands. This sounds threatening to “labor” and valuable to “capital” – that could be true. But we focus on supporting human welfare through policies that ensure ever-increasing material standards of living, health, and incentives to do things that are valuable to others – whatever that means (perhaps in some robot future it will just be about making your neighbor smile, I don’t really know…) So I thought about the question “What will wealthy individuals always want to pay for, rationally?” “Something they need to be healthy” is the easiest answer. Without health, everyone is poorer. The threshold of medical advance is staggered. New methods/treatments are developed all the time, in stages. They are expensive when newly produced. They are less available when newly produced. The system of doing clinical trials to certify the safety and efficacy of a new treatment is one of the major costs involved in creating new treatments. For a wealthy person that has most material things = the possibility of having an option to get in on the ground floor for a treatment that could safe their life or welfare, before it is widely available to the public, is something they would rationally want to pay for. At present, the govt. regulations do not charge for this opportunity. It is random in clinical trials. But it would be possible for people to buy into a system that monitors all of their background medical conditions and gives them opportunities to get in on the ground floor of an appropriate opportunity. This could potentially generate a lot of money for an organization like the NIH and speed the development of new/cheaper therapies for everyone. It’s an incentive to have money and spend it that doesn’t victimize anyone and isn’t efficiently captured in the current economy. And its an example of something that will increase in relative value in the robot-dominated future. Capitalism or socialism? Both & neither.
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joshAnother place where govt. can play a bigger, useful role in the fast-paced capitalist economy: Employer wants to find people who can do “X,Y,Z” and aren’t criminals. Private firms can certify that. But if they are not national or global then they have different standards, & overheads and coverage. Govt. could help with scaling that while letting employers drive a large menu of X,Y,Z. There could be a lot of efficiency gains in having govt. do more of that for both workers and employers.
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joshIt’s really a different thing than college. A 40, 50, or 60 year old doesn’t need to go to college. They need to get certified for X,Y,Z. They, their libraries/bookstores, & private firms can figure out if they need training. But the larger the set of X,Y,Z that they can get certified for, the easier it is for them to connect with paid work in the moving economy.
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joshI emphasize, in point 2) of the top post above, that Heine Gang things are economically wasteful. Killing people in the prime of their life, wars/military based on lies and false flags, spying on everyone, phony costumes/support for so many, make the public discussion one of disinfo, destryong communities and families….all these things are wasteful and expensive. What does Heine add in compensation for that expense? The only thing I can see is some economy of scale by having centralized slaves support many in specialized ways…this, of course, comes as severe cost to the victims forced into slavery and huge numbers of dead.
There is no objective analysis that would see Heine things as a cost savings. So why do people claim change is expensive rather than a gain?
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