Many people in the private enterprise system of the USA make lots of money by doing nothing productive, just by shuffling money around. It’s called financialization, and these wealthy financiers (egregious examples: Elchonon “Elie” Schwartz, Steven Hoffenberg (with Jeffrey Epstein), Scott W. Rothstein, Gilbert Chikli,Simon Leviev, Moshe Leichner, David Gentile and Jeffry Schneider, Carl Ruderman, Lou Pearlman, Charlie Javice, Bernie Madoff, Kris Bortnovsky, Sam Bankman-Fried, Barry Minkow, Allen Stanford,Alex Mashinsky, Scott W. Rothstein, Lou Pearlman, Solomon Dwek, Michael Milken, Burt Marshall, William Rick Singer, James Paul Lewis, Jr., Ivan Boesky, Sholom Rubashkin, Sanjeev Kumar (an example of medical fraud by a physician), Kenneth Lay, Donald Trump, Jeffrey Skilling, Bernard Ebbers, Reed Slatkin, Tom Petters, Dennis Kozlowski, Michael de Guzman, Mark Swartz, Eli Weinstein, etc.) reduce efficiency and effectiveness of what other people produce. Ponzi schemes are still popular in private enterprise, and rank highly along with healthcare fraud. In private enterprise, defrauding other people is considered business genius, whereas in government, defrauding people lands you in jail. Private enterprise is destroying our hospitals, and private enterprise physicians illegally selling opioids is still a big business, while executives at one healthcare hospital system embezzled over $245 million. Private equity is destroying nearly everything it touches, where the PE boys know how to make money for themselves but not for the company. These days in the USA, much of society fetishes rich guys who swindled others instead of respecting our learned experts. When the media needs an opinion on space technology, for example, they turn to idiots like Musk instead of our Ph.D.s in engineering and science like we did in the successful days when the USA landed a man on the Moon. Most people in the USA have been brainwashed by the rich man who largely controls our media to erroneously believe that private enterprise (PE) is more efficient and effective than government. Here I show how just the opposite is true.
In private enterprise you have guys like Harvey Weinstein, where if you don’t have sex with him, you don’t get the job. Or, Jeff Epstein, where he launders money and bribes people after he lets billionaires rape 14 year old girls, having filmed the billionaire in the act on Epstein Island. In both cases, much of your capital is being spent on illicit, non-productive activities. And, if you’re caught, the billionaire I mean, you can pay-off private enterprise lawyer Alan Dershowitz to defend you. He’s one of Epstein’s friends too, and a PE lawyer. Jeff, a college dropout, had many companies with which he committed his illicit scams. And, can you imagine the business expenses these guys, and others in PE, have – lavish travel, extravagent dinners, super cars, the “donations” they to one another’s non-profits, are part of how these guys scam us with so-called business expenses. When Robert Kraft, owner of the Patriots, was seeing prostitutes at the massage parlor in Florida, were all those trips business expenses as part of his travel to Florida from Boston? And rich capitalists like Trump and Musk don’t pay their bills to small contractors that have worked for them. Private enterprise is a grifter system for the wealthy.
Private enterprise AI companies are spending billions on Large Language Models for so-called Chat AI. We’re in the midst of the height of the AI hype curve. Yet AI Chat is suffering from AI Model Collapse – the AI Chat models are becomming worse over time, and can’t solve simple problems that children can easily do. Professors at our universities have been warning of this AI problem for over a decade – and warning that simply scaling the large data centers won’t solve the problem. Yet billions are being spent scaling data centers as I write this. College dropouts, like Sam Altman, keep scaling, but the AI Chat models keep becoming worse. Private enterprise at its worse. The USA may have a high GDP, but what do those products and services represent of value to the people? Billions spent on AI that bullshits us. Billions spent on our medical system that is the highest priced on the planet with the worst outcomes. Services to the public, such as ambulance services, are much better and less expensive when offered through government. When the military-industrial complex purchases politicians because of deregulation and privatization, billions are spent on a military that is the worst polluter on Earth and is used to kill innocent people around the world, including Palestine.
What causes government to run inefficiently? When government is deregulated and privatized, that’s when. When public money is run through the government to private enterprise, inefficiency and ineffectivity result. Use public money to fund privatized military, what results? Abu Ghraib, run by CACI Premier Technology, Inc.: This company provided interrogation services at the prison. A jury recently found CACI liable for its role in the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib, and L-3 Services (formerly Titan Corporation): This company provided translation services. Use public money to run our medical system (not healthcare) and what results is a total shit show with the worst and most expensive “healthcare” system in the world. When the government is inefficent thanks to privatization and deregulation things such as shoddy construction result. Without government overseeing construction, condos collapse because of of poor construction. Miami is an example. As the Miamia Herald has written, “Condominium construction was red-hot then [1980s, the Reagan deregulation had begun], fueled in part by what would turn out to be a disastrous deregulation of the nation’s savings and loans associations. We know that building codes for single-family homes during that era were weak, and enforcement was lax, something that became terribly apparent when Hurricane Andrew roared through southern Miami-Dade County.”
The USA is a privatized, deregulated mess where, for example, our prisons have been privatized and corporatized leading to the kids-for-cash scandal. The private corporation running the prison gave kickbacks to judges for the judge’s criminal activity to wrongly convict kids and send them to prison. The more kids in prison, the bigger the profits for the corp. Private prisons lead to longer sentences and more inmates – i.e. more profit for the corp. And guess what, taxpayers spend more money supporting private prisons than government run prisons. In Texas, the state is so pro-business, desperate to attract businesses, spending billions of middle class taxpayer dollars to do it, to this ugly, harsh, backward state, that they pass laws to allow businessmen to commit fraud without being held to account when caught. Physicians in Texas are committing fraud by charging for services they didn’t perform. And torte reform in Texas means that private enterprise physicians are rarely sued and held accountable for their misdeeds. Meanwhile, in Miami, private enterprise fraud is being committed at prodigious rates, part of Florida’s accolade of being the fraud capital of the USA. And it’s not just the USA of course. Glencore of Switzerland has been bribing people all of the world in order to land contracts. Billions of dollars of bribes -it’s the way private enterprise often works. Meritocracy? Hardly. More like the biggest cheater wins. Billions of tax dollars are spent on satellites. Of the satellites in Earth orbit, about 42% are inactive. Built by companies such as Boeing, who recently blew up a large communications satellite worth hundreds of millions of dollars, satellites, such as Starlink, blowup or crash back to Earth – Starlink satellites last only about 4 years before they crash back to Earth. Really efficient, right?
Even public–private partnerships (PPPs) often cost more than fully public projects, and this is primarily due to two factors: higher financing costs for private entities and the complexity of contracting and administration. The private part of the PPP will suck the funding dry for the sake of profit. No such motivation occurs on the public side.
Private enterprise creates many false narratives to make government look bad in an effort to weaken government and allow private enterprise to do as it wants – private enterprise wants to take as much money from working people as possible. And it’s working. Look at their false narrative about CEQA – California’s environmental laws on land use and development. Private enterprise likes to say CEQA deters housing starts in CA. It’s BS. CEQA was passed in 1968 under Gov. Reagan and CA has been booming ever since. California often leads the nation in housing starts since 1968, and recently is the third leading state for housing starts. What has caused a slow-down in CA housing starts (from #1 to #3) are the high costs associated with deregulation and the ensuing financialization of the housing market. California is one of the most beautiful places on Earth with great weather and the tech and cultural innovation hub of the planet. As a result, financiers park a lot of their money in the state. It’s a great investment in a place where everyone wants to be. The result, prices rise – big time. And about a million vacant homes remain in CA despite the so-called “housing shortage” that results. These 1 million vacant homes have been priced beyond affordability by the rich investors. Across the USA, it’s 17 million unaffordable vacant homes. The rich guys park their money in California real estate instead of banks or other investments driving up housing prices for the middle class. And the prices skyrocket when our government is deregulated by Republicans, something that benefits the billionaires and centimillionaires. Take the controls off the rich and they’ll create a modern day feudal system and eventually a dictatorship will result – something now in progress under Trump.
Let’s have a quick historical look at the US government. The US federal government has employed between 1.8 and 2.4 million people over the last 60 years, while the US population has grown significantly, increasing from roughly 196 million to an estimated 346.8 million in 2025. This includes the military, which, collectively, is the largest group of federal employees. The US war machine is huge, wasteful (due to the corruption of private enterprise contractors), and growing under Trump. So the same number of federal workers are taking care of the needs of over 150 million more people during the past 60 years. It’s a highly efficient and effective bureaucratic system taking care of our country. Up until 2017, we’ve had a very stable country with no one attacking our Capital, killing Capital Cops, nor pooping on the Speaker’s desk. Alas, those day are gone. We have a convicted felon as President, someone who swindles people for a living. Trump and Melania Meme Coins are a recent example. He pardons cop-killers if the killers are killing for him. Now the mean-spirit and swindling pervades the USA – Theranos, FTX, Trump University, Nikola, etc. Ramaswamy, part of Trump’s DOGE, performed a massive pump-and-dump in the healthcare sector. Enron privatized energy, sending many a company bankrupt before they went bankrupt themselves. Privatized healthcare sucks, it’s killing us, ever growing, and physicians are a big part of the problem. Privatizing is like a deadly cancer in society and metastasizing throughout our institutions. Our billionaires are sending other billionaires and movie stars/celebrities into space for joy rides at the expense of taxpayers – NASA has been privatized. The once proud government agency that landed men on the Moon over 50 years ago has been reduced to a privatized, deregulated entity that explodes 9 Starships (as of June, 2025) in succession and sends billionaires for joy rides. It’s called private enterprise, and it’s been deregulated by Trump and the post-Reagan Republicans, along with some of the Democrats. Government does better than free enterprise, at least it did until Reaganism and Trumpism took over and double-downed on Reagan’s “government is the problem.” .
Numerous studies have found no evidence of greater efficiency by private enterprise than government. The largest study of the efficiency of privatized companies looked at all European companies privatized during 1980-2009. It compared their performance with companies that remained public and with their own past performance as public companies. The result? The privatized companies performed worse than those that remained public and continued to do so for up to 10 years after privatization, the time in which measures were being recorded.
Government does work poorly at times when modern day Republicans who believe in deregulation and privatization take the helm. They always collapse the economy while using government money to pay private companies to manage the government functions. Our misbegotten healthcare system in the USA is one example. Private enterprise takes taxpayer dollars to give us the world’s most expensive and worst performing healthcare system in the world – Republicans vetoed a single payer system. Here in California we have another example. Some people use California’s high-speed rail program as a signature example of Democratic dysfunction when it was a Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who made the decisions while in charge of the state’s high-speed rail authority at the key moment in 2008 to decrease state capacity and outsource to consultants. Schwarzenegger came to power during an undemocratic recall of our Democratic governor – the results were tragic. California fell from the 5th largest economy on the planet to number 10 because of the Republican. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, brought it back to number 5 and Democratic Governor Newsom has brought it to #4.
As David Dayen teaches us, over the last forty years because of Reagan Republicans our choices have narrowed, our opportunities have shrunk, and our lives have become governed by a handful of very large and very powerful corporations. Private enterprise at its worst, and now one of the worst, Donald Trump, is our president. Today, practically everything we buy, everywhere we shop, and every service we secure comes from a heavily concentrated market. Here are a few reasons why private enterprise is worse than the government:
Businesses Don’t Solve Problems, They Make Money. Government Solves Problems, They Don’t Make Money
Exemplifying the stupidity and inefficiency of free enterprise – sending passenger cars into space.
Take automobiles for example – please take them and send them into space, just like like Musk did with his private enterprise company, SpaceX. Automobiles are inefficient, in many ways. Have a look at that Escalade traveling down the highway, a nine passenger auto with only one person in it. It’s been sitting all night in the garage, wasting space while not in use, then arrives in the downtown where it will sit for another 8 hours while its owner is at work. Wasting space in the downtown as it sits in a parking lot doing nothing. Look at all of the wasted space downtown devoted to parking lots. Dumb. On the way home, the Escalade will sit in traffic for 90 minutes, all the while polluting the atmosphere as it sits idle in “rush” hour traffic with its 5 liter engine burning fossil fuel. Meanwhile the electric trains keep rolling passengers into the downtown, burning no fuel and requiring little space for their tracks and passenger boarding areas. The government solved a problem by funding the trains, while free enterprise made money giving us inconvenient, polluting automobiles.
It’s the same for commercial and private aircraft use for short distances. Wasteful, inconvenient, and polluting. Trains are much better.
Electric train rolling into San Francisco – quiet, smooth, fast, and efficient.
Private Enterprise Won’t Cannibalizes New Technologies, Invests Money in Killer Acquisitions, While Government Creates New Technologies
Kodak invented the digital camera but didn’t go all in because it didn’t want to cannibalize its film market. Product cannibalization is the replacement of a product with a new one from the same company, typically expressed in sales revenue. Likewise, when companies are entrenched in a market, they often buy new companies and/or the new company’s technology and put the technology on the shelf so as not to cannibalize their successful but outdated current technology. It’s called “killer acquisitions.”
Meanwhile, almost all new technologies derive from government funding of academia. For example, as Prof. Dr. Mariana Mazzucato, Ph.D. teaches us, “every technology that makes the iPhone so ‘smart’ was government funded: the Internet, GPS, its touch-screen display and the voice-activated Siri.”
Financialization of Private Enterprise
When Ronald Reagan deregulated the housing market, prices of homes skyrocketed. Why? It’s called financialization of the market and it means that more people, financial people, are in between labor, the people buying the homes, and the supplier, the people building and selling the homes. Those in betweeners, the financiers, such as Charles Carrier in Texas, do nothing but loot the system. They don’t help to build the homes and they don’t help sell the homes. They just grab a piece of the pie, and the scraps of the pie left to the middle class (labor) are smaller and more expensive – meaning not enough homes for the people and those homes that are available are much more expensive.
Financialization is a process by which financial flows are diverted away from production and consumption toward asset markets in the pursuit of capital gains. In the USA, much of the wealth of the top 1 percent is debt owed by the rest of us, claims against our future income. Middle- and low-income households have experienced a buildup of debt simply to obtain basic necessities – homes, cars, education. These payments by ordinary people flow directly to the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector and to high-income households, where ownership of financial assets is concentrated. FIRE doesn’t produce anything. They just shuffle money around and capture most of the money, leaving only enough for the bottom 90% to exist in a modern feudal state.
Government is not financialized and therefore orders of magnitude more efficient and effective at serving most of the people – those not in the top 1%. As Prof. Dr. Michael Hudson, Ph.D teaches us, “ The threat posed to society by rentier interests is the great challenge of every nation today: whether its government can restrict the dynamics of finance capitalism and prevent an oligarchy from dominating the state and enriching itself by imposing austerity on labor and industry. So far, the West has not risen to this challenge.” This is acutely true under the Trump regime.
Prof. Dr. David Harvey, Ph.D., of CNYU, “describes the New Cold War’s U.S.-China conflict [that] cannot simply be regarded as market competition between two industrial rivals. It is a broader conflict between different political economic systems – not only between capitalism and socialism as such, but between the logic of an industrial economy and that of a financialized rentier economy increasingly dependent on foreign subsidy and exploitation as its own domestic economy shrivels.” In other words, uncontrolled private enterprise is destroying the USA.
Government Drives Innovation, Both From Within and Also Through Regulations on Industry
Business is short-sighted. They focus on profits, not innovation. Thus, when problems arise or continuing problems are discovered, business often does little to solve the problem. Government has the long-vision and funds innovation at it’s own institutes and mainly through support of academia. Beyond solving problems, government creates things for which no problem had been detected. But the new thing can benefit society – solar panels, transistors, lithium ion batteries, the internet, nuclear power, modern rockets and spaceships, computers, etc, were developed by the government, not private enterprise. If the government sets regulations, then business sometimes innovate – electric vehicles result, for example. Without government innovation and regulations we’d all be driving 67 Fords with no seat belts and a MPG rating of 10 miles/gallon.
Focus on Profit Instead of Results
While governments don’t need to make profits, companies need to make profits, particularly to pay investors. The investors do nothing for the company, the are called rent takers, and yet we pay these guys big bucks. Money is not real, it’s just an instrument where you promise to make payment. Think of banks as an example. When some rich guy at a bank gives you a loan, he doesn’t have money to back that loan. Look at the bank’s coffers, there’s no cash of gold to back the loan. It’s just some rich guy signing a piece of paper that says you now have money because he loaned it to you. And the banker takes 6% interest for just signing a piece of paper. He does little work, he’s just shuffling paper around and taking a large slice of other people’s work for doing very little. In other words, the rich guy at the bank literally creates money just by signing a piece of paper. And look at what often happens when these rich guys create money to self-aggrandize – remember the Silicon Valley Bank crisis and the Savings and Loan Crisis of the 1980s? Remember the 2008-2009 collapse of the financial industry? Remember who is bailed-out after the rich guys collapse the system? The wealthy are bailed-out, not the middle class. So the rich guys use the banks and financial system to self-aggrandize, they collapse the system thanks to their greed, and then the middle class pays even more to bail them out after they stole all of the middle classes’ money. Yet middle class Republicans (MCR) still support these rich guys – these MCR morons will even raid the Capital and kill cops to support self-aggrandizing billionaires such as Trump. Talk about unbelievably dumb!
Why do we need fake money from rich people when they do nothing and we have to pay them even more fake money than the fake money they gave to the working people at the company the rich people “invested” in. This is called capitalism, and it’s stupid. The middle class working people need to tell these “rent takers,’ who do nothing other than move fake money around from one working person to another working person, to fuck-off. Rich people shouldn’t be accumulating billions of dollars of fake money because that fake money they’ve accumulated reflects nothing that they have done to deserve it – they didn’t do the work.
Focus on Profits and Lack of Flexibility in Private Enterprise
Look at private enterprise biotech companies. They’re privately funded because they have a particular technology suited to treating a particular disease. They’re going after a particular market with their particular technology. Often they fail – they go bankrupt. Whether it’s Molecular Templates Inc. in Austin, TX, or others, they waste much money, often billions, and their assets are sold for pennies on the dollar. On the other hand, government labs are run efficiently, develop most new technologies that enter the marketplace, and don’t go bankrupt. They pivot their focus as needed to make new discoveries that will benefit mankind.
Businesses Take Government Money (The People’s Money) and Waste it
Consider Oracle, founded in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a hugely successful multi-billion dollar company. Texas taxpayers gave Oracle many millions of dollars, free land on a lake, and huge tax breaks to “move” it HQ to Austin Texas. Oracle set up shop in Austin, moving a few of its low paid workers to Austin and on paper saying its HQ was in Austin. Most workers, and especially high paid workers remained in San Francisco. But Oracle made hundreds of millions by saying they moved to Texas. Three years later, Oracle received $250,000,000 from Tennessee to move their HQ to the Nashville area. Still, most workers stay in California, and Oracle’s billionaire founder Larry Ellison makes out like a bandit. Do we really think moving workers from place to place so that taxpayers give Larry Ellison millions of dollars is efficient? Oracle is just one of many similar stories where free enterprise bilks taxpayers.
Businesses Commit Fraud, Wasting Billions
Trump University, Nikola, Theranos, Enron, Solar City, FTX, Waste Management, World Com are examples of the many large frauds committed by US businesses. The people’s capital flows into the hands of a few fraudulent rich guys who take the money and run. These companies, i.e. rich guys, take money but give nothing in return. Medical fraud by corrupt physicians in private practice is rampant too – including performing unnecessary procedures such as stenting and falsifying records. Rampant! I mean rampant!
Remember Elizabeth Holmes, the daughter of an Enron fraudster, the chief fraudster of Theranos who is now in jail for fraud? She’s at it again – from jail. She has a new blood testing company with one of her former Theranos partners who’s not in jail. Commit fraud in the USA and be found out – just move your fraud scheme to India and give it another name. And be sure on the website of the new company that the names of the Theranos fraudsters, the leaders of the new company, are nowhere to be found. So privatized, deregulated, and money-centric is private enterprise and the government that they have purchased, that convicted fraudsters are committing fraud from their jail cells. It’s like an episode from the crime-thriller show Blacklist – better described as reality TV.
Unnecessary Business Expenses
Business executives fly in private jets, stay at luxury hotels, eat extravagant meals, host expensive parties, take vacations at lavish resorts – all being paid for by the corporations and taken as a tax deduction. Yes, you the middle class, pays for these luxuries that the private enterprise executives enjoy.
Corporations Hire Part-Time Workers Instead of Full-Time Workers to Avoid Paying Benefits
Many workers for corporations are working part-time – not by their choice, but because corps don’t want to pay benefits. Many people, therefore, work 2 or 3 part-time jobs and don’t receive benefits. Instead, they rely on government benefits. In other words, corps push their responsibility to provide benefits to workers onto the government. People running around from job to job, and the corp have a constant flux of workers is inefficient and taxpayers pickup more of the costs of benefits while the rich become richer by not paying fair wages or benefits.
Deregulated, Privatized Healthcare Fraud
Walgreens pays a $350 million fine for illegally filling opioid prescriptions and Orlando Health pays $45 million for killing one of its patients through neglect. Physicians taking money from pharma in outright bribery schemes is rampant. Physicians, such as Richard O Akoto MD, a graduate of a for-profit “medical school” in the Caribbean, defrauds the US government of $1.4 million. U.S. hospitals performed over 229,000 unnecessary coronary stents from 2019-2021. That’s a rate of one every seven minutes. Physician fraud is everywhere in the USA. Everywhere. Companies and physicians selling opioids online without seeing or knowing anything about the “patient,” the person needing a fix. Yes, in a privatized medical system, many physicians are pushers. Physicians and other healthcare providers trafficking controlled substances where they found in one fell swoop, various health care fraud schemes involving approximately $2.75 billion in intended losses and $1.6 billion in actual losses. One physician, Phillip Frost in Miami, was charged with an illegal pump and dump scheme with his biotech company, yet the University of Miami School of Medicine has named one of its departments after him. Health insurance companies, Aetna Inc. and affiliates, Elevance Health Inc. (formerly known as Anthem), and Humana Inc., pay hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal kickbacks to insurance brokers. “US healthcare” is a euphemism for “privatized, money-making treatment scheme.” Our privatized medical system is the most expensive in the world with the worst outcomes. A cabal of physician groups, drug companies, insurance companies, and hospital and clinic corporations control the system and corrupt the FDA. An example, physicians are used to review clinical trials for drug candidates and approve them for use as a prescription in the market. What happens in the process? Physicians approve drugs on behalf of the drug companies whether the drugs are safe and effective or not. Then the physicians who approved the drug for the pharma company are hired by the pharma company at high salaries, often a million dollars per year. So corporate pharma pays physicians to approve a bad drug, with the physician being paid after the approval to avoid conflict of interest regulations.
For example, back when Reagan deregulated clinical trials and healthcare, the blood thickener EPO was a cancer drug disaster that, by one estimate, cost nearly 500,000 Americans their lives. EPO sales in cancer were bigger than any other drug ever before, with profits flowing not only to J&J but to almost every oncologist and hospital in the United States. But it was becoming apparent years later that a study in Germany, that has a government controlled healthcare system, this incident was part of a pattern, that dozens of researchers working for or on behalf of J&J had participated in trials that had found much the same as Henke’s study in Germany. In nearly every case, the results had been kept secret, and none of these researchers had been brave enough to blow the whistle. The secrete – EPO was killing people. For years in our privatized, corporate controlled healthcare system, people were dying from a money-making drug. Government studies in Germany stopped the corporate and physician profiteers in the USA.
At roughly $1,000 a dose during the height of its use, EPO was and remains expensive (still used for anemia). Physicians and hospitals often pocket nearly a third of that price themselves — or about $300 per dose in the 2000s. Many patients receive dozens of doses, pay thousands of dollars, and then die.
Here’s another free enterprise boondoggle wasting millions of dollars and hurting patients, in this case, Alzheimer’s patients. Cassava Sciences in Austin TX has published phony studies to have their drug approved by the FDA. Cassava executives and consultants, including some of their scientists and physicians, have been charged with fraud. After big bucks spent and much BS spewed by the company, their drug failed. Same with Vivek Ramaswamy’s drug company – big bucks spent, much BS spewed, the rich become richer, the middle class is bilked, and the drug doesn’t work.
Directly comparing Medicare when it is run by the government, traditional Medicare, versus Medicare Advantage, which is run by businesses, intensive coding by Medicare Advantage (MA) plans raised enrollees’ risk scores and may have allowed companies to pocket tens of billions of dollars more than if traditional Medicare had covered the same enrollees in 2021, according to a large analysis of coding patterns and revenue in Medicare Advantage contracts.
There’s a long history behind Medicare Advantage, taught to us by Prof. Dr. Paul Krugman, Ph.D., a Nobel Laureate in economics, that goes back to Ronald Reagan, who allowed insurance companies to offer managed care plans to Medicare recipients. The idea was to save money through the purported efficiency of the private sector. What actually happened was that insurers engaged in “cream skimming”: they signed up seniors in good health, leaving less healthy Americans with traditional Medicare. The result was that insurers received more taxpayer money than they paid out for health care. In other words, privateers took money from the healthy Medicare patients, preventing that money from being used for unhealthy Medicare patients. The rich got richer, the sick got sicker as a result. That’s privatization.
This lousy medical system we have is a direct result of greedy physicians at the AMA. Physicians could change our system any time they want – they control the system. But they don’t want to. They make too much money by having this privatized healthcare system. The average dermatologist, for example, makes $500,000/year and works 4 days a week. There is a shrinking number of publicly run hospitals in America. In the past quarter century, the share of all hospital beds at government-owned hospitals has declined by more than 40%. Many of these public hospitals were unprofitable but didn’t close — they were bought by a not-for-profit or for-profit health care system. When hospitals go private, costs go up and quality goes down. Same with private enterprise custodial health facilities and surgery centers in the USA – they routinely kill people and commit fraud.
Now, Private equity (PE) firms have increased their ownership stake across health care sectors in the US. PE’s focus on short-term profitability may decrease the provision of unprofitable services, reducing access for patients in vulnerable populations. Have a blinding retinal diseases where the cure doesn’t make much profit for the rich guys, then forget about the drug or procedure, the rich guys won’t give it to you.
Businesses Are Full of Hyperbolic Bullshit Artists, Government Uses Experts
Consider the current GenAI hype or colonization of Mars hyperbole that pervades the USA. You’ve a college dropout, Sam Altman, as CEO of OpenAI who is going down the wrong path of developing GenAI. Sam’s BS hyperbole has convinced Trump to spend $500 billion on his failed project. Among other problems, growing evidence finds that making AI- LLMs larger worsens them. Studies have proven that as these GenAIs get larger, they’re worse at broad, simple tasks that are critical for using them in a commercial setting, and only marginally better at more specific complex tasks. There is plenty of real-world evidence supporting this notion, such as OpenAI’s latest o1 model being worse at basic tasks than their old ChatGPT-4o model and Tesla’s latest FSD software, which has started cutting corners and hitting curbs. Talk to government supported scientists at our academic institutions and they’ll tell you what the evidence and rational thought is regarding GenAI, but talk to businesses and they’ll give you the hype. In this case, business yields a $500 billion boondoggle.
Same for the Mars hype. Starship will never go to Mars. Government scientists and engineers have told us why it will never happen despite Musk’s BS. Back in the 1960s when NASA ran the space missions and was led by doctors of science and engineering (Ph.D.s), i.e. experts, Saturn took a man to the Moon and back to Earth in just 5 missions, each mission being a success. Compare that to 8 successive explosions of Starship without entering Earth’s orbit – a disastrous waste of billions of dollars in our privatized space program.
Stock Buybacks
Thanks to Ronald Reagan companies can now buy back their own stock in large amounts. Instead of spending their money on R&D, hiring and maintaining quality employees, capital improvements, etc, stock buybacks make the shareholders richer without improving the company. The rich become richer, the company becomes something of reduced quality.
Private Equity and Venture Capital
Rich guys buy companies for the sake of profit, not for the sake of solving society’s needs. PE often buys companies, guts their assets and puts the proceeds in their pockets. They cut costs and before the company craters as a result, with profits maintained in the short term before the collapse, they sell the company for a big profit. Once they sell the company, sometime thereafter the company collapses. PE wins, everybody else loses.
The VC guys invest early in a company, often with a 5 year plan to get rich. As an example, all the internet bullshit companies that provide little benefit to society proliferate. Attention-getting apps of one sort or another keep people glued to their phones or computers.
Exorbitant Pay Schemes to Senior Management and Owners
Many of these guys make billions per year and then pay no taxes. Guys like Musk receive billions in government subsidies, meaning he takes the people’s money, and then give nothing in return to the people by not paying taxes. One way Musk and other billionaires avoid taxes is to use their wealth to take loans that feature low interest rates and are never called by the bank because the bank wants the huge business that Musk’s businesses offer the bank. So Musk has lots of money from the loan, a forever loan, and never pays taxes. Therefore, Musk uses government services for free, and the middle class pays for him to use all the services he receives from government. Crazy! He also runs dangerous and toxic manufacturing plants that harm people, both those working in the plant as well as those living close to the plant. States like Texas pay these guys (the people’s tax dollars) to move their companies to the state, and relax environmental laws for the plant. The people’s tax dollars, not those of the rich guys, are then used to clean-up the toxic waste. Companies play one state against the other to see which red state will give them (the people’s money) the most. In one example, Oracle moved its HQ from California to Texas because Texas gave the company many millions of dollars only to move 3 years later to Tennessee because TN gave Oracle $250,000,000!
Businesses Make A Toxic Mess, Tax Payer Dollars Clean It
I gave the example of Musk’s Tesla above, but many other companies are doing this throughout the USA. Blowing up 8 consecutive Starships in Texas and polluting the environment, including the atmosphere is one example.
Capitalism is a shitty system when the people, i.e. government, doesn’t control it. Republican, and some Democrat leaders, will tell you otherwise because they are the rich guys who are rent takers and do little to nothing for all the fake money they’ve accumulated. The worst of these a-holes actually become president – millions of people are brainwashed and stupid.
Stem Cells, Health, Technology 